NBS Senior Seminar

I. Introduction

In our diverse society, it is necessary to understand that the same treatments may not work for everyone. For diseases that are thought to be caused by differences in brain chemistry, the variety in brain chemistry (as well as the variety in what is felt as "normal" or "baseline") means that certain treatments may not work in the same ways for everyone. Currently the medical community seeks to treat depression and obsessive compulsive disorder in two main ways: psychoactive drugs or cognitive behavioral therapy. However, both of these treatments are not fully understood, nor their efficacy verified.

The ethics of using animals to do research is a hot-button topic that just doesn’t seem to have a right answer (or even a wrong one). Ask two people what they think, and you’re likely to get at least three answers—few are staunchly sure of where they stand on the issue. Animal testing and their use in research is not a new phenomenon; in fact, it can be traced all the way back to the writings of the Greeks in the third and fourth centuries BCE, in the works of Aristotle and Erasistratus (they were among the first to perform vivisections).

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder characterized by persistent, intrusive thoughts or impulses (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors (compulsions) (1).  Obsessions generally revolve around a central theme, the most common of which are contamination, symmetry and order, and safety and harm (2).  Compulsions are thought to arise as a mechanism for reducing the anxiety produced by unwanted obsessions.  Every time a compulsive behavior is performed, anxiety decreases, and the behavior is negatively reinforced, increasing the likelihood of a person performing the ritualistic behavior again.

Background

Though pain is traditionally thought of as the bodily awareness to harmful or noxious stimuli, the subject of pain has far more depth than one might initially believe. The issues surrounding pain, pain philosophy, and pain management are far-reaching and are replete with ethical and moral conundrums.

By its very nature, love is an irrational and capricious emotion. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines love twelve different ways (thirteen if you count the tennis term), and there have been countless attempts made by poets, musicians, philosophers, and literary figures to distill and define the essence of this powerful emotion. At first thought, love appears to be too complex and ambiguous to define in a scientific manner. As Professor Le mentioned, social scientists do not attempt to operationalize complex emotions like love in their entirety. For example, by demonstrating love-directed behavior in one instance is a study able to be generalized to other

                       

While accounts of both phantom limb awareness and pain have been reported for over 500 years (1), only in recent decades have patients reporting such sensations of missing limbs not been classified as pathological. In fact, recent studies report 60-80% incidence rate of PLP, whereas in the middle of the 20th century, reported PLP cases were as low as 4% (3). Rather, modernized technologies and advancements in the field of neuroscience have revealed evidence indicating that the mechanisms involved in such sensations are actually responsive and adaptive (2), perhaps accounting for the increased rate