Grief Functions as an Honest Indicator of Commitment
Abstract
Grief is a puzzling phenomenon. It is often costly and prolonged, potentially increasing mortality rates, drug abuse, withdrawal from social life, and susceptibility to illness. These costs cannot be repaid by the deceased and therefore might appear wasted. In the following article, we propose a possible solution. Using the principles of social selection theory, we argue that an important selective pressure behind the human grief response was the social decisions of other humans. We combine this with insights from signaling theory, noting that grief shares many properties with other hard-to-fake social signals. We therefore contend that grief was shaped by selective forces to function as a hard-to-fake signal of (a) a person's propensity to form strong, non-utilitarian bonds and (b) a person's current level of commitment to a group or cause. This theory explains many of the costly symptoms of grief and provides a progressive framework for future research.
... We consider that the CLCM offers a distal explanation (along with a more specific mechanism) to integrate current empirical findings from the psychology of death-related threat regulation. For instance, grief is an ubiquitous phenomenon among humans (Bonanno & Kaltman, 1999) and is theorized as a costly behavior enabling individuals to signal their levels of commitment to a group (or a cause), as well as their capacity to form strong nonutilitarian social bonds (see Winegard, Reynolds, Baumeister, Winegard, & Maner, 2014) to conspecifics. At the same time, noncostly grief-like behavior is seen in nonhuman primates (e.g., refusal to leave the corpse of a familiar individual) and is thought to facilitate reunification with a lost social partner, a behavior which is particularly maladaptive when the lost individual is dead (see . ...
... Other predictions that can be derived from the CLCM have already been corroborated such as the fact that grieving individuals are perceived as more prone to engage in social interactions and that perceivers of grieving targets are more willing to engage in social interaction with them (Winegard et al., 2014). ...
Exposure to death-related threats, thoughts and cues (actual or anticipated death of conspecifics, including oneself) remain powerful stressors across primate species, including humans. Accordingly, a pervasive issue in psychology pertains to the kind of social–cognitive responses exposure to deadly threats generates. To this day, psychological models of reactions to death-related threats remain underspecified, especially with regards to modern evolutionary theory. Research on both humans and nonhuman primates’ reactions to death-related threats highlights a general tendency of human and nonhuman primates to “cling to the group” and to display increased social motivation in the face of death and deadly events (predator attacks, disasters, terror attacks. . .). Given the adaptive value of social networks, which provide individuals with resources, mating pool and support, we propose the existence of an evolved mechanism to explain these affiliative responses. In particular, we propose a “conspecific loss compensation mechanism” (CLCM) that actively keeps track of and compensates for threats to the integrity of one’s social network. In the face of death-related cues signaling a danger for one’s social network, or actual conspecific loss, CLCM triggers proportional affiliative responses by a process labeled compensatory socialization. After reviewing existing evidence for the CLCM, we discuss its plausibility, parsimonious character, and explanatory power of the diversity of responses observed among threatened and grieving individuals. We also formulate clear and novel predictions to be tested in future research.
... Quinn, 2019). These include culturally localized behaviors such as dueling (Allen & Reed, 2006), restrictions of female freedom (Rai & Sengupta, 2013), honor killings (Thrasher & Handfield, 2018), terrorism and political violence (Hoffman & McCormick, 2004;Lapan & Sandler, 1993;Pape, 2006), as well as broad categories of behavior such as aggression (Frank, 1988), grief (Winegard et al., 2014) and regret (Rosenstock & O'Connor, 2018). Others have argued that relatively costly activities widely assumed to be worthwhile, but for which the direct evidence of their success is often underwhelming (such as higher education and healthcare), can be explained as instances of costly signaling (Caplan, 2018;Hanson, 2008). ...
This paper examines and contrasts two closely related evolutionary explanations in human behaviour: signalling theory, and the theory of Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs). Both have been proposed to explain costly, dangerous, or otherwise ‘extravagant’ social behaviours, especially in the context of religious belief and practice, and each have spawned significant lines of empirical research. However, the relationship between these two theoretical frameworks is unclear, and research which engages both of them (especially in systematic comparison) is largely absent. In this paper we seek to address this gap at the theoretical level, examining the core differences between the two approaches and prospects and conditions for future empirical testing. We clarify the dynamical and mechanistic bases of signalling and CREDs as explanatory models and contrast the previous uses to which they have been put in the human sciences. Because of idiosyncrasies regarding those uses (especially with signalling), several commonly supposed differences and comparative advantages are actually misleading and not in fact generalisable. We also show that signalling and CREDs theories as explanatory models are not interchangeable (or reducible to one another), because of deep structural differences. As we illustrate, the proposed causal networks of each theory are distinct, with important differences in the endogeneity of various phenomena within each model and their explanatory targets. As a result, they can be seen as complementary rather than in competition. We conclude by surveying the current state of the literature and identifying the differential predictions which could underpin more comprehensive empirical comparison in future research.
