Maladaptive Behaviors

Maladaptive Behaviors

Introduction

Maladaptive behaviors refer to types of behaviors that inhibit a person's ability to adjust to particular situations. This type of behavior is often used to reduce one's anxiety, but the result is dysfunctional and non-productive. For example, avoiding situations because you have unrealistic fears may initially reduce your anxiety, but it is non-productive in alleviating the actual problem in the long term.

Discussion

In the context of this system, individual-difference variation in eating behavior and obesity are generally viewed as maladaptations or errors in which some aspect of the system is not functioning properly. For example, obese persons have been shown to be abnormally insensitive to certain internal cues and abnormally sensitive to certain external cues in regulating caloric intake. It seems to me that this dismissal of the traditional view is a bit too facile. First, the one datum they cite as counterevidence—the high incidence of supposedly “maladaptive” patterns—does not constitute prima facie evidence against the Miller-Fishkin position as they seem to suggest. Second, Miller and Fishkin (1997) do in fact describe specific differences between ancestral and modern environments that could, at least in principle, account for contemporary individual differences as maladaptations rather than as evolved facultative strategies. On the other hand, the arguments and evidence in favor of the Buss-Greiling position are also much stronger than their (necessarily limited) discussion acknowledges. It therefore seems worthwhile to examine both sides of the issue in somewhat more detail. It is worth noting in passing that, in fact, the high incidence of insecure attachment is even more striking than Buss and Greiling acknowledge.

Evaluations and Interventions

As they correctly state, the proportion of American infants classified as insecure in observational studies, and of adults classified as insecure based on self-reports, tends to range approximately between one-third and one-half. Observational studies of infants conducted in other countries, however, frequently produce even higher rates of insecure classifications. For example, Grossmann, Grossmann, Huber, and Wartner (1981) found only 33% of a German sample of infants to be classified as secure. Nearly half were classified as insecure-avoidant. Is it possible, then, that two-thirds of children in some populations are evincing a “maladaptive” pattern? Buss and Greiling seem to think not, but consider the following analogy: According to recent government statistics, approximately 33% of adult Americans in 1988-1991 were overweight, and in certain demographic subgroups the rate approaches 50% (National Center for Health Statistics, 1996). I suspect most researchers would agree that obesity does not reflect some kind of alternative, adaptive weight-regulation strategy, but rather is a “maladaptive” result of something gone awry with respect to a singular homeostatic mechanism.2 If obesity is a maladaptation rather than an adaptation, how is it possible for its incidence to be so high today?3 Surely if a mechanism produced such high rates of maladaptive behavior in the ancestral environments in which it evolved, natural selection would likely have supplanted it with a more adaptive alternative (assuming such an alternative was evolvable).

However, a mechanism designed to regulate eating behavior, like a mechanism ...