Neuroethics Open Thread

Blogs occasionally provide an "open thread" for readers to make comments and to point readers to interesting neuroethics-related stories or events.  In case there are any takers, here is the Neuroethics & Law Blog's first open thread.  Happy threading!

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Thank you Professor Kolber for inaugurating this open thread: I hope to take full advantage of the opportunity! First, let me state that I'm not at all fond of the locution "neuroethics" (indeed, I think it refers to an empty set or has no referent whatsoever) for reasons I will not burden others with, in part because I'm impatient to get onto other things but also because I can rest easy with the blog's description as "an interdisciplinary forum for legal and ethical issues related to the mind and the brain," or, for my purposes, ethical issues (generously understood) related to the mind arising in contemporary health care in this country (these often have legal ramifications of course, but I'm neither a lawyer or a law professor so I can leave such matters to those better qualified). There'll be no rhyme or reason to my series of posts.

In case you've missed it, I'd like to draw attention to Jerome Groopman's recent Sunday book review piece from The New York Times (Jan. 27, 2008), "Faith and Healing:" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/books/review/Groopman-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Groopman recently authored a fairly decent book (it was favorably reviewed in The New York Review of Books) entitled, How Doctors Think (2007), although I happen to think Kathryn Montgomery's How Doctors Think: Clinical Judgment and the Practice of Medicine (2006), is the more interesting and edifying of the two books. Read either or both, but do so in conjunction with Alfred I. Tauber's Patient Autonomy and the Ethics of Responsibility (2005).

I digress (and not for the first time), so back to Groopman's review. The title under consideration is by one Anne Harrington: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (2008). Being a student of religious worldviews and worldviews in general, it's perhaps understandable that I'd be drawn to a review that entices us with the heading "Faith and Healing." Groopman informs us that many of his patients broach the issue of, or are intimately familiar with, therapeutic modalities that fall under the heading of "alternative and complementary [and integral] medicine." By my lights, Groopman is to be thanked for not being dispositionally skeptical (or contemptuously dismissive) regarding forms of healing that fall outside the rubric of (Western) biomedicine. And please don't infer from that remark that I am, in turn, dismissive of biomedicine, I'm not, for one has only to read Paul Thagard's important book, How Scientists Explain Disease (1999), to appreciate biomedicine's contributions to the sciences and arts of healing. Still, despite a compelling narrative of medical success on many fronts, patients remain dissatisfied with the biomedical approach to healing what ails them:

"Some 60 million Americans use these therapies in the effort to combat serious diseases like cancer and AIDS, as well as the normal physiology of aging. In the United States, office visits to providers of complementary and alternative medicine now outnumber visits to primary care physicians. The costs of such care approach $40 billion dollars a year. Books, talk shows and Web sites present riveting testimonials of clinical benefits from Eastern breathing techniques, dietary supplements, positive thinking and prayer."

People are voting, and not just for presidential candidates. Harrington too acknowledges that “Quite often, [the] physicalist way of thinking about illness works," and so we come to the heart of the matter:

"Sometimes, of course, standard treatments don’t work or simply don’t exist. And sometimes tests fail to uncover any physical cause for a patient’s suffering at all. But such failures, Harrington argues, explain only part of the widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream medicine. Of equal or greater import, she writes, is medicine’s failure to address the 'existential' aspect of illness, to answer the questions 'Why me? Why now? What next?' Doctors usually frame their answers to such questions in language that forgoes any meaning for the individual. Whether cancer will return is a matter of statistical likelihoods derived from the study of large groups of patients — or, in lay terms, 'bad luck.' There is no meaning in randomness, and for the patient no sense of control. Perhaps someday genomic research will help predict the particular behavior of each individual’s cancer, but for now doctors cannot say with any precision who will relapse or why."

In short, biomedicine does not treat the myriad illnesses of the body and mind in an integral or holistic fashion that addresses the sickeness of an individual person qua individual person, and many patients sense this, if only intuitively or inchoately. What is more, there is often the belief, right or wrong, the result of a placebo effect or not, that an attempt at healing that combines sensitivity to existential issues with therapeutic modalities gleaned from the menu of alternative and complementary medicine will work, that is, will restore the person to a state of health if not human flourishing.

