Evolutionary explanations of depression and cognitive control dysfunction: A literature review

Cognitive control dysfunction, including impairments in inhibition, shifting, updating, and the balance between proactive and reactive control, is a robust feature of depression. Although these patterns are well documented, their origins and possible functions remain debated. This narrative review asks whether recurrent depressive cognitive-control profiles can be interpreted, in part, through evolutionary frameworks. Integrating Social Rank Theory, the Analytical Rumination Hypothesis, and Social Bargaining Theory, this review maps depressive control patterns onto putative functions related to hierarchy management, complex problem solving, and social support recruitment. Rather than treating cognitive control dysfunction as a unitary deficit, this review synthesizes component-level evidence and network perspectives to argue that specific configurations of control processes and attentional biases may reflect context-sensitive trade-offs. These hypotheses are situated within broader explanations, including evolutionary mismatch, byproduct accounts, stress–inflammation pathways, and developmental and cultural contingencies. This broader framing emphasizes that conditionally functional states can still be costly and clinically impairing in contemporary environments. Overall, this review proposes an integrative framework linking computational aims, cognitive algorithms, and neural implementations to evolutionary hypotheses, clarifying why particular cognitive-control profiles may recur in depression and resist change. Clinically, this framework motivates using cognitive control training and cognitive-behavioral interventions as mechanistic probes to identify and modify the control parameters and network couplings most relevant to a given depressive profile.