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Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are situated as the foundation of a six-tier pyramid, above which rests: (1) disrupted neurodevelopment; (2) social, emotional, and cognitive impairment; (3) adoption of health-risk behaviors; (4) disease, disability, and social problems; and (5) early death. ACEs purportedly initiate a causal sequence of negative developmental, behavioral, social, and cognitive outcomes, culminating in heightened mortality risk. Militating against this causal explanation, life history evolution is herein hypothesized to be the true foundation of any such pyramid. Subsuming ACEs within a life history framework has two broad implications: First, to some extent, ACEs are effectively changed from cause to correlate; second ACEs are seen as markers of strategic life history variation, not markers of dysfunction.

After many waves of out-migration from Africa, different human populations evolved within a great diversity of physical and community ecologies. These ambient ecologies should have at least partially determined the selective pressures that shaped the evolution and geographical distribution of human cognitive abilities across different parts of the world. Three different ecological hypotheses have been advanced to explain human global variation in intelligence: (1) cold winters theory (Lynn, 1991), (2) parasite stress theory (Eppig, Fincher, & Thornhill, 2010), and (3) life history theory (Rushton, 1999, 2000). To examine and summarize the relations among these and other ecological parameters, we divided a sample of 98 national polities for which we had sufficient information into zoogeographical regions (Wallace, 1876; Holt et al., 2013). We selected only those regions for this analysis that were still inhabited mostly by the aboriginal populations that were present there prior to the fifteenth century AD. We found that these zoogeographical regions explained 71.4% of the variance among national polities in our best measure of human cognitive ability, and also more concisely encapsulated the preponderance of the more specific information contained within the sampled set of continuous ecological parameters.

Life history strategy represents individual variation in the degree to which bioenergetic resources are allocated toward growth, maintenance, and reproduction. Individual differences in life history strategies are thought to underlie many of the individual differences studied in Psychology. It was hypothesized that responses on the Sentence Completion Test of Ego Development are partially reflective of an individual’s life history strategy. This hypothesis was tested in three studies, each representing a different level of analysis. The results of Study 1 suggest near unity between ego-level and life history strategy at the conceptual level. In Study 2 a moderate association between rated ego-level and rated life history strategy was found. Additional analyses showed that this association remained when controlling for verbal IQ and that developmental change in each construct was correlated. In Study 3, it was found that responses to the sentence stems could be used directly to assess life history strategy. Combined, the results add to the evidence that responses on projective tests using a sentence stem format are associated with life history strategy. Future research could focus on identifying and constructing sentence stems that provide the maximum information about an individual’s life history strategy.

Differential-K theory, when applied to the study of anxiety disorders, predicts that slower life history (LH) racial groups exhibit higher levels of trait anxiety and worry, and higher prevalence of anxiety disorders, as both LH and anxiety experiences are future oriented. We predict that slower LH racial groups will exhibit an especially high prevalence of those anxiety disorders in which: (A) A central symptom is excessive worry rather than the anxious emotion only, as worry is an effortful cognitive phenomenon that involves mentally scrutinizing longer-term future threats and solutions; and (B) The central source of concern is social interactions, as the long-term maintenance of social relationships is one of the hallmarks of slow LH. We conducted an extensive search in international databases of scientific publications, with selection criteria chosen to reduce the possible effect of methods variance in the design and language of psychometric instruments and protocols, as well as variance in psychological health services and sociopolitical conditions. In line with the evolutionary hypothesis, Whites exhibited a higher prevalence of worry-related and sociality-related anxiety disorders than African-Americans and Latinos. Self-report data on worry and social anxiety traits further supported the evolutionary hypothesis, with Northeast Asians reporting the highest average scores. Importantly however, Blacks exhibited higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, a stressor-related condition, lending partial support to the social psychology hypothesis. We review and discuss racial differences in propensity to seek professional help when experiencing distress, in emotional expression to health care workers, and in the validity of psychometric measures, and conclude they are unlikely explanations for the identified race differences. Future studies that test the evolutionary hypothesis on differences among populations within these broad racial groupings are necessary to further examine the predictive power of this theory.