Read the review, or better, Harrington's book. Although I see things a bit differently than Groopman, I'll let him have the final word:

"Harrington concludes with the questions that her students at Harvard regularly ask: Which mind-body narratives are 'true'? Are all the stories we tell ourselves about illness equally valuable? Harrington has already answered these queries in part in the voice of the woman with breast cancer in the Stanford study. Yet, she has still been 'haunted' over the years by unusual events, like the case of a man whose tumors seemed to melt 'like snowballs on a hot stove' in response to a 'worthlesss' cancer treatment that he nonetheless believed in. The physicist Freeman Dyson once noted that, to a scientist, an event like the spontaneous remission of a tumor is viewed as occurring at the asymptote of probability, one in several million, but through the eyes of a believer it becomes not mathematics but a miracle. Harrington shows us that, whatever science reveals about the cause and course of disease, we will continue to tell ourselves stories, and try to use our own metaphors to find meaning in randomness."

I lied, I want final say: "randomness" is a descriptive term a physicalist or naturalist won't hesitate to invoke, but those of a religious or spiritual orientation will probably prefer a different word here, however much perception will suggest chaos or randomness in the first instance.

For an endeavor to make sense of one of the aforementioned complementary medical traditions, please see my paper, "Beyond the Sieve of Biomedicine: Toward a Cross-Cultural Understanding of Chinese Medicine," posted at Daniel Goldberg's delightful and important Medical Humanities Blog: http://www.medhumanities.org/ Scroll down a tad to Jan. 25, 2008. I've since made some corrections and changes to the paper, so if anyone wants the latest version you can e-mail me: patrickseamus"at"hotmail.com (use 'at' symbol).

I hope to post a few more items anon, having tried your patience with this length of thread.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Erratum: "There will be no rhyme or reason to the *order* of my posts." (I hope there's at least a little rhyme and reason to the posts as such.)

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

I would like to let Neuroethics contributors and readers know of several blogs and websites related to health care and medicine in general and mental health care in particular. All of them directly or indirectly touch upon topics related to "legal and ethical issues related to the mind and brain" even though you won't find them listed at the left under "Neuroethics-Related Sites."

1. Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry: A Closer Look http://clinpsyc.blogspot.com/
Description: Psychiatric medications, science, marketing, psychiatry in general, and occasionally clinical psychology. Questioning the role of key opinion leaders and the use of "science" to promote commercial ends rather than the needs of people with mental health concerns.
2. Health Care Renewal http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/
Description: Addressing threats to health care's core values, especially those stemming from concentration and abuse of power.
3. Hooked: Ethics, Medicine, and Pharma http://brodyhooked.blogspot.com/
Description: Updates and Commentary related to HOOKED: ETHICS, THE MEDICAL PROFESSION, AND THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY, by Howard Brody, MD, PhD (Rowman and Littlefield, January, 2007)
4. Literature, Arts and Medicine Blog http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/blog/
Description: This blog is linked to and is an extension of The NYU School of Medicine medical humanities web site and the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database. It is intended to be a forum for scholarly discussion of ongoing projects in medical, nursing, premedical, graduate, and postgraduate education and research that use the humanities, social sciences, and the arts to address current issues in medicine and bioscience– from a variety of perspectives.
5. Medical Humanities Blog http://www.medhumanities.org/
Description: Short description unavailable, so go to right hand column where it says "Click Here for About"
6. For a site with some invaluable links to various forms of complementary and alternative medicine originating from Asia, please see this page: http://www.jivaka.net/index.html
7. For a directory of scholars around the world who study the history, anthropology, or sociology of Chinese medicine, see here http://www.albion.edu/history/chimed/scholar.html

Patrick S. O'Donnell

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Presumably readers of this blog are deeply interested in the emotions. Toward refining that interest I'm sharing a work in progress: a selected transdisciplinary bibliography for the emotions. Its constraints: Books, in English, although I've also included a few entries from the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I hope you find it useful.

