Steven C. Hertler

Understanding Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder: Reviewing the Specificity and Sensitivity of DSM-IV Diagnostic Criteria

With the ultimate goal of better understanding Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD), the present work is a review and critique of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., DSM-IV) diagnostic criteria at the end of their 18 years of use. Problems of specificity (polythetic criteria and failure to employ a hallmark feature) make OCPD an indistinct diagnostic category that consequently contains a plurality of types. Problems of sensitivity (missing elements and concrete expression of signs) make it more difficult to cull OCPD persons from the population at large. Collectively, these problems of specificity and sensitivity have undermined the efficiency of the DSM-IV criteria set; but more importantly, these problems continue to distort the clinical understanding of OCPD generally.

A social biogeography of homicide: Multilevel and sequential canonical examinations of intragroup unlawful killings.

A considerable number of publications have examined the effect of various geographical, life history, social, economic and political factors on homicide. However, few studies were interested in examining the effect of these forces in an integrated social biogeography of homicide. This study collected data for 172 nation-states from various publications and databases. Standardized Studentized residuals were extracted from a multilevel model examining the effects of geographical adjacency upon homicide rates. A general linear model was used, with the residuals, to observe the effects of physical, community, social, cultural, and cognitive ecology upon homicide. Two sequential canonical analyses (SEQCA) were conducted to determine the mediating effects among the ecological indicators with respect to homicide. In the SEQCA, we hypothesized physical ecology would lead to communal ecology, in turn leading to social ecology, subsequently leading to cognitive ecology, and ultimately to homicide. A parsimony test concluded that economic growth and inequality fully mediated the relationship between cognitive ecology and homicide residuals. Similarly, the effects of life history upon homicide were fully mediated by social ecology. This study suggests several social ecology factors appear to directly affect homicide; however, other aspects of ecology indirectly affected homicide through influences on social ecology. The effect of indicators of social ecology such as income inequality and the operational sex ratio indicate competition for resources is a significant force generating differences in homicide rates across populations. In conclusion, a suite of evolutionary pressures seems to influence homicide rates, but mainly in a sequential nature rather than simultaneously.

The Postmodern Self Personal Persistence and Its Absence in Contemporary Life Narratives

Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, and Hallett created the Personal Persistence Interview in an effort to determine how persons defend their sense of personal persistence. In other words, these researchers wanted to determine the means by which one’s present self and past self can remain subjectively similar in spite of change. A modified version of that research tool is presently used to obtain narratives not only of personal persistence but also of its absence. As of yet, there are no open-ended descriptions of how and why one’s past and present self-experience could be wholly different. These narratives are colloquially presented as they relate to change, time, and culture. Maturation and perspectival changes putatively induced more than half the sample of 177 college-aged participants to report an absence of personal persistence. Still, others, also acknowledging substantial change, continued to feel personally persistent. Change within early and late modernity, as well as change as it is expressed in theories of self, will be compared with change as it is present in these life narratives.

Beyond birth order: The biological logic of personality variation among siblings

Abstract Notwithstanding their relatedness, siblings vary as much as strangers with respect to personality traits. Attempting to explain this paradox across many publications, Frank J. Sulloway invokes evolutionary theory, specifically emphasizing Malthusian competition and referencing the concept of adaptive radiation, which produced beak variation among Darwinian finches as they spread across the Galapagos Archipelago. However, Sulloway understands birth order and other familial dynamics to create personality variation among siblings, using evolutionary concepts only as illustrative comparisons. The present paper argues that Sulloway mistook a literal truth for an analogy. Sibling personality variation does not mirror a process of evolution, it is a process of evolution. Substituting the macroevolutionary process of adaptive radiation for the microevolutionary process of adaptive diversification, and emphasizing the perpetuation of genetic material above the survival of the organism, sibling personality variation is herein explained as a hedge against lineage extinction. Unable either to predict environmental challenges or create pluripotent offspring, parents diversify their brood and thereby diversify their risk. As discussed, sibling personality variation as an ontogenetic process of adaptation remains relevant, but only in so far as it augments a primary genetic process of evolution.

