Review
Threat-detection in child development: An evolutionary perspective

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Abstract

Evidence for developmental aspects of fear-targets and anxiety suggests a complex but stable pattern whereby specific kinds of fears emerge at different periods of development. This developmental schedule seems appropriate to dangers encountered repeatedly during human evolution. Also consistent with evolutionary perspective, the threat-detection systems are domain-specific, comprising different kinds of cues to do with predation, intraspecific violence, contamination–contagion and status loss. Proper evolutionary models may also be relevant to outstanding issues in the domain, notably the connections between typical development and pathology.

Section snippets

Developmental schedule of fear-targets

A number of authors have noted that different domains of fear come online during human development. Stanley Hall's survey was perhaps the first systematic attempt to measure the prevalence of common fears on a large sample of children and adolescents, documenting the salience of natural triggers (thunder, reptiles, insects) as well as situational (darkness) and social ones (Hall, 1897).

Very broadly, one can delineate a general developmental schedule for typical childhood fears, starting with

Accounts of fear-acquisition

Central to early theories of fear-acquisition were classical conditioning accounts, following which any stimulus could become a fear-trigger, given the appropriate CS/UCS pairing (Watson and Rayner, 2000). The main assumption was that most normal fears as well as pathological phobias would be the result of actual particular encounters with the target stimuli. There were several problems with this account. First, the assumption of equipotentiality (all UCS have the same potential for triggering

Fear and precaution in an evolutionary perspective

The models reviewed above did not fully integrate evidence from ethological and evolutionary approaches to animal behavior. However, the processes engaged and in particular the process of acquisition may make more sense once considered as adaptive behaviors in the context of natural selection, which favors the evolution of domain-specific cognitive systems that handle recurrent fitness challenges. This domain-specific view of cognition informed by different principles was first popularized by

Stability and appropriateness of the developmental schedule

As noted above, children do not develop fear-targets in an unprincipled way. On the contrary, specific targets come on-line at different stages of childhood. This schedule is astonishingly stable between children in vastly different kinds of social and cultural environments, ranging from nomadic foraging tribes to large cities. Obviously, encounters with strange people, other animals, contaminants, differ a great deal between environments, so that children come to develop distinctly cultural

Potential vs. actual threats

It is striking that most children's fears occur in situations in which there is no actual direct threat – which may lead us to think that threat-detection systems are hyper-active or simply inaccurate in children. That would be misguided, for several reasons. First, as we emphasized, children's fears come online at times that correspond to actual dangers in evolutionary contexts. Second, as we will explain presently, children and adults are very similar in that respect, in the extent to which

Typical development and pathology

In our view, another advantage of the evolutionary perspective is to provide a clearer understanding of the similarities and differences between pathology and typical development. There is, as we mentioned in introduction, only a scant and scattered literature on the typical development of threat-detection. This is all the more striking in domains where children or adolescents develop pathologies, for which we often do not have very specific descriptions or theoretical models for typical

Outstanding questions

Several developmental issues remain to be addressed, of which the following are only a small selection.

  • Neurophysiological development. Threat-detection and precaution follow a strict developmental schedule. Although some structures supporting this cognitive domain are fairly well-identified (from neuro-imaging and neuro-psychological evidence, see Fiddick, this volume), there is still no general account of their unfolding during brain maturation. In some domains, like social competence and

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