*Ames, Roger T. and Wimal Dissanayake. eds. Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996.
*Arnold, Magda. Emotion and Personality. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.
*Averill, James. Anger and Aggression: An Essay on Emotion. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1982.
*Baier, Annette C. Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
*Bandes, Susan A., ed. The Passions of Law. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
*Barbalet, J.M. Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure: A Macrosociological Approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
*Barrett, Lisa Feldman, Paula M. Niedenthal, and Piotr Winkielman, eds. Emotion and Consciousness. New York: The Guilford Press, 2005.
*Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
*Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron. The Subtlety of Emotions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 2000.
*Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron. Love Online: Emotions on the Internet. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
*Berlant, Lauren, ed. Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.
*Blackburn, Simon. Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning. Oxford: Clarendo Press, 1998.
*Budd, Malcolm. Music and the Emotions. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.
*Budd, Malcolm. Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music. London: Penguin, 1995.
*Campbell, Sue. Interpreting the Personal: Expression and the Formation of Feeling. Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
*Cavell, Marcia. The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
*Chari, V.K. Sanskrit Criticism. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.
*Chodorow, Nancy J. The Power of Feelings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
*Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001.
*Collier, Gray. Emotional Expression. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 1985.
*Corrigan, John, Eric Crump and John Kloos. Emotion and Religion: A Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
*Cottingham, John. Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
*Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam, 1994.
*Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1999.
*Darwin, Charles (Paul Ekman, ed.). The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 (1872).
*Davidson, Richard J. and Anne Harrington, eds. Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
*Davidson, Richard J., Klaus R. Scherer and H. Hill Goldsmith, eds. Handbook of Affective Sciences. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.
*DeLancey, Craig. Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal about Mind and Artificial Intelligence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001.
*de Sousa, Ronald. The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
*de Sousa, Ronald, “Emotion,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2007 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL=http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2007/entries/emotion/.
*Dilman, Ilham. Freud and Human Nature. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1983.
*Dilman, Ilham. Freud and the Mind. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984.
*Dixon, Thomas. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
*Eifring, Halvor, ed. Love and Emotions in Traditional Chinese Literature. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
*Ekman, Paul. Emotions in the Human Face. New York: Pergamon Press, 1972.
*Ekman, Paul. Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life. New York: Times Books (Henry Holt), 2003.
*Ekman, Paul and Richard J. Davidson, eds. The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994.
*Elster, Jon. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
*Elster, Jon. Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction and Human Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999 (A Bradford Book).
*Epstein, Joseph. Envy. New York: Oxford University Press/New York Public Library, 2003.
*Evans, Dylan. Emotion: The Science of Sentiment. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001.
*Fingarette, Herbert. Self-Deception. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000 ed.
*Fisher, Philip. The Vehement Passions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
*Flack, William F. and James D. Laird. eds. Emotions in Psychopathology: Theory and Research. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
*Fortenbaugh, W.W. Aristotle on Emotion. London: Duckworth, 1975.
*Frank, Robert. Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of Emotions. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988.
*Frijda, Nico H. The Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
*Frijda, Nico H. The Laws of Emotion. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006.
*Gay, Peter. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, 5 Vols. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1984-1998.
*Giannetti, Eduardo. Lies We Live By: The Art of Self-Deception. New York: Bloomsbury, 2000.
*Goldie, Peter. The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2000.
*Goldie, Peter, ed. Understanding Emotions: Mind and Morals. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
*Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books, 1995.
*Goleman, Daniel, ed. Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them?—A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. New York: Bantam Doubleday, 2003.
*Goleman, Daniel, ed. Healing Emotions: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Mindfulness, Emotions, and Health. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1997.
*Gordon, Robert. The Structure of Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
*Graver, Margaret R. Stoicism and Emotion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
*Greenspan, Patricia. Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Justification. New York: Routledge, 1989.
*Greenspan, P. S. Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995.
*Griffiths, Paul. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
*Gross, Daniel M. The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
*Hadot, Pierre. The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
*Harré, Rom. The Social Construction of the Emotions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986.
*Harré, Rom and Gerrod Parrott, W. The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions. London: Sage, 1996.
*Hatzimoysis, Anthony, ed. Philosophy and the Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
*Helm, Bennett W. Emotional Reason, Deliberation, Motivation, and the Nature of Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
*Hjort, Mette and Sue Laver, eds. Emotion and the Arts. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
*James, Susan. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997.
*Kagan, Jerome. What is Emotion? History, Measures, and Meanings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
*Kagan, Jerome and Robert Zajonc, eds. Emotion, Cognition, and Behaviour. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
*Kaster, Robert A. Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
*Katz, Jack. How Emotions Work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
*Kenny, Anthony. Action, Emotion and Will. New York: Humanities Press, 1963.
*Kennedy-Moore, Eileen and Jeanne C. Watson. Expressing Emotion: Myths, Realities and Therapeutic Strategies. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.
*Kivy, Peter. Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989.
*Konstan, David. Pity Transformed. London: Duckworth, 2001.
*Konstan, David. The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
*Konstan, David and Keith Rutter, eds. Envy, Spite and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.
*Kövecses, Zoltán. Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
