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247Ethical issues in global neuroimaging genetics collaborationsNeuroImage 117208 (221): 1-10. 2020.
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166Attentional Harms and Digital InequalitiesJMIR Mental Health 9 (2). 2022.Recent years have seen growing public concern about the effects of persuasive digital technologies on public mental health and well-being. As the draws on our attention reach such staggering scales and as our ability to focus our attention on our own considered ends erodes ever further, the need to understand and articulate what is at stake has become pressing. In this ethical viewpoint, we explore the concept of attentional harms and emphasize their potential seriousness. We further argue that …Read more
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99Sadistic cruelty and unempathic evil: Psychobiological and evolutionary considerationsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (3): 242-242. 2006.Understanding the origins of evil behaviour is one of our most important intellectual tasks. A distinction can perhaps be drawn between overt sadistic cruelty and the lack of empathy to suffering that is a hallmark of evil. There is increasing data available on the prevalence, proximal psychobiological underpinnings, and distal evolutionary basis for these contrasting phenomena.
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93Philosophy and Obsessive–Compulsive DisorderPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 19 (4): 339-342. forthcoming.
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69Psychopharmacological enhancement: a conceptual frameworkPhilosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 7 5. 2012.The availability of a range of new psychotropic agents raises the possibility that these will be used for enhancement purposes (smart pills, happy pills, and pep pills). The enhancement debate soon raises questions in philosophy of medicine and psychiatry (eg, what is a disorder?), and this debate in turn raises fundament questions in philosophy of language, science, and ethics. In this paper, a naturalistic conceptual framework is proposed for addressing these issues. This framework begins by c…Read more
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69Obtaining informed consent for genomics research in Africa: analysis of H3Africa consent documentsJournal of Medical Ethics 42 (2): 132-137. 2016.Background The rise in genomic and biobanking research worldwide has led to the development of different informed consent models for use in such research. This study analyses consent documents used by investigators in the H3Africa (Human Heredity and Health in Africa) Consortium. Methods A qualitative method for text analysis was used to analyse consent documents used in the collection of samples and data in H3Africa projects. Thematic domains included type of consent model, explanations of gene…Read more
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57Predictors of consent to cell line creation and immortalisation in a South African schizophrenia genomics studyBMC Medical Ethics 19 (1): 72. 2018.Cell line immortalisation is a growing component of African genomics research and biobanking. However, little is known about the factors influencing consent to cell line creation and immortalisation in African research settings. We contribute to addressing this gap by exploring three questions in a sample of Xhosa participants recruited for a South African psychiatric genomics study: First, what proportion of participants consented to cell line storage? Second, what were predictors of this conse…Read more
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55Philosophy and cognitive neuropsychiatryPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 6 (3): 217-221. 1999.
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54BackgroundCommunity engagement within biomedical research is broadly defined as a collaborative relationship between a research team and a group of individuals targeted for research. A Community Advisory Board is one mechanism of engaging the community. Within genomics research CABs may be particularly relevant due to the potential implications of research findings drawn from individual participants on the larger communities they represent. Within such research, CABs seek to meet instrumental go…Read more
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48Psychiatric Genomics: Ethical Implications for Public Health in Lower- and Middle-Income CountriesAmerican Journal of Bioethics 17 (4): 17-19. 2017.
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47Cognitive Science and the UnconsciousAmerican Psychiatric Press. 1997.Examines those aspects of the unconscious mind most relevant to the psychiatric practitioner, including unconscious processing of affective and traumatic...
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39Social anxiety disorder and the psychobiology of self-consciousnessFrontiers in Human Neuroscience 9. 2015.
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38Revenge and forgiveness in the New South AfricaBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (1): 37-38. 2013.Insofar as South Africa underwent a rapid transformation from apartheid to democracy, it may provide a unique laboratory for investigating aspects of revenge and forgiveness. Here we suggest that observations and data from South Africa are partially consistent with the hypotheses generated by MCullough and colleagues. At the same time, the rich range of revenge and forgiveness phenomena in real-life settings is likely to require explanatory concepts other than specialized modules and their compu…Read more
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37Psychiatric Disorders Are Soft Natural KindsPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 29 (3): 183-185. 2022.Tilmes concludes his interesting and informative piece with the sentence that “analysis of psychiatric vagueness merits further consideration.” I agree with this point, as well as with his earlier assertion that how one understands psychiatric vagueness may implicate the diagnostic model that one adopts, and the research that one pursues. Fortunately, there has been recent attention to vagueness in psychiatry, addressing both degree-vagueness and combinatorial vagueness. Vagueness in psychiatry …Read more
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35Normal and Abnormal Anxiety in the Age of DSM-5 and ICD-11Emotion Review 7 (3): 223-229. 2015.Despite the effort on DSM-5 and ICD-11, few appear satisfied with these classification systems. We suggest that the core reason for dissatisfaction is expecting too much from them; they do not provide discrete categories that map to specific causes of disease, they describe clinical syndromes intended to guide treatment choices. Here we review work on anxiety and anxiety disorders to argue that while clinicians draw a pragmatic distinction between normal and abnormal emotions based on considerat…Read more
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32Neural Networks and Psychopathology: Connectionist Models in Practice and Research (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1998.Reviews the contribution of neural network models in psychiatry and psychopathology, including diagnosis, pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy.
