Evolutionary, social and biological accounts, held in generative tension.
Three accounts. One asymmetry. And the discipline of refusing to crown a winner.
The paper and its slides, walked through in full. / Trouble playing? Watch on YouTube ↗
Biology, evolutionary history and lived culture co-constitute and co-enact each other in a whole larger than any of them. The biological level must refuse coronation as some deeper or truer cause sitting beneath the others.
Each is pitted in a generative posture of complementary vantages on a broader cross-paradigmatic phenomenon, rather than vandalised by the zero-sum games that seek to monopolise knowledge.
Fear systems are theorised as adaptive where calibrated to hypervigilant over-detection: a false positive costs little, a false negative can cost everything.
Extended to the question at hand, parental investment theory notes that biological females have historically borne the greater reproductive cost and caregiving demand for vulnerable offspring. That asymmetry in labour, mobility and power would afford a lower threshold for threat detection a selection advantage.
Taylor's refinement proposes a distinctively female stress response, tend-and-befriend rather than fight-or-flight: mobilising social support as a distributed defence.
Where biological females have been less mobile and less physically dominant, attentiveness to nearby threat becomes not merely inheritance but trained and reinforced socialisation.
Culture also exerts coercive directives about which feelings may be expressed, and by whom. The asymmetry may therefore extend from the diagnostic process itself: differences in help-seeking, in symptom reporting, and in how clinicians evaluate distress.
The constructionist critique does tangible analytic work here. Genuine artefact is found within the measurement, without denying the veracity of the underlying distress.
Ovarian hormones, progesterone and oestrogen, shape anxiety directly, illustrated by the lowering and raising of vulnerability to panic across pregnancy.
This sex-specific endocrine pathway tracks through reproduction from puberty, through the menstrual cycle, pregnancy and menopause, implicated in both the up- and down-regulation of fear and stress.
It also modulates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which activates the very oxytocin systems on which the tend-and-befriend response is based. The three accounts are already entangled.
The stakes are not trivial. In a domain where questions of sex and gender are politically charged, and rightfully so given the history of power and its asymmetric affordances of safety, welfare and equity, reductionism in either direction carries real cost: naturalising difference into fixed biology, or dissolving it into pure social construction.
The evolutionary account survives the critique of essentialism only when read correctly: as adaptive reasoning that evidences ancestral pressures, not as the destiny of any woman alive today. Read that way, it can sit alongside, and perhaps bridge, the social and the biological, rather than ratifying a status quo that is neither universally desired nor supported.
The reductionist error is not merely a preference for one level. It is the inversion by which a methodological lens is mistaken for the thing itself, an apprehension mistaken for a final ontological claim to causation.
More easily understood, perhaps, as the apocryphal moon, rather than the finger pointing at it. The territory of asymmetrical anxiety diagnosis is known only by its maps: an adaptive bias toward vigilance, carried by neuroendocrine machinery, and shaped constantly by adaptive and hyperlocal cultures, and the roles they permit.
"Situating parental investment theory and tend-and-befriend against the constructionist critique of essentialism, then refusing to let biology 'win' as the deeper cause, showed real theoretical thinking. Excellent work overall."
The paper as submitted, and the short deck that carries the argument.
American Psychological Association, seventh edition.