Digital technologies and evolutionary mismatch: Harming, but also healing mental health

Evidence linking computer-mediated communication (CMC) to mental health is often mixed and inconclusive. Theoretical efforts to explain this have lacked critical insights from fields like anthropology and evolutionary medicine, which contextualize human health problems in relation to the discrepancy between features of human ancestral environments and contemporary industrialized lifestyles: so-called evolutionary mismatches. Although aspects of CMC may indeed represent such evolutionary mismatches, this relationship may, however, be complicated by (a) a failure to contextualize the negative mental health effects of CMC against broader societal factors (e.g., family nuclearization) which are plausible preexisting evolutionary mismatches themselves; and (b) ignoring the positive effects of CMC in mitigating these mismatches. In this article, we propose a perspective that addresses these limitations, suggesting that this serves as an antidote to the overpathologization of novel behaviors facilitated by CMC. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).