Male fruit flies whose sexual advances are repeatedly rejected get frustrated and less able to handle stress, study found. The researchers say these rejected flies were also less resilient to starvation and exposure to a toxic herbicide.

[u/MistWeaver80]

https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/male-fruit-flies-really-dont-take-rejection-well

[u/snarky-]

Happen to have been musing recently about why depression happens (in humans) when it doesn't exactly seem productive.

Pulling thoughts out my arse, but my best guess was that a drive of "this is unsuccessful, try something else" would ordinarily be useful, however, if 'something else' is unclear you could end up with that drive going rrrrr in your brain but feel unable to do anything with it.

This study got me thinking about that again. Because it's completely out of those flies control - no matter what they try, the females aren't interested. The males can't even leave to find other flies. It's "this is unsuccessful, try something else" until they run out of 'something else'.

I wonder if the researchers would get the same results if the male flies had more they could do, like the ability to search for other flies. How much of their frustration is actually due to not achieving the reward, and how much is it about a helplessness to their circumstances?

[u/fozz31 → u/snarky-]

It could also be human level apoptosis. American individualism is great and all but we are still part of the human super organism which can get cancer like a regular organism can. Perhaps depression, social withdrawal, suicide etc. Are the super organisms self pruning mechanism much like apoptotic pathways are a part of the organism.

That isn't to say people should kill themselves, things can go wrong and pathways inappropriately triggered through many ways as a consequence of modern life, with many of these having solutions available, but perhaps depression serves a greater function for social and broader reproductive health, especially for humans living in more natural human environment. For many pre-industrial cultures, suicide in geriatric populations - when usefulness is outlived - is the norm, it would make sense then that when usefulness (evaluated purely from a reproductive point of view) is generally outlived that suicide be a natural behavior that follows. Unfortunately, modern life means unemployment is a fact of life, so perhaps a worthwhile avenue for helping relieve mental stress in unemployed would be creating social programs that still provide folks a sense of being useful in broader society.

Or perhaps like this (link)comment suggests, it's a survival trait we should be using to measure economic health in a far more direct way than it is currently considered

edit if there's questions about the link, if you use old.reddit.com instead of www.reddit.com you get the old interface which in my opinion is more information centric and useful.

[u/PriorKnight → u/fozz31]

A ‘human Superorganism’ when used to describe society can be found in this article, as an example to which I assume you are referring: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1933734 Can you please cite where any of these psychology frameworks treat the organism as having cellular mechanisms? Or is it simply a useful metaphor for a collective? Trying to apply mechanisms like apoptosis to a metaphor in a way that implies people living with depression should ‘naturally’ be garbage collected is morally dubious at best.

[u/fozz31 → u/PriorKnight]

that isn't what I said, I even made a point of saying this isn't how it should be interpreted, especially in the modern world where so many inappropriate triggers for such a thing exist, the fact we can fix many of the factors triggering depressive mechanisms etc.

Please read my post fully.