Precarious Goals: A Biopsychological Model of Adaptive Strivings Articulates How Harsh Social Worlds Erode Physical Health

Environments erode health by shaping biologically based goal systems, or adaptive strivings, that help a brain regulate bodily energy resources. Adaptive strivings let predictive brain processes anticipate and meet even modest shifts in impending metabolic demands. Adaptive strivings serve growth, social potency, and safety. Striving for personal and social growth (transcendence striving) improves energy regulation and promotes health. But adverse environments can foster precarious strivings that cause organic damage even in the absence of fight-flight responses or distressing emotions: Agonistic striving (persistently seeking to influence others) and dissipated striving (disengaging to be safe) impair regulation and foster illness by generating perpetual power contests or perceptions of self-inefficacy. Threats to social power or status endanger health by inducing precarious strivings that amplify adversities. Emotional transcendence striving, however, may dampen harsh health impacts. Research has replicated the three strivings across differences of race, sex, and age and indicates that agonistic striving contributes to hypertension, somatic symptoms, and alcohol use disorders. Harmful health effects of agonistic striving are moderated by emotional transcendence striving indexed by the ability to modulate anger or physical pain. Agonistic striving mediates the association between exposure to neighborhood disorder and hypertension after controlling for negative emotions and disease-prone traits.