... Under this view, the criteria for labeling grief as a mental disorder may unfairly target specific subsets of bereaved people, such as grieving parents, and pathologize what are actually normal responses to severe or traumatic events (Thieleman & Cacciatore, 2014). Indeed, many evolutionary psychologists have suggested that grief-even when severe and prolonged-may usually be a normal, evolved emotional response to the death of a loved one (Archer, 2001;Hagen, 2011;Horwitz & Wakefield, 2007;Nesse, 2005;Winegard, Reynolds, Baumeister, Winegard, & Maner, 2014). Nevertheless, the ruminations that occur as part of the grief response have not been well-studied by evolutionary psychologists. ...
There has been little evolutionarily oriented empirical research on the intense, repetitive thoughts—ruminations—that often occur during grief. We used evolutionary theory to develop a new instrument for evaluating grief-related rumination titled the Bereavement Analytical Rumination Questionnaire (BARQ) operationalized by two dimensions: root cause analysis (RCA), the analysis of the cause of the loss; and reinvestment analysis (RIA), the analysis of how to reinvest time and effort in meaningful (presumably fitness enhancing) activities. We administered the BARQ to a sample of people seeking help for grief from non-profit organizations (619 completers) and tested several evolutionary predictions about grief-related rumination. The sample had several signs of severe grief, making it clinically relevant (sleep disturbances, chronicity, psychotropic drug use). Rumination was higher among antidepressant users, suggesting that rumination is related to depression. We also found evidence that grief-related rumination is modulated by circumstances (e.g., type of loss, age and gender of the participant, age of the deceased, traumatic death), which suggests adaptive regulation. Our most important results are consistent with inclusive fitness theory. Specifically, the pattern suggests that as people grow older, they spend less time ruminating about the causes of direct fitness losses (the loss of their own children), and they spend more time ruminating about the causes of indirect fitness losses (e.g., the loss of young non-parental, non-offspring relatives). We also found a sex or gender difference in grief-related rumination that is consistent with other evidence that women have a greater impact on the survival of close relatives (particularly, children and grandchildren), as well as evidence that women have more to lose with the loss of a close social partner. Overall, we found little support for the hypothesis that grief-related rumination is disordered.
... The obvious doubt here is the degree of unfakeability of moral emotions: intense emotions like rage might be difficult to fake, but more everyday moral emotional displays, such as displaying concern with the interests or problems of others are eminently fakeable (many friendships would not last long if they were not). Even keeping that to one side, while people seem to be very good at discerning emotional states in a one-to-one situation, and while different emotional signals appear to be strongly cross-cultural with a few 63 Other than Frank's own work, the basic model has been invoked in a variety of ways (with various degrees of plausibility), in explanations of emotional traits such as grief (Winegard et al. 2014), aspects of romantic love and jealousy (Buss 2016), and aggression and vengeance in war (Boster, Yost, and Peeke 2003). exceptions, discerning emotion is not the same as discerning the motivation behind it. ...
The origins of human social cooperation confound simple evolutionary explanation. But from Darwin and Durkheim onwards, theorists (anthropologists and sociologists especially) have posited a potential link with another curious and distinctively human social trait that cries out for explanation: religion.
This dissertation explores one contemporary theory of the co-evolution of religion and human social cooperation: the signalling theory of religion, or religious signalling theory (RST). According to the signalling theory, participation in social religion (and its associated rituals and sanctions) acts as an honest signal of one’s commitment to a religiously demarcated community and its way of doing things. This signal would allow prosocial individuals to positively assort with one another for mutual advantage, to the exclusion of more exploitative individuals. In effect, the theory offers a way that religion and cooperation might explain one another, but which that stays within an individualist adaptive paradigm.
