Harvey Cushing and Sigmund Freud shaking hands: How electrical brain stimulation became a psychoanalytic method to study the unconscious (1870-1955).

In the first half of the 1950s, psychoanalysts and neurosurgeons used electrical brain stimulation to explore hard-to-reach, unconscious psychological processes such as repressed memories, defence mechanisms and sexual identity. The development of evolutionary theory and neurophysiological methods and theory, together with the birth of psychoanalysis, were important precursors to these remarkable stimulation experiments. Experimental, theoretical and clinical antecedents of these stimulation experiments between the 1870s and the 1940s are discussed to show how smoothly the apparently opposing perspectives of psychoanalysis and neurophysiology merged.

The Mental Health Ecosystem: Extending Symptom Networks With Risk and Protective Factors.

Inspired by modeling approaches from the ecosystems literature, in this paper, we expand the network approach to psychopathology with risk and protective factors to arrive at an integrated analysis of resilience. We take a complexity approach to investigate the multifactorial nature of resilience and present a system in which a network of interacting psychiatric symptoms is targeted by risk and protective factors. These risk and protective factors influence symptom development patterns and thereby increase or decrease the probability that the symptom network is pulled toward a healthy or disorder state.

Affluence boosted intelligence? How the interaction between cognition and environment may have produced an eighteenth-century Flynn effect during the Industrial Revolution.

Cognition played a pivotal role in the acceleration of technological innovation during the Industrial Revolution. Growing affluence may have provided favourable environmental conditions for a boost in cognition, enabling individuals to tackle more complex (industrial) problems. Dynamical systems thinking may provide useful tools to describe sudden transitions like the Industrial Revolution, by modelling the recursive feedback between psychology and environment.