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The Evolution of Well-Being: An Anthropology Based, Multidisciplinary Review
Version 1
: Received: 19 August 2022 / Approved: 1 September 2022 / Online: 1 September 2022 (04:29:47 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Dornisch, S. The Evolution of Well-Being: An Anthropology-Based, Multidisciplinary Review. Humans 2022, 2, 161-176. Dornisch, S. The Evolution of Well-Being: An Anthropology-Based, Multidisciplinary Review. Humans 2022, 2, 161-176.
Abstract
Evolutionary perspectives have generated many questions and some answers in the study of human health and disease. The field of evolutionary medicine, and related analytics of evolutionary psychiatry and evolutionary psychology have extended and expanded the way health disorders are viewed by searching for why humans, as a species, are vulnerable to certain pathological conditions. The search is organized into four domains that apply proximate and evolutionary explanations to human traits and developmental sequences. This framework opens inquiry to the ontogeny, phylogeny, mechanism, and adaptive significance of human health conditions. In this paper I argue that evolutionary medicine seems to parallel biomedicine in its primarily pathogenic focus. That is, conditions of pain, suffering, and disorder have received the most attention. Some work has used the architecture of evolutionary medicine to take a salutogenic approach, evaluating the proximate and evolutionary explanations of human well-being. I propose that an evolutionary understanding of human well-being requires a survey of emotions and their relationship with neurobiology, language, and culture. My anthropology based, multidisciplinary review of biopsychosocial processes reveals the way evolution has shaped modern human understanding of well-being through sociolinguistic learning processes and thereby our individual experiences of well-being. These insights have the power to contextualize human suffering and flourishing as we progress toward the goal of attenuating the former and expanding the latter.
Keywords
well-being; evolution; emotion; learning; language; motivation
Subject
Social Sciences, Psychology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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