My approach is not to assess the empirical adequacy of the religious signalling explanation or contrast it with other explanations, but rather to deal with the theory in its own terms – isolating and fleshing out its core commitments, explanatory potential, and limitations. The key to this is acknowledging the internal complexities of signalling theory, with respect to the available models of honest signalling and the extent of their fit (or otherwise) with religion as a target system. The method is to take seriously the findings of formal modelling in animal signalling and other disciplines, and to apply these (and methods from the philosophy of biology more generally) to progressively build up a comprehensive picture of the theory, its inherent strengths and weaknesses.
The first two chapters outline the dual explanatory problems that cooperation and religion present for evolutionary human science, and surveys contemporary approaches toward explaining them. Chapter three articulates an evolutionary conception of the signalling theory, and chapters four to six make the case for a series of requirements, limitations, and principles of application. Chapters seven and eight argue for the value of formal modelling to further flesh out the theory’s commitments and potential and describe some simple simulation results which make progress in this regard.
Though the inquiry often problematizes the signalling theory, it also shows that it should not be dismissed outright, and that it makes predictions which are apt for empirical testing.
... Truchlící prostøednictvím tohoto signálu podává informace o tom, jakou má vazbu k lidem kolem sebe a zda je schopen navázat pevné a upøímné vztahy. Autoøi pøedpokládají, že lidé, jejichž reakce na ztrátu je delší a intenzivnìjší, budou svým okolím vnímáni jako loajálnìjší, Pøehledné èlánky upøímnìjší a celkovì lepší adepti pro navázání dlouhodobého partnerského vztahu (Winegard et al., 2014). ...
SOUHRN Úmrtí blízké osoby často souvisí s projevy, které symptomaticky připomínají profil klinické deprese (intenzivní smutek, nespavost, anhedonie, zhoršená schopnost koncentrace či chuť k jídlu). Pokud tyto projevy trvají déle než 2 týdny, trpí pozůstalý podle kritérií nejnovější verze Diagnostického a statistického manuálu duševních poruch (DSM-5) velkou depresivní poruchou. Nebylo tomu tak ale vždy. V přehledovém článku představujeme proces, který v DSM-5 vedl k vyloučení kritéria, sloužícího k odlišení zármutku a klinické deprese. Kromě důvodů, proč uvažovat o truchlení jako o adaptivním procesu, představujeme rovněž teorie, které pojímají truchlení jako přirozený proces zastávající specifickou funkci. V závěru uvádíme pojetí truchlení podle MKN-10 a připravované MKN-11.
... Grief is an emotional response triggered by loss and characterised by active distress and passive depression, universal in human cultures but also seen in social mammals and some birds following the loss of a parent, mate or offspring (Archer, 1999). Explanatory hypotheses include a by-product of attachment, group cohesion, a death reminder, and an honest signal of commitment (reviewed in Winegard et al., 2014). Whatever the proximate/ultimate causation, it is clear that grief is primarily caused by the severance of social bonds, such as the death of a significant individual, and that grieving states described in the primate literature have a substantial resemblance to human grief (Sapolsky, 2016;Anderson, 2017). ...
For the past two centuries, non‐human primates have been reported to inspect, protect, retrieve, carry or drag the dead bodies of their conspecifics and, for nearly the same amount of time, sparse scientific attention has been paid to such behaviours. Given that there exists a considerable gap in the fossil and archaeological record concerning how early hominins might have interacted with their dead, extant primates may provide valuable insight into how and in which contexts thanatological behaviours would have occurred. First, we outline a comprehensive history of comparative thanatology in non‐human primates, from the earliest accounts to the present, uncovering the interpretations of previous researchers and their contributions to the field of primate thanatology. Many of the typical behavioural patterns towards the dead seen in the past are consistent with those observed today. Second, we review recent evidence of thanatological responses and organise it into distinct terminologies: direct interactions (physical contact with the corpse) and secondary interactions (guarding the corpse, vigils and visitations). Third, we provide a critical evaluation regarding the form and function of the behavioural and emotional aspects of these responses towards infants and adults, also comparing them with non‐conspecifics. We suggest that thanatological interactions: promote a faster re‐categorisation from living to dead, decrease costly vigilant/caregiving behaviours, are crucial to the management of grieving responses, update position in the group's hierarchy, and accelerate the formation of new social bonds. Fourth, we propose an integrated model of Life‐Death Awareness, whereupon neural circuitry dedicated towards detecting life, i.e. the agency system (animate agency, intentional agency, mentalistic agency) works with a corresponding system that interacts with it on a decision‐making level (animate/inanimate distinction, living/dead discrimination, death awareness). Theoretically, both systems are governed by specific cognitive mechanisms (perceptual categories, associative concepts and high‐order reasoning, respectively). Fifth, we present an evolutionary timeline from rudimentary thanatological responses likely occurring in earlier non‐human primates during the Eocene to the more elaborate mortuary practices attributed to genus Homo throughout the Pleistocene. Finally, we discuss the importance of detailed reports on primate thanatology and propose several empirical avenues to shed further light on this topic. This review expands and builds upon previous attempts to evaluate the body of knowledge on this subject, providing an integrative perspective and bringing together different fields of research to detail the evolutionary, sensory/cognitive, developmental and historical/archaeological aspects of primate thanatology. Considering all these findings and given their cognitive abilities, we argue that non‐human primates are capable of an implicit awareness of death.
