Understanding individualised genetic interventions as research-treatment hybrids.

Until recently, medicine has had little to offer most of the millions of patients suffering from rare and ultrarare genetic conditions. But the development in 2019 of Milasen, the first genetic intervention developed for and administered to a single patient suffering from an ultrarare genetic disorder, has offered hope to patients and families. In addition, Milasen raised a series of conceptual and ethical questions about how individualised genetic interventions should be developed, assessed for safety and efficacy and financially supported.

Asymmetric Causal Attributions to Environmental Influences for Prosocial Versus Antisocial Behavior.

Several recent studies have explored how people may favor different explanations for others' behavior depending on the moral or evaluative valence of the behavior in question. This research tested whether people would be less willing to believe that a person's environment played a role in causing her to exhibit antisocial (as compared to prosocial) behavior. In three experiments, participants read a description of a person engaging in either antisocial or prosocial behavior.

Individualized interventions for rare genetic conditions and the research-treatment spectrum: Stakeholder perspectives.

Purpose: Advances in the study of ultrarare genetic conditions are leading to the development of targeted interventions developed for single or very small numbers of patients. Owing to the experimental but also highly individualized nature of these interventions, they are difficult to classify cleanly as either research or clinical care. Our goal was to understand how parents, institutional review board members, and clinical geneticists familiar with individualized genetic interventions conceptualize these activities and their implications for the relationship between research and clinical care.

Asymmetrical genetic attributions for the presence and absence of health problems.

Objective: Recent research has suggested that people more readily make genetic attributions for positively valenced or desirable traits than for negatively valenced or undesirable traits-an asymmetry that may be mediated by perceptions that positive characteristics are more 'natural' than negative ones. This research sought to examine whether a similar asymmetry in genetic attributions would emerge between positive and negative health outcomes.

Design: Across seven experiments, participants were randomly assigned to read a short vignette describing an individual experiencing a health problem (e.

Asymmetric genetic attributions for one's own prosocial versus antisocial behavior.

People tend to rate prosocial or positive behavior as more strongly influenced by the actor's genes than antisocial or negative behavior. The current study tested whether people would show a similar asymmetry when rating the role of genes in their own behavior, and if so, what variables might mediate this difference. Participants were prompted to think about an example of their own behavior from the past year that was either prosocial or antisocial.

The Emergence of Psychiatry: 1650-1850.

Western psychiatry emerged as a medical specialty caring for the mentally ill over the course of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This emergence was a contingent process, dependent on the co-occurrence of three historical developments that together shaped the young discipline. The first was the rise of the mind as an entity with numerous active faculties in the conceptual space between the body and the Christian soul.

The prospects of precision psychiatry.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, biomedical psychiatry around the globe has embraced the so-called precision medicine paradigm, a model for medical research that uses innovative techniques for data collection and analysis to reevaluate traditional theories of disease. The goal of precision medicine is to improve diagnostics by restratifying the patient population on the basis of a deeper understanding of disease processes. This paper argues that precision is ill-fitting for psychiatry for two reasons.

Genetic attributions and perceptions of naturalness are shaped by evaluative valence.

Genetic influences on human behavior are increasingly well understood, but laypeople may endorse genetic attributions selectively; e.g., they appear to make stronger genetic attributions for prosocial than for antisocial behavior.

Personality Disorders as Emergent Interpersonal Syndromes: Psychopathic Personality as a Case Example.

Personality disorders have long been bedeviled by a host of conceptual and methodological quandaries. Starting from the assumption that personality disorders are inherently interpersonal conditions that reflect folk concepts of social impairment, the authors contend that a subset of personality disorders, rather than traditional syndromes, are (EISs): interpersonally malignant configurations (statistical interactions) of distinct personality dimensions that may be only modestly, weakly, or even negatively correlated. Preliminary support for this perspective derives from a surprising source, namely, largely forgotten research on the intercorrelations among the subscales of select MMPI/MMPI-2 clinical scales.

Psychopathy as an Emergent Interpersonal Syndrome: Further Reflections and Future Directions.

In our article (Lilienfeld et al., 2019), we hypothesized that psychopathy and some other personality disorders are emergent interpersonal syndromes (EISs): interpersonally malignant configurations of distinct personality subdimensions. We respond to three commentaries by distinguished scholars who raise provocative challenges to our arguments and intriguing suggestions for future research.

Asymmetrical genetic attributions for prosocial versus antisocial behaviour.

Genetic explanations of human behaviour are increasingly common. While genetic attributions for behaviour are often considered relevant for assessing blameworthiness, it has not yet been established whether judgements about blameworthiness can themselves impact genetic attributions. Across six studies, participants read about individuals engaging in prosocial or antisocial behaviour, and rated the extent to which they believed that genetics played a role in causing the behaviour.

Why not be pluralists about explanatory reduction?

Borsboom et al. convincingly argue that, from their symptom network perspective, mental disorders cannot be reduced to brain disorders. While granting that network structures exist, I respond that there is no reason to think they are the only psychiatric phenomena worth explaining.

Correction to: Behavioral Genetics and Attributions of Moral Responsibility.

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a few mistakes in the Introduction section.

Behavioral Genetics and Attributions of Moral Responsibility.

While considerable research has examined how genetic explanations for behavior impact assessments of moral responsibility, results across studies have been inconsistent. Some studies suggest that genetic accounts diminish ascriptions of responsibility, but others show no effect. Nonetheless, conclusions from behavior genetics are increasingly mobilized on behalf of defendants in court, suggesting a widespread intuition that this sort of information is relevant to assessments of blameworthiness.

Darwin at Orchis Bank: Selection after the Origin.

Darwin's first publication after the Origin of Species was a volume on orchids that expanded on the theory of adaptation through natural selection introduced in his opus. Here I argue that On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (1862) is not merely an empirical confirmation of his theory. In response to immediate criticisms of his metaphor of natural selection, Darwin uses Orchids to present adaptation as the result of innumerable natural laws, rather than discrete acts analogous to conscious choices.