Biopsychosocial and contextual pressures: Contributions to a metatheoretical disorder theory from neuroscience, evolutionary, developmental, and ecological perspectives

Human internal and external pressures that drive cognition, emotion, motivation, and interpersonal behavior are critical aspects of clinical psychology and psychotherapy's perspectives on psychopathology. Different theoretical orientations suggest that difficulties with emotional needs, interpersonal motivations, psychosocial stages, and maturational tasks lie at the core of psychopathology. From an evolutionary and neurobiological perspective, several affective systems were shaped through the interaction between genetic and environmental pressures and can be described as the neural basis for several emotion-based behavioral tendencies. However, efforts to integrate these constructs from basic neural science, evolutionary psychology, and clinical psychology have been sparse. In this sense, the present article aims to briefly review the literature on such clinically relevant constructs and make a proposal in a coherent metatheoretical perspective to integrate and make sense of these phenomena as an unified rationale. From affective neuroscience to evolutionary psychology, developmental psychopathology, and ecological systems perspectives, biopsychosocial and contextual pressures are suggested as a heuristic for a contemporary, coherent, and transtheoretical theory of the disorder.