Ethological aspects of anorexia nervosa [proceedings].
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Adolescent↗
Biomedical subjects
A Demaret
Publications and source records attributed to A Demaret.
[From pseudopregnancy to anorexia nervosa].
Translated in the primeval environment where humanization evolved during millions of years (man's environment of evolutionary adaptation, according to Bowlby), the characteristic behaviours of anorectics and bulimics do not look unfavourable but on the contrary adaptive, helping to the survival of the group or kinship (hyperactivity, altruistic feeding, etc.). Analogies, indeed homologies, exist in many animal species, distant or closely related to us (social insects, birds, mammals including primates) observed in nature. It concerns altruistic behaviours described among individuals, for the most part females, referred to as allomothers (aunts) or helpers (co-operative breeding) in ethological terms. From this evolutionary perspective, a biological genetic basis would exist in anorexia and bulimia, as a component of a phylogenetic inheritance of the K-selection strategy of reproduction. At the present time, anorexia would be a pathological extreme of this strategy, whereas pseudocyesis would be, on the contrary, one of the r-selection. Diverse and varying sociocultural and demographic conditions prevailing in modern world would revive either of these phylogenetic programs of reproductive strategies, leading as the case may be, to adaptive or pathological reproductive or helping behaviours.
Altruism↗
[Evolutionary psychiatry].
The author's perspective is that of a naturalist and ethologist. In this paper, he looks for evidences of phylogenetic components inherited from evolutionary adaptive behaviours in the etiology of psychopathological syndromes: bipolar depressions, seasonal affective disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, hysterical syndrome, impulsive behaviours, eating disorders, etc. Evolutionary psychiatry which sets present human pathological behaviour in the context of our species past evolution and of our ancestor's adaptations to their natural environment, leads the psychopathologist to revise certain of classic concepts in this field and resort to some of the concepts used by the ethologists, such as territory, hierarchy, allo-grooming and altruistic behaviour. It constitutes an invitation to reconsider the heredity of mental disorders in the light of phylogenetic consideration. As Freud and Lorenz have always recommended, one should not dissociate ontogeny from phylogeny in the study of human behaviour, whether normal or pathological.
Altruism↗
[Innate learning abilities].
Ethologists working with many species, studying overall behaviour, observing and experimenting in natural milieu, have first realized that animals are learning some things, sometimes complex, more easily than simple ones. It is almost always behaviour having an evident survival value. It is conceivable that during phylogenesis, the pressure of natural selection has developed to a high level the ability to acquire these behaviours, as an "inborn ability to learn". Seligman has proposed to call these reinforced evolutional behaviour as "prepared learnings". These learnings behaviours are present in both humans and animals: like for example feeding aversions which acquisition does not follow the classical laws of conditioning. Starting from these new facts, it is justified to propose a modification of aversive therapy in alcoholics and to reconsider theories concerning learning of certain pathological behaviour, such as phobia.
Alcoholism↗
[Behavior therapy of onchophagia and trichotillomania. Ethological and behavioral perspectives].
Emphasis is brought to similarities between informations collected from the study and treatment of patients suffering from nail biting and trichotillomania, by behavioural treatment and the concept according to which such troubles are "tics", learned responses which will become non adapted, present in a given situation, reinforced by time and progressively more resistant to extinction on the one hand, and ethological concepts which consider those behaviours as displacement of activity such as "grooming" in primates, ritual activities, free from nutritions activities, triggered by some attitudes and facilitated by the presence of fear affects, aggressivity or sexual drive.
Behavior Therapy↗