The Adaptive Calibration Model of stress responsivity

By M. Del Giudice, Bruce J. Ellis, Elizabeth A. Shirtcliff. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 2010

1,290 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents the Adaptive Calibration Model (ACM), an evolutionary-developmental theory of individual differences in the functioning of the stress response system. The stress response system has three main biological functions: (1) to coordinate the organism’s allostatic response to physical and psychosocial challenges; (2) to encode and filter information about the organism’s social and physical environment, mediating the organism’s openness to environmental inputs; and (3) to regulate the organism’s physiology and behavior in a broad range of fitness-relevant areas including defensive behaviors, competitive risk-taking, learning, attachment, affiliation and reproductive functioning. The information encoded by the system during development feeds back on the long-term calibration of the system itself, resulting in adaptive patterns of responsivity and individual differences in behavior. Drawing on evolutionary life history theory, we build a model of the development of stress responsivity across life stages, describe four prototypical responsivity patterns, and discuss the emergence and meaning of sex differences. The ACM extends the theory of biological sensitivity to context (BSC) and provides an integrative framework for future research in the field.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/efec776e9f409063d365a1dcf668054ad507ebf7

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Citations in the corpus

Rethinking IL-6 and CRP: Why they are more than inflammatory biomarkers, and why it matters. (2018, neutral): “dysregulation, but from an evolutionary-developmental standpoint they may play a functional role in the coordination of behavior and physiology in the context of faster life history strategies (Del Giudice et al., 2011; Ellis et al., 2017).”
Individual Differences in Environmental Sensitivity (2015, background): “ability in the propensity for conditional adaptation to the environment (6, 24, 36, 39).”
Borderline Personality Disorder (2016, neutral): “timing of biological maturation, sexual activity and intensity of care for offspring is regulated by sex hormones, the stress response system, and neuropeptides [26-28].”
Middle Childhood: An Evolutionary‐Developmental Synthesis (2014, background): “…in life history strategy are reflected in patterns of self-regulation, aggression, cooperation and prosociality, attachment, sexuality, and so forth (Del Giudice & Belsky, 2011; Del Giudice, Ellis, & Shirtcliff, 2011; Del Giudice et al., 2009; Ellis, Figueredo, Brumbach, & Schlomer, 2009).”
Resilience in developing systems: the promise of integrated approaches (2016, background): “Many of the adaptive systems that sustain health and well-being in human development require some calibration that depends on plasticity, ranging from immune function to stress regulation (Del Giudice et al., 2011).”
Brain on stress: How the social environment gets under the skin (2012, background): “Indeed, the Active Calibration Model and the concepts of allostasis and allostatic load are orthogonal and provide complementary ways of understanding individual developmental trajectories, which was suggested in the work by Rutter (94); this work called for studies on individual differences in vuln”