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30Cognitive and psychiatric science beyond determinismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (5): 906-907. 1999.Many of Rose's criticisms of determinism in biology have clear relevance to modern cognitive and psychiatric science; too narrow a focus on the brain as an information processing machine runs the risk of neglecting the context in which information processing takes place, and too narrow a focus on the neuroscience of psychopathology runs the risk of neglecting other levels of explanation for these phenomena. It should be emphasized, however, that animal and genetic studies of phenomena of interes…Read more
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28Unconscious influences on decision making: Neuroimaging and neuroevolutionary perspectivesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (1): 23-24. 2014.
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26Potential use of clinical polygenic risk scores in psychiatry – ethical implications and communicating high polygenic riskPhilosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 14 (1): 1-12. 2019.Psychiatric disorders present distinct clinical challenges which are partly attributable to their multifactorial aetiology and the absence of laboratory tests that can be used to confirm diagnosis or predict risk. Psychiatric disorders are highly heritable, but also polygenic, with genetic risk conferred by interactions between thousands of variants of small effect that can be summarized in a polygenic risk score. We discuss four areas in which the use of polygenic risk scores in psychiatric res…Read more
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26Ethical Challenges in Contemporary FASD Research and PracticeCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 25 (4): 726-732. 2016.
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25Unconscious habit systems in compulsive and impulsive disordersBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (2): 141-141. 2014.
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24Cognitive Embodiment and Anxiety DisordersPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 27 (1): 53-55. 2020.Glas's article is one of several in an interesting special issue focused on applying concepts from enactivism to psychiatry; his focuses on anxiety in particular. Given ongoing developments in work on enactivism, and ongoing debates about how to progress psychiatry, this application is timely. Here, I make three general points about the application of enactivism to psychiatry; I exemplify these with occasional comments on social anxiety disorder.First, as de Haan notes in her introduction, the t…Read more
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23A Neural Network Approach to Obsessive- Compulsive DisorderJournal of Mind and Behavior 15 (3): 223-238. 1994.A central methodological innovation in cognitive science has been the development of connectionist or neural network models of psychological phenomena. These models may also comprise a theoretically integrative and methodologically rigorous approach to psychiatric phenomena. In this paper we employ connectionist theory to conceptualize obsessive-compulsive disorder . We discuss salient phenomenological and neurobiological findings of the illness, and then reformulate these using neural network m…Read more
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22The Philosophy of EvilPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 12 (3): 261-263. 2005.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 261-263 [Access article in PDF] The Philosophy of Evil Dan J. Stein Keywords philosophy, evil, self-deception, psychopathy, narcissism, sadism Kubarych (2005) first draws on Peck (1983) to suggest a distinction between psychopaths who have no conscience and therefore no need for self-deception, and evil narcissists who use self-deception to keep the emotional consequences of their crim…Read more
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20Disorder and Deviance: Where to Draw the Boundaries?Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 21 (3): 261-265. 2014.Last updated - 2020-01-06.
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18Investigating assumptions of vulnerability: A case study of the exclusion of psychiatric inpatients as participants in genetic research in low‐ and middle‐income contextsDeveloping World Bioethics 20 (3): 157-166. 2020.Psychiatric genetic research investigates the genetic basis of psychiatric disorders with the aim of more effectively understanding, treating, or, ultimately, preventing such disorders. Given the challenges of recruiting research participants into such studies, the potential for long‐term benefits of such research, and seemingly minimal risk, a strong claim could be made that all non‐acute psychiatric inpatients, including forensic and involuntary patients, should be included in such research, p…Read more
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University of Cape TownProfessor
Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Psychiatry and Psychopathology |