Adam Hunt

🚨Just published in the British Journal of Psychiatry!🚨 Evolutionary explanations of anxiety rated as 5x more useful for patients and 3x more useful for clinicians than genetic explanations of anxiety! Our paper is the largest RCT of evolutionary explanations to date!

@justin_garson @PsychToday Thanks for covering it Justin! I do think we have only just started plumbing the depths of the potential for evolutionary reframing

For @PsychToday, I wrote about an extraordinary new study (led by @realadamhunt) showing that the stories we tell about anxiety are just as important as the anxiety itself - and how the conventional “broken brain to be managed with drugs” story harms patients. 1/4

Why do metabolic and circadian systems break down together in bipolar disorder? Iain Campbell (Edinburgh) brings an evolutionary lens to this question — Thursday 28 May, 6pm BST. Free WPA EP webinar. Register: buff.ly/192izGf

@RokoMijic This is a postdoc position - it's basically freedom to work on your own ideas for two years with very little oversight. There will be nearly zero responsibilities. It's just open research time. I agree salaries could/should be a bit higher, but equally it's basically not a 'job'

Job vacancy in the Yookay Shaping the future of AI governance Pay is £39.4k - that's $53k - gross Net of all the paypig taxes, you'd take home about £29,500 - which is about $40k. To earn the equivalent net of this in the USA you could get a team lead job at Walmart (18 months experience stacking shelves)

@s8mb PLEASE make buildings in this country beautiful again! It's one of my greatest joys to cycle through London, and architecture makes such a difference

Sculpture is what separates beautiful Victorian cast-iron drinking fountains from the cheap plastic ones built today, and what makes ornamented buildings of the past so enthralling. In a sense, a medieval cathedral IS a giant sculpture. And, more than any other art form, sculpture is shaped by engineering and economics. BUT: sculptures today are often crude and simplistic, and the craft has been in decline for decades. Because it requires such a complicated set of skills, and modern art colleges focus far more on art criticism instead of training, sculpture is dying. In this week's Works in Progress podcast, @thinkaboutglue and @SCP_Hughes joined me to talk about things like: - Why the only country that could build the sculpture park that the Trump Administration wants is... North Korea, - How sculpture was industrialised in Antiquity, revived by Renaissance goldsmiths, and how mass production has been the norm for centuries, - Why the best figurative sculptors are found in Hollywood prop shops, - How Hindu temples kept alive a sculptural tradition the West lost, - And whether we need an advanced market commitment for beauty. Listen now, and let us know what you think! Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6Sx3lQ… Youtube: youtu.be/DQGgJvinpuE Apple: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/whe…

@Kitty_Mayo_ There's absolutely no way this is better than using a hand remote control. Even brain implants by neuralink etc aren't as good as hands!! This is inspired by sci Fi but not gonna happen for a loooong time. Hands evolved for millions of years to perfectly channel thoughts!

Two weeks ago, watching Agnessa Pedersen mind control a drone in real time, was one of the most moving moments in my career. Agnessa is a rare and wondrous human working towards a wild future.

Reminder: free WPA Evolutionary Psychiatry webinar this Thursday 28 May, 6pm BST. Iain Campbell (Edinburgh) on "An evolutionary perspective on metabolic and circadian dysregulation in bipolar disorder" Register: buff.ly/192izGf

New season of the Evolving Psychiatry podcast is starting, released every Sunday, 12 episodes in the works! Kicking off with the renowned @AllenFrancesMD youtu.be/P9iErs1i8FM?si…

@bswud Ah sad, happens to the best of us!

@RealAdamHunt In his youth, yes, but he’s a bit haggard now

Tfw

@bswud Must have been an even more handsome photographer I guess

@RealAdamHunt It’s the quality of the picture that makes it, I think

@Evolving_Moloch Yup, I do think that the preservation differences between (very useful and flexible!) organic material vs rocks has wildly biased us here

I think human culture and technology probably did not explode during this period as much as assumed, and there is instead preservation bias in the archaeological record. And relatedly human cultural change cannot be assumed to reflect genetic change—indeed it often does not.

Not too late to register for the next free Evolutionary Psychiatry webinar due on Thursday 28 May 6pm. See details & reg link below @RealAdamHunt @henrypoconnell @gurjotbrarmd @Derektracy1 @lennycornwall @RandyNesse @Reemabed81Reem @muzafferkaser @AgnesAyton

@Foreman1David @gikkos1 @riad It's two sides of the same story - and that's the interesting thing! Of course, brains are built by genomes which are selected by evolution - yet different focuses do frame the story in a different light. And quite substantially different!

@RealAdamHunt @gikkos1 @riad Weren’t the answers correlated? Also, I wasn’t a fly on the wall at the lectures but as genomes summarise evolution by natural selection, I don’t understand what is essentially the same theory leading to more positive outcomes under one condition.

Think evolutionary explanations before genetic @riad

@Foreman1David @gikkos1 @riad The one question which might most plausibly have been impacted by that single point would be 'optimism about recovery'. But the others seem much less directly related (e.g. willingness to seek help; usefulness of information)

@gikkos1 @riad Sorry, but putting a guarded prognosis slide in the genetic but not the evolutionary slide deck biases the results.

@Foreman1David @gikkos1 @riad We had positive results on all 7 pre-registered hypotheses, and an additional 3 items. It would be extremely surprising if a single point in a single slide in the 30 minute presentation is the driver of all the effects? Also we replicated a finding of Schroeder et al. 2023

🚨Just published in the British Journal of Psychiatry!🚨 Evolutionary explanations of anxiety rated as 5x more useful for patients and 3x more useful for clinicians than genetic explanations of anxiety! Our paper is the largest RCT of evolutionary explanations to date!

@sebkrier Rekkkkt

@CarlosEAlvare17 Very interesting!

Speaking of anxiety, I teach presentation and feedback skills to PhD students. Despite the class being taught in their final year, the biggest factor in presentation quality is probably the level of anxiety in many students, which is often even greater than the preparation of media and presentation practice. Remarkably, the biggest factor on the overall class vibe is feedback type, tone and amount -- especially the criticism from instructors. The issue of feedback is essentially devising the gentlest way to criticize constructively: open with the presentation strengths, identify specific areas for improvement and suggest how to make the improvement. Even without any harsh or personal criticism, a substantial level of criticism tends to create stress in many students. I think those dynamics align with your study. That's especially true for the idea of hearing strong criticism that would be analogous to a genetic liability that we are unlikely to be able to mitigate. I even see an analogy in the relationship between anxiety and societal authority structures: students vs instructors, and patients vs physicians. Beyond those dynamics, a curious factor is student engagement. The default state is weak or non-engagement except for the small subset of gregarious students. Without preventing it, the natural order seems to be for students to make kind comments and weak critiques, which leaves the stronger criticisms for instructors... eventually arriving on the instructors making up the bulk of the feedback -- which is what makes students the most anxious. Thus, there's a large-effect tradeoff on engagement/stress. And teaching this class is largely an exercise in getting students to give all the necessary feedback (and the instructors are more like facilitators).

@RealAdamHunt I’ve used evolutionary psychology a lot and yes it’s much more useful. Clients actually feel empowered once they understand the function of these drives.