RM: Evolutionary explanations of emotions. Human
Nature, 1: 261-289, 1990.
Nesse RM, Ellsworth PC. Evolution, emotions, and
emotional disorders. American
Psychologist, 64(2):129-39, 2009.
This classic article has been widely cited. Its main contribution
is recognition that describing functions for emotions does not offer a
full evolutionary explanation because one emotion has many functions
and different emotions have many shared functions. Instead, an
evolutionary explanation for an emotion needs to describe the situation
that shaped the emotion, the adaptive challenges posed by that
situation, how selection shaped systems to detect the presence of that
situation and express the emotion in those situations, and how the
characteristics of the emotion increase fitness when expressed in those
This article offers an updated approach to the evolution of emotions, with the emphasis on the importance of appraisal theory
, and the sobering conclusion that natural selection is most unlikely to have shaped well-defined emotions or dimensions of the sorts that researchers have so long searched for.
Nesse RM. Evolutionary origins and functions of
emotions. In: Scherer K, Sander D, editors. The Oxford Companion to Emotion and
the Affective Sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 159-64, 2009.
A clear simple overviewNesse RM. An evolutionary perspective on panic disorder and agoraphobia. Ethology and Sociobiology;8:73S-83S, 1987.
RM: An evolutionary perspective on psychiatry. Comparative Psychiatry 25:575-580, 1984.
Nesse RM: What is
mood for? Psycholoquy 2: Issue 9.2, November 24, 1991.
RM: What good is feeling bad? The evolutionary utility of
psychic pain. The Sciences,
30-37, Nov./Dec. 1991.
My earliest clear statement about the evolutionary origins of mood
IM, Nesse RM: Fear and fitness: An evolutionary analysis of anxiety disorders. Ethology and Sociobiology 15:247-261,
RM: Computer emotions and mental software. Social
Neuroscience Bulletin 7(2): 36-37, 1994.
RM, Berridge K Psychoactive drug use in evolutionary perspective. Science, 277: 63-65, 1997.
RM: What Darwinian medicine offers psychiatry. Evolutionary Medicine, W. R. Trevathan,
J. J. McKenna and E. O. Smith. New York, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Nesse RM Emotional Disorders in Evolutionary Perspective. British Journal of Medical Psychology 71:397-415,
RM Proximate and evolutionary studies of stress and depression: Synergy at the
Interface Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews,23 (7): 895-903, 1999.
RM Is depression an adaptation? Archives of General Psychiatry, 57: 14-20, 2000.
in response and reply
RM Is grief really maladaptive? (Review of The Nature of Grief, by John Archer) Evolution
and Human Behavior 29: 59-61, 2000.
RM: Natural selection and the regulation of defensive responses. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26(1) 88-105, 2005.
The smoke detector principle, with the math. Best source for this work.
Nesse RM, Bhatnagar S,
Young, E: The evolutionary origins and functions of the stress response, The Encyclopedia of Stress, Second Edition,
Academic Press, NY, 2007.