This study of the modern film version of "Phantom of the Opera" employs a mythic theme to illustrate how women can involve themselves with charismatic and eroticized narcissistic men, who are unavailable for true relationship within the conscious world of societal connection. How can the healthy-heroic woman extricate herself from the seductive web of such men, men who seek to own the women--no...

One variety of love is familiar in everyday life and qualifies in every reasonable sense as a reactive attitude. ‘Reactive love’ is paradigmatically (a) an affectionate attachment to another person, (b) appropriately felt as a non-self-interested response to particular kinds of morally laudable features of character expressed by the loved one in interaction with the lover, and (c) paradigmatica...

Adaptive systems are able to modify their behaviors to respond to significant changes at run time such as component failures. In many cases, run-time adaptation is simply replacing a piece of system with a new one without interrupting the system operation. In terms of component-based systems, an adaptation may be defined as replacing a system component with a new version at run time. However, u...

In contrast to earlier concepts, it seems that distinct ligands acting on the same receptor may elicit qualitative different response patterns, a phenomenon given many names, including "functional selectivity," "agonist-directed trafficking," "biased agonism," "protean agonism," or "ligand-directed signaling." In this issue of Molecular Pharmacology, Sato et al. (p. 1359) extend this concept to...

This article considers Richard Rolle's use of erotic imagery and romantic metaphor in his popular fourteenth-century devotional manual, The Form of Living. The Form engaged a widespread community of readers through the glorification of desire and pleasure, which were sanctified by merit of Christ, the lover that Rolle encouraged his readers to woo. While the use of language in the text is inclu...