The advent of new imaging techniques is broadening our understanding of the major psychiatric illnesses. The increased knowledge of brain function will have consequences for the expert medical witness who has to give evidence in court. Both the insanity defence and the defence of automatism depend on disorders of the mind. Psychiatry is now able in many cases to produce evidence that these are ...

had considerable experience of " shell-shock" in the war, and included eminent neurologists. They heard evidence from a number of distinguished men, representing opinion on the military, medical and legal aspect of the subject, and also from officers and men who had suffered from " shell-shock." They have made a lengthy and exhaustive report which must long remain the authoritative work on the ...

How did egalitarianism emerge in early human societies? In contrast to dominance hierarchies in non-human primates, human simple forager bands are typically egalitarian, with male hunters often serving as the collective alpha. Here we present a thermodynamics-inspired simple population model, based on stochastic optimization of dominance relationships, in which a dominance hierarchy of individu...

The article discusses and analyzes data from several economic experiments in a household sur-vey with mothers of preschool children. The researchers measured competitiveness by giving the subjects the choice between competing in a tournament or receiving a piece rate for a real effort task. The subjects also participated in lottery choices, which enabled the researchers to assess their risk pre...

A group of agents is collectively engaged in a joint productive activity. Each agent supplies an observable input, and output is then collectively shared among the members. A Bergson Samuelson welfare function defined on individual utilities describes the social values of the agents. However, individual actions are taken on a selfish basis. The collective decision cannot be precommitted, and is...

The author highlights the importance of emotions in all ethical reflections. He describes the most common positions of ethicists employing duties and rights as the basis for ethical thought. The author, goes to Freudian theory as viewed by the utilitarians, stating that the 'quest for pleasure' is not necessarily egocentric, especially for adults. For example, the feeling of solidarity emerges ...