Prof. Charles Crawford

时间： 2012-04-13 12:30 - 14:30

地点： 哲学楼103房间

It is commonly assumed that the desire for a thin female physique and its pathological expression in eating disorders result from social pressures for thinness. I argue that such widespread behaviour may be better understood not merely as the result of arbitrary social pressure, but as an exaggerated expression of behaviours that may have been adaptive in our ancestors. The reproductive suppression hypothesis is that natural selection shaped a mechanism for adjusting female reproduction to ancestral socio-ecological conditions by altering the amount of body fat and its rate of acquisition. In modern western culture, social and ecological cues, which would have signalled the need for temporary postponement of reproduction in ancestral environments, may now be experienced to an unprecedented intensity and duration. I discuss a variety of studies of female-female competition and stressful male attention that were carried out by my graduate students and me to test the reproduction suppression hypothesis for the production of anorexic-type dieting behaviour in non-clinical populations.

2012-04-13

2012-04-13