The Adaptive Role of Emotions

Let's center our understanding of emotions around their adaptive function (and stop calling them "maladaptive" while we're at it).

While there is some debate about which emotions, if any, are universal,¹ few deny that humans are equipped with emotional systems, distinguished by their experiential, physiological, and behavioral aspects. For example, if someone cuts us off on the highway, we feel anger, our blood pressure rises, and we might even flip them the bird. Although what causes anger varies from person to person, the idea is that humans share a similar emotional architecture.

Typically, we are too wrapped up in the experience of having an emotion to appreciate its design or consider its function, but make no mistake that emotions are adaptations, meaning they evolved because they helped our ancestors pass on their genes. A person without emotions would not fall in love, would not endeavor to re-establish their good name after it had been sullied, and would not take precautions when a twig snapped in the forest. Emotions, in short, help us respond to environmental stimuli in ways that are adaptive.

Or I should say, ways that were adaptive. Like most species-typical traits, emotions evolved in what evolutionary psychologists call “the environment of evolutionary adaptedness,” or EEA. The EEA is the environment—technically, a statistical composite of environmental conditions—in which humans evolved.² It is worth reflecting that humans have only been agricultural for the last 10,000 years (5% our history), industrial for the last 150 years (.075%), and digital for the last 30 years (.015%).³ These modes of existence are unlikely to have influenced our psychological architecture much because they haven’t been around very long compared to other modes of existence, like hunting and gathering in small tribes.⁴

Our modern environment is similar in some ways to the EEA (we still breathe oxygen) but different in others (we interact with far more people today). These differences often have unfortunate results, such as when our sweet tooth, designed for a sugar-scarce world, meets ice-cream. Indeed, it may be that eating too much is now more deadly than not eating enough. We tend to understand such evolutionary mismatch, I think—at least to the extent we are aware of it—as an inevitable cost to human progress. All else equal, the temptation to eat too much is considered less bad than the possibility of starving.

Where paleo section?

With all this as background, it should be easier to understand why I’m rankled by cognitive behavioral therapy’s use of the word “maladaptive” to describe client emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Of course, what CBT means by “maladaptive” is that some emotions, thoughts, and patterns of behavior are inconsistent with a person’s goals. For example, outbursts of anger are not conducive to getting promoted or building friendships. But boy, what a poor word choice for the orientation that holds itself out as the most “evidence-based,” when the evidence is quite strong that emotions are, in fact, adaptations. While CBT should know better, it is not alone. Every therapeutic orientation conceptualizes emotions differently, and I have yet to encounter one that understands them as adaptive in the evolutionary sense.

Now you might be asking yourself: What difference does it make if we consider emotions to be adaptively functional or not? To that I would respond: You mean in addition to the value of beginning with truth? (I’d say this cheekily, of course.) If so, then I can think of three more advantages.

The first is that humans tend to benefit from understanding a reason or purpose behind something. In my practice, clients are always wondering: Why do I feel this way? Why do I feel this much? Why can’t I stop feeling this? Indeed, in the modern age defined by widespread availability of information, most people are confused by their emotions. The number of theories available, coming from academia, clinicians, folk psychology, and the self-help industry, is overwhelming. I’ll grant that the correct answer— “Because the installment of this emotional system differentially helped some of your ancestors to survive and reproduce”—isn’t warm, fuzzy, or simple. But it’s true, and that’s something.

Second, we tend to think of our emotions—both the experience of having them and how we respond to them—as intensely personal. They are a large part of “who we are,” and our management of them speaks deeply to our character. If we understood our emotions as panhuman, though, subject to the same process of natural selection as the human knee, the lizard eye, and the camel hump, it might help lower the stakes. After all, the differences between people’s emotions are usually a matter of degree, not kind: you know what jealousy feels like, but I might experience more of it. That this difference in degree also depends on many factors outside of our control might help us further divorce our sense of personal worth from it.

Finally, when we explore an emotion in therapy or elsewhere, it would be helpful to consider its intended function. For emotions like regret, this exercise might feel tedious because the answer is obvious: next time, I should do things differently. (Meanwhile, tedium recommends that we do something different right now.) But I would submit that there are possibly hundreds of emotions we experience throughout our lives, depending on how minutely we want to classify them, and many will require work to explain.⁵ The function of shame, for example, might be to prevent us from doing certain things that would devalue our reputation in a group, or, if said things have already been done, help us avoid punishment—perhaps by running away or making reparations.⁶

At the very least, an ultimate explanation for emotions—as adaptations that helped our ancestors navigate problems and opportunities—could become the common starting point for this central topic in mental health. Rather than allow every therapeutic technique its own origin story, within which emotions are defined anew, let’s actually make therapy a scientific enterprise by building on shared, epistemological bedrock.

Let an evolutionary view of emotions be the rock that clinical psychology is founded upon!

1. See, e.g., Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Pan Macmillan.

2. Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1990). The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. Ethology and Sociobiology, 11, 375-424.

3. Based on anatomically-modern humans being about 200,000 years old, and even this logic isn’t technically correct, since many features of our design (e.g., eyes) have been around far longer.

4. Recent evidence suggests that evolution might have occurred more rapidly than previously thought; however, the general argument still applies.

5. In addition to the linked article, see Nesse’s Good Reasons for Bad Feelings for some excellent early work on this subject.

6. Sznycer, D., & Cohen, A. S. (2021). Are emotions natural kinds after all? Rethinking the issue of response coherence. Evolutionary Psychology, 19(2), 14747049211016009. Also note that shame is considered a backward-looking emotion, so when it prevents us from doing things in the future, it is via our ability to simulate doing something and then reflecting on what it would be like to have done that thing. So, still technically backward-looking.