This chapter is the first of five comprising Part III. Though, as in Chap. 6, we have previously allowed some lexical analyses to interpolate Part II’s historical-empirical thrust, Part III is predominately statistical, even as it continues to review relevant literature and history. Though, consistent with the mandate of this monograph, we aim ultimately to establish the reality of human group selection, this initial chapter alone treats chimpanzees. To thoroughgoing evolutionists, the relevance will be self-evident; we only add that establishing evidence of group selection in such a highly related species foundationally supports the empirical argument for human group selection, as presented in the four subsequent chapters constituting Part III of this volume.

Size at birth, growth rate, age at sexual maturity, number and size of offspring, and longevity are among the variables studied in life history evolution, a mid-level branch of evolutionary biology. Long-lived, slow maturing, and highly encephalized Homo sapiens, though skewed as a group towards the very slow end of the spectrum, nevertheless show some life history variation; variation which may relate to, and to some extent explain, personality variation. When applied to extant personality disorders, the risk-taking, boldness, and impulsivity of psychopathy is explained as a fast life history strategy. Herein, it is argued that the highly heritable obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), opposite psychopathy, is a slow life history strategy. Both OCPD and slow life history strategists exhibit anxiety and harm avoidance, risk and loss aversion, future-oriented thought and time urgency, delayed gratification, and conscientious labor and fidelity. In addition to a host of compelling correlations, the preponderance of intrinsic over extrinsic mortality that explains the evolution of slow life histories is precisely that which has been described in an ecological etiology that explains OCPD as a product of post-migration evolution from Africa into Eurasia.

Introductory psychology classes and texts invariably feature attachment theory, which is rightly regarded as a pillar of the field. The acknowledged founder of attachment theory, John Bowlby, resisted the tide of psychoanalysis and instead pursued a more biological explanation of parent–child relations, characterized by insecure attachment variants as dysfunctional miscarriages of mother–infant bonding. Contrary to Bowlby’s assumptions, the supposed pathology of the insecure attachment is reframed by life history evolution as strategic adaptation to reproductive ecologies. While insecure attachment is not specifically adaptive, eliciting rearing behaviors displayed by parents, like early sexual debut, mate diversity, completed fertility, and other resultant mating behaviors displayed by the child at maturity, are adaptive within unpredictable and stochastic environments.

Raymond Cattell distinguished crystallized intelligence, akin to stored knowledge, from fluid intelligence, akin to raw reasoning abilities. Likewise, he delineated personality into component parts. Though intelligence and personality each qualify as subdisciplines within psychology, both are subsumed, along with other traits, under the meta-theory of life history evolution. The relationship is profound, though not straightforward. As described in this chapter, both intelligence and personality vary along a life history continuum, such that, as life history slows, population mean intelligence increases, as do personality traits like risk aversion, conscientiousness, anxiety, and agreeableness. Nevertheless, this effect occurs on average, and there is strategic variation occurring, which obscures the relationship between population-mean intelligence, personality, and life history. Once understood, these relationships color and clarify Cattell’s life’s work.

The obsessive-compulsive personality pattern of orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy was first described and explained by Sigmund Freud. Freud’s description was sound, but his explanation was flawed. Further still, no extant etiology, psychoanalytic or otherwise, convincingly accounts for the existence, and intergenerational perpetuation, of obsessive character. Thus, herein is presented a new etiology; an evolutionary etiology that describes obsessive personality, not as a disorder, but as an extreme strategy whose imbalance is a product of post-dispersal evolution. Migration into northerly latitudes brought about a relative release from biotic selective pressures, such as conflict and conspecific competition, and a corresponding increase in abiotic selective pressures, such as cold and seasonal scarcity. Features such as (1) future-oriented thought, (2) parsimoniousness, and (3) compulsive conscientiousness become both viable and intelligible as a temperamental consequence of struggling more exclusively with the elements. After using comparative animal data to demonstrate their biogeographical distribution, the human distribution of these three traits is also shown to be concentrated within northerly latitudes.

