Site maintenance Wednesday, November 13th, 2024. Please note that access to some content and account information will be unavailable on this date.
Skip to main content

Abstract

Although rodent research provides important insights into neural correlates of human psychology, new cortical areas, connections, and cognitive abilities emerged during primate evolution, including human evolution. Comparison of human brains with those of nonhuman primates reveals two aspects of human brain evolution particularly relevant to emotional disorders: expansion of homotypical association areas and expansion of the hippocampus. Two uniquely human cognitive capacities link these phylogenetic developments with emotion: a subjective sense of participating in and reexperiencing remembered events and a limitless capacity to imagine details of future events. These abilities provided evolving humans with selective advantages, but they also created proclivities for emotional problems. The first capacity evokes the “reliving” of past events in the “here-and-now,” accompanied by emotional responses that occurred during memory encoding. It contributes to risk for stress-related syndromes, such as posttraumatic stress disorder. The second capacity, an ability to imagine future events without temporal limitations, facilitates flexible, goal-related behavior by drawing on and creating a uniquely rich array of mental representations. It promotes goal achievement and reduces errors, but the mental construction of future events also contributes to developmental aspects of anxiety and mood disorders. With maturation of homotypical association areas, the concrete concerns of childhood expand to encompass the abstract apprehensions of adolescence and adulthood. These cognitive capacities and their dysfunction are amenable to a research agenda that melds experimental therapeutic interventions, cognitive neuropsychology, and developmental psychology in both humans and nonhuman primates.

Formats available

You can view the full content in the following formats:

Information & Authors

Information

Published In

Go to American Journal of Psychiatry
Go to American Journal of Psychiatry
American Journal of Psychiatry
Pages: 701 - 714
PubMed: 34080889

History

Received: 8 August 2020
Revision received: 11 October 2020
Revision received: 9 December 2020
Accepted: 22 December 2020
Published online: 3 June 2021
Published in print: August 01, 2021

Keywords

  1. Amygdala
  2. Anxiety
  3. Brain Evolution
  4. Episodic Memory
  5. Hippocampus
  6. Prefrontal Cortex

Authors

Details

Daniel S. Pine, M.D. [email protected]
Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience, Emotion and Development Branch (Pine), and Section on the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Laboratory of Neuropsychology (Murray), NIMH, Bethesda, Md.; Olschefskie Institute for the Neurobiology of Knowledge, Bethesda, Md. (Wise)
Steven P. Wise, Ph.D.
Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience, Emotion and Development Branch (Pine), and Section on the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Laboratory of Neuropsychology (Murray), NIMH, Bethesda, Md.; Olschefskie Institute for the Neurobiology of Knowledge, Bethesda, Md. (Wise)
Elisabeth A. Murray, Ph.D.
Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience, Emotion and Development Branch (Pine), and Section on the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Laboratory of Neuropsychology (Murray), NIMH, Bethesda, Md.; Olschefskie Institute for the Neurobiology of Knowledge, Bethesda, Md. (Wise)

Notes

Send correspondence to Dr. Pine ([email protected])

Funding Information

The authors report no financial relationships with commercial interests.

Metrics & Citations

Metrics

Citations

Export Citations

If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.

For more information or tips please see 'Downloading to a citation manager' in the Help menu.

Format
Citation style
Style
Copy to clipboard

View Options

View options

PDF/EPUB

View PDF/EPUB

Full Text

View Full Text

Get Access

Login options

Already a subscriber? Access your subscription through your login credentials or your institution for full access to this article.

Personal login Institutional Login Open Athens login
Purchase Options

Purchase this article to access the full text.

PPV Articles - American Journal of Psychiatry

PPV Articles - American Journal of Psychiatry

Not a subscriber?

Subscribe Now / Learn More

PsychiatryOnline subscription options offer access to the DSM-5-TR® library, books, journals, CME, and patient resources. This all-in-one virtual library provides psychiatrists and mental health professionals with key resources for diagnosis, treatment, research, and professional development.

Need more help? PsychiatryOnline Customer Service may be reached by emailing [email protected] or by calling 800-368-5777 (in the U.S.) or 703-907-7322 (outside the U.S.).

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share article link

Share