*Kristjánsson, Kristján. Aristotle, Emotions, and Education. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.
*Lane, Christopher. Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
*Lane, Richard D. and Lynn Nadel, eds. Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
*Lane, Robert E. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
*Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form. New York: Scribner’s, 1953.
*Langer, Susanne K. Problems of Art. New York: Scribner’s, 1957.
*Langer, Susanne K. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Vol. 1. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.
*Lazarus, Richard S. Emotion and Adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
*Lear, Jonathan. Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990.
*Lear, Jonathan. Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
*Lear, Jonathan. Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
*LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain. London: Orion Books, 1998.
*Lewis, Michael and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, eds. Handbook of Emotions. New York: Guilford, 2nd ed., 2000.
*Lutz, Catherine A. and Lila Abu-Lughod. eds. Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1900.
*Manstead, Anthony S.R., Nico Frijda and Agneta Fischer, eds. Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
*Marcus, George E. The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.
*Marks, Joel, ed. The Ways of Desire: New Essays in Philosophical Psychology of the Concept of Wanting. Chicago, IL: Precedent, 1986.
*Marks, Joel and Roger T. Ames, eds. Emotions in Asian Thought: A Dialogue in Comparative Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995.
*Masson, J.L. and M.V. Patwardhan. Santa Rasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy of Aesthetics. Poona: Bandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1969.
*Matravers, Derek. Art and Emotion. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998.
*Mele, Alfred R. Irrationality: an essay on akrasia, self-deception and self-control. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
*Mele, Alfred R. Self-Deception Unmasked. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
*Moldoveanu, Mihnea C. and Nitin Nohria. Master Passions: Emotion, Narrative, and the Development of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
*Neu, Jerome. A Tear is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
*Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
*Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
*Oakley, Justin. Morality and the Emotions. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1992.
*Oatley, Keith. Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
*Oatley, Keith and Jennifer M. Jenkins. Understanding Emotions. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996.
*Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.
*Prinz, Jesse J. Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004.
*Pugmire, David. Rediscovering Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
*Pugmire, David. Sound Sentiments: Integrity in the Emotions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005.
*Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of the Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
*Ridley, Aaron. Music, Value, and the Passions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.
*Roberts, Robert C. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
*Roberts, Robert C., “Emotions in the Christian Tradition,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2006/entries/emotion-Christian-tradition/.
*Roberts, Robert C. Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2007.
*Robinson, Jenefer. Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2005.
*Rorty, Amelie O. ed. Explaining the Emotions. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980.
*Rorty, Amelie O. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988.
*Rossi, Elisa. Shen: Psycho-Emotional Aspects of Chinese Medicine. Oxford, UK: Churchill Livingstone, 2007.
*Sabini, John and Maury Silver. Emotion, Character, and Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
*Sartre, Jean-Paul. (Bernard Frechtman, trans.). The Emotions: Outline of a Theory. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.
*Scheff, Thomas J. Catharsis in Healing, Ritual and Drama. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979.
*Scheff, Thomas J. Microsociology: Discourse, Emotion and Social Structure. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
*Scheff, Thomas J. and Suzanne M. Retzinger. Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflict. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1991.
*Scherer, Klaus R., A. Schorr and T. Johnstone, eds. Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001.
*Schmitter, Amy M., “17th and 18th Century Theories of Emotions,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2006/entries/emotions-17th18th/ .
*Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1976.
*Solomon, Andrew. The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. New York: Scribner, 2001.
*Solomon, Robert C. The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993.
*Solomon, Robert C. Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
*Solomon, Robert C. In Defense of Sentimentality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004.
*Solomon, Robert C., ed. What is an Emotion? Classic and Contemporary Readings. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2003.
*Solomon, Robert C., ed. Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
*Sorabji, Richard. Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000.
*Stocker, Michael (with Elizabeth Hegeman). Valuing Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
*Tangney, June Price and Kurt W. Fischer. Self-Conscious Emotions: The Psychology of Shame: Guilt, Embarrassment, and Pride. New York: Guilford, 1995.
*Taylor, Gabriele. Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985.
*Wierzbicka, Anna. Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press/Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1999.
*Wollheim, Richard. The Thread of Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.
*Wollheim, Richard. On the Emotions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
*Wolpert, Lewis. Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.
*Yanal, Robert J. Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
*Zhang, Yanhua. Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine: An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

First, I want to thank Professor Kolber again for allowing this open thread and I hope other readers will take advantage as well.

There's an important article I'd like to draw your attention to: Jonathan Leo and Jeffrey R. Lacasse, "The Media and the Chemical Theory of Depression." Here's the abstract:

The cause of mental disorders such as depression remains unknown. However, the idea that neurotransmitter imbalances cause depression is vigorously promoted by pharmaceutical companies and the psychiatric profession at large. We examine media reports referring to this chemical imbalance theory and ask reporters for evidence supporting their claims. We then report and critique the scientific papers and other confirming evidence offered in response to our questions. Responses were received from multiple sources, including practicing psychiatrists, clients, and a major pharmaceutical company. The evidence offered was not compelling, and several of the cited sources flatly stated that the proposed theory of serotonin imbalance was known to be incorrect. The media can play a positive role in mental health reporting by ensuring that the information reported is congruent with the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Here's the link to a pdf. version of the article.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Oops! Here's that link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/u37j12152n826q60