The Biologically-Based Bias of Personality Disorder Diagnosis

More than previous versions, the American Psychiatric Associations (2013) fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) formally specified the nature of a personality disorder. Going beyond specific personality disorders and their respective criteria sets, are the General Criteria for Personality Disorder (GCPD) provided in section III on page 761 of DSM-V. Much of this list simply specifies that impairments must be enduring-transcending time, place, medical status, and developmental period. It is only the first two, criterion A and criterion B, which positively define a personality disorder. Specifically, criterion A states that there must be “moderate or greater impairment in personality functioning,” and criterion B states that there must be “one or more pathological personality traits.” Thereafter, on page 762, the DSM attempts to define and operationalize the concepts of pathological personality traits and impaired personality functioning. First, DSM-V operationalizes pathological personality traits in so far as five are listed: (1) negative affectivity, (2) detachment, (3) antagonism, (4) disinhibition, and (5) psychoticism. Second, in describing personality functioning, there is mention of disturbances in self and interpersonal functioning, which are taken to “constitute the core of personality psychopathology.” DSM-V proceeds to parse self and interpersonal functioning further: “Self-functioning involves identity and self-direction; interpersonal functioning involves empathy and intimacy.” All such efforts are commendable improvements on what would otherwise have been imprecise concepts liable to hold different meanings for different readers. Precision is gained by exposition. Yet, precision invites criticism. With implicit assumptions giving way to explicit assertions, as collected across various tables, terms, and operational definitions within the GCPD, personality disorder diagnosis can be recognized as relativistic. When clinical judgment, diagnostic tradition and psychiatric authority are exchanged for empirical research, one finds personality variables like those embodied in the GCPD unassociated with deficits in vocation, mating success, finance, and health (Ullrich et al., 2007; Gutierrez et al., 2013; Vall et al., 2015). At any point along the continuum of personality, instead of unalloyed deficits and beneficial traits, humans experience fitness relevant trade-offs (Nettle, 2006; Brumbach et al., 2009), as do damselflies (Rodin and Johansson, 2004), rainbow trout (Schjolden et al., 2006), house mice (Rauw, 2006) and a host of other animals displaying rudimentary personalities (Bell, 2007; Wolf et al., 2007; Biro and Stamps, 2008; Dammhahn, 2012; Favreau et al., 2014). What is true for traits may be true for personalities. As previously reviewed (Hertler, 2015a), psychopathy and obsessive compulsive personality disorder have both been described as strategic, evolved patterns, rather than dysfunctional personality disorders. Moreover, a recent study found personality extremes consistent with DSM-V disorders to be sexually selected via female choice (Vall et al., 2015). With the fact of relativism being elsewhere treated (Hertler, 2015b), it suffices to state that the GCPD rests on clinical assumptions of pathology which do not appear to equate to impairments in evolutionarily relevant life outcomes. Herein, it is not the question of relativism itself that is pursued, but the nature of that relativism. GCPD criteria are neither arbitrarily relativistic nor culturally relativistic; instead they show a particular bias, comprehensible only from a life history evolutionary vantage point. Bringing a life history evolutionary perspective to bear Life history evolution is a coherent sub-discipline of evolutionary biology that originated with the study of variation across seven developmental trait clusters, among which were lifespan, maturation rate, and brood size. Life histories are distributed across a gradient from fast or r-selected, to slow or K-selected. Most basically, and confined to the classic biomarkers upon which life history theory was grounded, fast and slow relate to the pace of development. Fast or r-selected species mature quickly, breed much, and die young, whereas slow or K-selected species show the opposite pattern, living long enough to support extensive prenatal growth and thereafter lavish resources on a small number of long-lived young. Contrast the elephant with the rabbit. In number, size, and care of young, as in longevity, growth and maturation rate, these animals are extraordinarily dissimilar. Life history variation, though greatest between species, is present within species; including the human species. Within the past three decades, life history evolution has been particularly successful in logically grouping altruism and affiliation, risk aversion and inhibition, as well as future oriented thought and delay of gratification (Figueredo et al., 2006; Jonason and Tost, 2010; McDonald et al., 2012; Hertler, 2015a), showing them to be K-selected. Opposite these, across a continuum, are r-selected antagonism, sensation seeking, disinhibition, and an orientation to the present. The original biological, as well as the aforementioned psychological and social life history variables, are collectively calibrated by mortality; specifically the rate, predictability and controllability of mortality. In K-selected regimes, mortality is rare, predictable and controllable; in r-selected regimes, mortality is common, unpredictable, and uncontrollable (Schechter and Francis, 2010). As investing in a few, slow growing, late maturing young is impractical and maladaptive under an r-selected regime with high, and highly unpredictable mortality, so is excessive altruism, risk-aversion or future orientation. There is not sufficient time or safety to capitalize on investment. So, life history creates a sort of time relevant biology organized around mortality.

