Gender differences in vulnerability to social stress - A Darwinian perspective

This article offers a theoretical framework based on evolutionary thinking designed to clarify relationships between social stress and mental illness, including the origin of gender differences in vulnerability to stress. Fro m a Darwinian perspective, stress is an interference with evolved behaviora l strategies. Human behavior is organized around the pursuit of biological goals, and any social event that interferes with these evolved strategic go als may constitute a stressor. The response to such interference - the stre ss response - is made up of physiological, psychological and behavioral com ponents. These components determine how individuals deal with those social events that were likely to reduce inclusive fitness in the ancestral enviro nment. Evolved gender differences in commitment to goals play a role in det ermining individual differences in response to stressors. When a social str essor interferes with achieving a biological goal, its harmful impact will depend primarily on the importance of the goal to an individual, and the im portance assigned to different goals by an individual does not depend exclu sively on personal variables and cultural values. Two evolutionary theories are relevant to gender differences in vulnerability to social stress: sexu al selection theory and life history theory. Clinical data from patients su ffering from depression triggered by social stress are reviewed to test pre dictions derived from these theories. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All ri ghts reserved.