The five factor trait of conscientiousness is a supertrait, denoting on one hand a pattern of excessive labor, rigidity, orderliness and compulsivity, and on the other hand a pattern of strict rectitude, scrupulosity, dutifulness and morality. In both respects the obsessive-compulsive personality is conscientious; indeed, it has been labeled a disorder of extreme conscientiousness (Widiger et al., 2009). Antisocial personality disorder, in the present paper, is described as occupying the opposite end of the conscientiousness continuum. The antisocial is impulsive rather than compulsive, illicit rather than licit, and furtive rather than forthright.After clinically comparing the obsessive and antisocial personalities, the present paper invokes evolutionary theory to explain their resultant behavioral, ideological, political and demographic differences

The present review and critique of extant etiological theories centers on a single finding: Obsessive-compulsive personality is highly heritable (0.78) and not significantly influenced by “common, shared-in-families environmental factors” (Torgersen et al., 2000, p. 424). This finding, though twelve years old, has remained dissociated from existing etiological accounts. Psychoanalytic theories anachronistically maintain that obsessive personality is familially forged. Biological theories, few, unelaborated and weakened by postulating proximate instead of ultimate explanations, fail to seriously reckon with Torgersen’s findings. Truly integrating heritability estimates into a functional etiological account of obsessive character, it is argued in the discussion section, will come from an evolutionary model that understands obsessive personality to be an evolved strategy rather than a dysfunctional disorder.

More than previous versions, the American Psychiatric Association's (2013) fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) formally specified the nature of a personality disorder. Going beyond specific personality disorders and their respective criteria sets, are the General Criteria for Personality Disorder (GCPD) provided in section III on page 761 of DSM-V. Much of this list simply specifies that impairments must be enduring-transcending time, place, medical status, and developmental period. It is only the first two, criterion A and criterion B, which positively define a personality disorder. Specifically, criterion A states that there must be “moderate or greater impairment in personality functioning,” and criterion B states that there must be “one or more pathological personality traits.” Thereafter, on page 762, the DSM attempts to define and operationalize the concepts of pathological personality traits and impaired personality functioning. First, DSM-V operationalizes pathological personality traits in so far as five are listed: (1) negative affectivity, (2) detachment, (3) antagonism, (4) disinhibition, and (5) psychoticism. Second, in describing personality functioning, there is mention of disturbances in self and interpersonal functioning, which are taken to “constitute the core of personality psychopathology.” DSM-V proceeds to parse self and interpersonal functioning further: “Self-functioning involves identity and self-direction; interpersonal functioning involves empathy and intimacy.” All such efforts are commendable improvements on what would otherwise have been imprecise concepts liable to hold different meanings for different readers. Precision is gained by exposition. Yet, precision invites criticism. With implicit assumptions giving way to explicit assertions, as collected across various tables, terms, and operational definitions within the GCPD, personality disorder diagnosis can be recognized as relativistic. When clinical judgment, diagnostic tradition and psychiatric authority are exchanged for empirical research, one finds personality variables like those embodied in the GCPD unassociated with deficits in vocation, mating success, finance, and health (Ullrich et al., 2007; Gutierrez et al., 2013; Vall et al., 2015). At any point along the continuum of personality, instead of unalloyed deficits and beneficial traits, humans experience fitness relevant trade-offs (Nettle, 2006; Brumbach et al., 2009), as do damselflies (Rodin and Johansson, 2004), rainbow trout (Schjolden et al., 2006), house mice (Rauw, 2006) and a host of other animals displaying rudimentary personalities (Bell, 2007; Wolf et al., 2007; Biro and Stamps, 2008; Dammhahn, 2012; Favreau et al., 2014). What is true for traits may be true for personalities. As previously reviewed (Hertler, 2015a), psychopathy and obsessive compulsive personality disorder have both been described as strategic, evolved patterns, rather than dysfunctional personality disorders. Moreover, a recent study found personality extremes consistent with DSM-V disorders to be sexually selected via female choice (Vall et al., 2015). With the fact of relativism being elsewhere treated (Hertler, 2015b), it suffices to state that the GCPD rests on clinical assumptions of pathology which do not appear to equate to impairments in evolutionarily relevant life outcomes. Herein, it is not the question of relativism itself that is pursued, but the nature of that relativism. GCPD criteria are neither arbitrarily relativistic nor culturally relativistic; instead they show a particular bias, comprehensible only from a life history evolutionary vantage point. Bringing a life history evolutionary perspective to bear Life history evolution is a coherent sub-discipline of evolutionary biology that originated with the study of variation across seven developmental trait clusters, among which were lifespan, maturation rate, and brood size. Life histories are distributed across a gradient from fast or r-selected, to slow or K-selected. Most basically, and confined to the classic biomarkers upon which life history theory was grounded, fast and slow relate to the pace of development. Fast or r-selected species mature quickly, breed much, and die young, whereas slow or K-selected species show the opposite pattern, living long enough to support extensive prenatal growth and thereafter lavish resources on a small number of long-lived young. Contrast the elephant with the rabbit. In number, size, and care of young, as in longevity, growth and maturation rate, these animals are extraordinarily dissimilar. Life history variation, though greatest between species, is present within species; including the human species. Within the past three decades, life history evolution has been particularly successful in logically grouping altruism and affiliation, risk aversion and inhibition, as well as future oriented thought and delay of gratification (Figueredo et al., 2006; Jonason and Tost, 2010; McDonald et al., 2012; Hertler, 2015a), showing them to be K-selected. Opposite these, across a continuum, are r-selected antagonism, sensation seeking, disinhibition, and an orientation to the present. The original biological, as well as the aforementioned psychological and social life history variables, are collectively calibrated by mortality; specifically the rate, predictability and controllability of mortality. In K-selected regimes, mortality is rare, predictable and controllable; in r-selected regimes, mortality is common, unpredictable, and uncontrollable (Schechter and Francis, 2010). As investing in a few, slow growing, late maturing young is impractical and maladaptive under an r-selected regime with high, and highly unpredictable mortality, so is excessive altruism, risk-aversion or future orientation. There is not sufficient time or safety to capitalize on investment. So, life history creates a sort of time relevant biology organized around mortality.