When conversing with skeptical listeners, honest speakers face the challenge of proving the credibility of their message. What can speakers do? We argue that incurring a cost—in terms of time, effort, emotion, reputation, etc.—to send a message can be a convincing signal of honesty to the listener. We highlight three qualities of signals that can make them costly for different reasons: difficult-to-fake, verifiable, and self-sacrificing. We propose that, while each quality impacts the listener’s perceptions of veracity, assessing each quality requires a different set of evaluations by the listener. As a result, assessments of each quality are subject to distinct errors in listener perception. Moreover, perceiving a signaling cost to be deliberate (vs. accidental) further impacts perceived veracity, but does so differently depending on the type of cost. Our costly signal framework can help guide speakers in overcoming listener skepticism.
There is considerable evidence that beliefs in supernatural punishment decrease self-interested behavior and increase cooperation amongst group members. To date, research has largely focused on beliefs concerning omniscient moralistic gods in large-scale societies. While there is an abundance of ethnographic accounts documenting fear of supernatural punishment, there is a dearth of systematic cross-cultural comparative quantitative evidence as to whether belief in supernatural agents with limited powers in small-scale societies also exert these effects. Here, we examine information extracted from the Human Relations Area Files on cultural discourse about the recently deceased, local ancestor spirits, and mortuary practices across 57 representative cultures. We find evidence that in traditional small-scale societies ancestor spirits are commonly believed to be capable of inflicting harm, with many attendant practices aimed at mitigating this danger. However, such beliefs do not appear to promote cooperation, as ancestor spirits seem to be concerned with interactions between themselves and the living, and to prioritize their own welfare. Many attendant practices are inconsistent even with bipartite cooperation with ancestors that could be viewed as a model for other relationships. The broader implications of this research for the cultural evolution of religion are discussed.
Across most of human history, infant and child mortality rates were very high, suggesting the death of a child was a challenge faced by many ancestral parents. Prolonged grief likely harmed grievers’ fitness, yet grief is ubiquitous and often protracted, thereby presenting a puzzle for evolutionary arguments. We integrate existing theories of grief with
patterns of parental bereavement to examine how human psychology has been shaped to respond to the death of a child. We contend that variation in life history strategy may explain the relative difficulty with which individuals recover from losing a child. We propose that the same physiological mechanisms underlying detachment and grief during
dissolved romantic relationships may also underlie the intensity of parental attachment and bereavement. This theoretical review thus integrates evolutionary theory with extant grief research to provide a functional analysis of the immense suffering associated with the loss of a child.
For nearly a century, bereavement theorists have assumed that recovery from loss requires a period of grief work in which the ultimate goal is the severing of the attachment bond to the deceased. Reviews appearing in the 1980s noted a surprising absence of empirical support for this view, thus leaving the bereavement field without a guiding theoretical base. In this article, the authors consider alternative perspectives on bereavement that are based on cognitive stress theory, attachment theory, the social–functional account of emotion, and trauma theory. They then elaborate on the most promising features of each theory in an attempt to develop an integrative framework to guide future research. The authors elucidate 4 fundamental components of the grieving process—context, meaning, representations of the lost relationship, and coping and emotion-regulation processes—and suggest ways in which these components may interact over the course of bereavement.
