Nando Pelusi On Applying Evolutionary Psychology In Therapy
Nando is an Albert Ellis-trained psychologist who uses evolutionary psychology in his therapy sessions with patients and was writing the Neanderthink column in Psych Today. He couldn't be here at NEEPS, the ev psych conference in Binghamton, but here's a podcast of him talking about what he does on WOR. (After the stuff about the pieces of the heads, at around 4:25.)
On a personal note, I was with Nando at the HBES at Penn at the moment when he looked across the room and spotted the woman who would become his wife. Even better, I met Gregg because of Nando, who had the iPod at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference in Berlin. I thought it looked kinda dumb, but Nando is Mister Technology, so I figured he knew something, and went into the Apple store to check it out, and found Gregg at the iPod display. (Or, as I like to say, "I got my boyfriend at the Apple store.")
And back to the ev psych, a term mentioned in Kalman Glantz' and Gary Bernhard's session from today, "mismatch theory."
"Mismatch theory" is based on the idea that organisms possess many traits (including behavioral patterns) that have been preserved by natural selection because of their adaptive function in a specific environment [sometimes called the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA)] which for most of a species' evolutionary history might have been very unlike that in which it now finds itself. "Ancient" adaptive traits are thus frequently "mismatched" to the current environment -- and organisms thus find themselves doing the best they can to deal with contemporary stimuli using the traits they do possess.
I wrote about this in I See Rude People, but I'm exhausted and I have to go to bed, so I'll try to remember to update this in the morning.
Oh, but before I go to bed, Nando talks about paleolithic eating, which reminds me, Steven Platek made a great point in the discusssion today. We were both at the Applied Evolutionary Psychology preconference, which focuses on getting ev psych data out to be applied in practical ways to day to day life -- which is what I do in my column and book (and did in my anti-SUV campaign, which was designed based on costly signaling theory and "the Handicap Principle," by Zahavi and Zahavi).
Platek, who eats and encourages eating "paleo," asked something I was wondering myself: If we're encouraging practical application of evolutionary psychology findings...how come the ev psych conference is serving BAGELS as the snack?!
UPDATE: Vote for Nando's New Yorker cartoon caption here. (Or, if you have poor taste, vote for one of the others!)
Interesting. I'll have to read some of Nando's stuff to see how ev psych can be applied to therapy; that's a connection that's not obvious to me. The discussion of mismatch theory brings up the old debate about to what extent the human race is still evolving (in the genetic sense) today. Back when I was an undergrad, in the early '80s, I got involved in a couple of discussions of that, and the general opinion at the time was that human evolution had all but stopped, due to natural selection not effecting humans any more; we've developed a whole lot of things to adapt and compensate for our environment. I'm not sure that's still the opinion, but I haven't really kept up with it.
Cousin Dave at April 2, 2011 7:00 AM
Amy Alkon
https://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2011/04/nando-pelusi-on.html#comment-1993352">comment from Cousin DaveI use ev psych research in my column thinking all the time. If you go through some of my columns, you'll see.
Amy Alkon
at April 2, 2011 7:03 AM
Oh yes, I see a lot of it in the advice you give... I was thinking more in terms of actual therapy techniques.
Cousin Dave at April 2, 2011 10:49 PM
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