The purpose of this chapter is to supply the reader with foundational information about life history theory without which the remainder of the book would not make sense. Herein, it is explained that life history was originally an exclusively biological theory relevant to the timing of gestation, development, maturation, and death. Later, it was used to explain variation among human populations not only on these core biological variables, but also on psychological and social variables. Psychological variables include personality traits like conscientiousness, mating strategy, and intelligence, while sociological variables include altruistic effort, cultural capital, and communal affiliation. With this primer on life history evolution, the reader can better assimilate specific life history knowledge detailed in subsequent sections.

Personal persistence, the subjective perception of self-sameness through time, is implied or explicitly asserted in nearly all modern theories of self and identity. Recently, personal persistence has become the subject of inquiry and argument, most directly due to Galen Strawson, who recently described himself as experiencing a distinct series of non-defective and non-pathological selves, each phenomenologically independent of the other. Using a combination of previously published, modified, and newly constructed measures, the present study, in an attempt to provide empirical information relevant to the theoretical treatments of personal persistence, assembled an assessment battery of assumptively intercorrelated personal persistence measures, which collectively provided dichotomous, linear, quantitative, and qualitative information about the experience of self-persistence in a sample of 177 mostly female college students between the ages of 18 and 44 years.

DSM-V estimates the prevalence of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD) to fall between 2.1 and 7.9 percent, making it one of the most prevalent personality disorders in the general population. Yet, obsessive prevalence is reported without its significance being appreciated. After reviewing the estimates of several studies, this paper pursues the theme of obsessive prevalence, showing why it was ignored, how it changes etiological assumptions, and, in turn, how newly generated etiologies engender the understanding of obsessive prevalence. High prevalence, when paired with high heritability, undermines psychoanalytic etiologies and invalidates psychiatric classification, suggesting that OCPD is a rare type, rather than a common disorder. Following this, evolutionary theory is used to illustrate the conditions from which this rare phenotype arose, and the mechanistic laws that maintain it within its present proportions. As treated within the discussion section, high prevalence, when contextualized within an evolutionary explanatory paradigm, suggests an ecologically determined biogeography of OCPD.

With the ultimate goal of better understanding Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD), the present work is a review and critique of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., DSM-IV) diagnostic criteria at the end of their 18 years of use. Problems of specificity (polythetic criteria and failure to employ a hallmark feature) make OCPD an indistinct diagnostic category that consequently contains a plurality of types. Problems of sensitivity (missing elements and concrete expression of signs) make it more difficult to cull OCPD persons from the population at large. Collectively, these problems of specificity and sensitivity have undermined the efficiency of the DSM-IV criteria set; but more importantly, these problems continue to distort the clinical understanding of OCPD generally.