The common assumption that emotional expression mediates the course of bereavement is tested. Competing hypotheses about the direction of mediation were formulated from the grief work and social-functional accounts of emotional expression. Facial expressions of emotion in conjugally bereaved adults were coded at 6 months post-loss as they described their relationship with the deceased; grief and perceived health were measured at 6, 14, and 25 months. Facial expressions of negative emotion, in particular anger, predicted increased grief at 14 months and poorer perceived health through 25 months. Facial expressions of positive emotion predicted decreased grief through 25 months and a positive but nonsignificant relation to perceived health. Predictive relations between negative and positive emotional expression persisted when initial levels of self-reported emotion, grief, and health were statistically controlled, demonstrating the mediating role of facial expressions of emotion in adjustment to conjugal loss. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.
Prebereavement predictors of the course of postbereavement depressive mood were examined in 110 gay men who were their partner's caregiver until the partner's death of AIDS. In all, 37 HIV+ and 73 HIV− bereaved caregiving partners were assessed bimonthly throughout a 10-month period beginning 3 months before and ending 7 months after the partner's death. Throughout the 10 months, mean Centers for Epidemiology Scale–Depression (CES–D) scores on depressive mood were above the cutoff for being at risk for major depression. CES–D scores decreased for 63% of bereaved caregivers over the 7 postbereavement months, and 37% showed little change from high CES–D scores or increasing CES–D scores. High prebereavement CES–D scores and finding positive meaning in caregiving predicted diminishing depressive mood; HIV+ serostatus, longer relationships, hassles, and use of distancing and self-blame to cope predicted unrelieved depressive mood.
The motivation, planning, production, comprehension, coordination, and evaluation of human social life may be based largely on combinations of 4 psychological models. In communal sharing, people treat all members of a category as equivalent. In authority ranking, people attend to their positions in a linear ordering. In equality matching, people keep track of the imbalances among them. In market pricing, people orient to ratio values. Cultures use different rules to implement the 4 models. In addition to an array of inductive evidence from many cultures and approaches, the theory has been supported by ethnographic field work and 19 experimental studies using 7 different methods testing 6 different cognitive predictions on a wide range of subjects from 5 cultures.
Anthropologists have long recognized that cultural evolution critically depends on the transmission and generation of information. However, between the selection pressures of evolution and the actual behaviour of individuals, scientists have suspected that other processes are at work. With the advent of what has come to be known as the cognitive revolution, psychologists are now exploring the evolved problem-solving and information-processing mechanisms that allow humans to absorb and generate culture. The purpose of this book is to introduce the newly crystallizing field of evolutionary psychology, which supplied the necessary connection between the underlying evolutionary biology and the complex and irreducible social phenomena studied by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians.
The latest interdisciplinary research on the evolutionary models of cooperation.
Current thinking in evolutionary biology holds that competition among individuals is the key to understanding natural selection. When competition exists, it is obvious that conflict arises; the emergence of cooperation, however, is less straightforward and calls for in-depth analysis. Much research is now focused on defining and expanding the evolutionary models of cooperation. Understanding the mechanisms of cooperation has relevance for fields other than biology. Anthropology, economics, mathematics, political science, primatology, and psychology are adopting the evolutionary approach and developing analogies based on it. Similarly, biologists use elements of economic game theory and analyze cooperation in "evolutionary games." Despite this, exchanges between researchers in these different disciplines have been limited. Seeking to fill this gap, the 90th Dahlem Workshop was convened. This book, which grew out of that meeting, addresses such topics as emotions in human cooperation, reciprocity, biological markets, cooperation and conflict in multicellularity, genomic and intercellular cooperation, the origins of human cooperation, and the cultural evolution of cooperation; the emphasis is on open questions and future research areas. The book makes a significant contribution to a growing process of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization on this issue.
In this study, we examined the violent death bereavement trajectories of 173 parents by following them prospectively for 5 years after their children's deaths by accident, suicide, homicide, or undetermined causes. Using latent growth curve methodology, we examined how the initial level of PTSD and the rate of change over time were influenced by 9 predictors: the deceased children's causes of death, parents' gender, self‐esteem, 3 coping strategies, perceived social support, concurrent levels of mental distress, and an intervention offered in early bereavement. Six of the nine factors predicted initial levels of PTSD: however, only parents' gender and perceived social support predicted change in PTSD over the 5‐year time. Five years postdeath, 3 times as many study mothers (27.7%) met diagnostic criteria for PTSD and twice as many study fathers (12.5%) met diagnostic criteria for PTSD compared with the normative samples.