Assessing Diachronic Reasoning: Exploratory Measures of Perceived Self-Change in Young Adults

Personal persistence, the subjective perception of self-sameness through time, is implied or explicitly asserted in nearly all modern theories of self and identity. Recently, personal persistence has become the subject of inquiry and argument, most directly due to Galen Strawson, who recently described himself as experiencing a distinct series of non-defective and non-pathological selves, each phenomenologically independent of the other. Using a combination of previously published, modified, and newly constructed measures, the present study, in an attempt to provide empirical information relevant to the theoretical treatments of personal persistence, assembled an assessment battery of assumptively intercorrelated personal persistence measures, which collectively provided dichotomous, linear, quantitative, and qualitative information about the experience of self-persistence in a sample of 177 mostly female college students between the ages of 18 and 44 years.

Closing on a note of conciliation: on the attempt to reconcile science and religion at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Origins

ABSTRACT Commentary on the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Origins often omits a closing exhibit wherein three scientists speak about the nature of faith and evolutionary science. Two prior reviews of this exhibit criticize an effort to conciliate patrons and avoid controversy, a charge that is, in part, substantiated by an accompanying plaque disclaiming any inherent conflict between “scientific explorations into the material world and a spiritual search for the meaning of human existence.” Written plaques are reinforced by three scientists on continuous loop, two of whom are professed Christians whose views might be faulted for abstracting humans from the animal kingdom, granting to religious metaphysics what has been explained by evolution, and implying a purposeful teleology where none exists. Eschewing these points of criticism, this paper pursues the divide between the exhibit’s conciliation and scientific opinion. Inclusion of two prominent theistic evolutionists implicitly biases public perception, as previous authors charge. Here, criticism might rest, except for decades of evolutionary explanations of human brains and behaviors. With advances in behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary biology, there are compelling reasons to understand religion itself to be a product of evolution, as do the majority of life scientists. Unfortunately, this museum video, operating without reference to sociobiological explanation, continues, like Stephen Jay Gould, to parse religion and science into independent magesteria.

Questions of Etiology, Change, Policy, Mating, and Migration

With the close of the fourth section, it is anticipated that readers will know what life history theory is, and how it explains Murray’s data. Having demonstrated that Coming Apart is fundamentally a work of life history, it is necessary to reconsider its implications. Therefore, Chapter 5 goes on to consider what the sources of change are, parsing between nature and nurture and other questions of causality. Thereafter, chapter five considers how the biological underpinnings of these sociological patterns change policy approaches and add gravity to data on mating and migration.

The Biology of Sociology: Pitting Ideology Against Elegance

Were explanatory, scientific explanations gauged by merit alone, the sixth chapter would hardly be necessary. In recognition of the realities of intellectual history, this chapter anticipates the resistance that may result from explaining Murray’s sociological data biologically and evolutionarily through life history theory. Objections are still raised against evolution, especially when applied to humans, and most especially when applied to human behavior. As such, life history theory, given that it is a sort of meta-theory that aggregates and explains much of human behavioral variation, will likely encounter resistance in this application, as it has in others. Herein, some of that intellectual history is reviewed, while projected concerns are addressed.

Life History Evolution: An Explanatory Framework

The purpose of this chapter is to supply the reader with foundational information about life history theory without which the remainder of the book would not make sense. Herein, it is explained that life history was originally an exclusively biological theory relevant to the timing of gestation, development, maturation, and death. Later, it was used to explain variation among human populations not only on these core biological variables, but also on psychological and social variables. Psychological variables include personality traits like conscientiousness, mating strategy, and intelligence, while sociological variables include altruistic effort, cultural capital, and communal affiliation. With this primer on life history evolution, the reader can better assimilate specific life history knowledge detailed in subsequent sections.