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Jul 24, 2019, 10:17 AM
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From this article about grief (that animals experience) Is there a reason for grief? | Scienceline
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Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist and director of the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, says that grief is a specialized form of sadness to help us cope with a life-altering event. “When you lose something that’s important, that’s a very adaptively significant event,” he said. At first, I wanted to dismiss this fact as a clinical explanation, but there’s some truth there: When I think of grief, I tend to think of my life before a loss, and then life after. The loss cleaves my time into different chapters.
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Nesse, though, firmly believes that there isn’t one purpose for any emotion. “Emotions have many functions,” he said. “What we should be trying to do is understand in what situation an emotion is useful.” He nonetheless thinks “the idea that grief may be a useful biological trait that is shaped by natural selection seems both preposterous and somewhat cold-blooded,” which he wrote in a book discussing how grief affects older couples. He points out that understanding the mechanics of grief doesn’t make it any less painful.
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