What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [135]
For a recent review of antidepressant side effects generally, see G. Beaumont, “Adverse Effects of Antidepressants,” International Clinical Psychopharmacology 5 (1990): 61–66, and S. Preskorn and G. Jerkovich, “Central Nervous System Toxicity of Tricyclic Antidepressants: Phenomenology, Course, Risk Factors, and the Role of Drug Monitoring,” Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology 10 (1990): 88–95.
The jury is still out on both the safety and the relative effectiveness of Prozac.
13. P. Tyrer, S. Murphy, D. Kingdon, et al., “The Nottingham Study of Neurotic Disorder: Comparison of Drug and Psychological Treatment,” Lancet, 30 July 1988, 235–40, contends that the anti-anxiety drugs are clinically useless for neurotic disorders. A useful general review of rate of effectiveness is in Spiegel, Psychopharmacology, 15–19, 25–29.
14. J. Roache, “Addiction Potential of Benzodiazepines and Non-Benzodiazepine Anxiolytics,” in Advances in Alcohol and Substance Abuse 9 (1990): 103–28, provides a balanced view. For an alarmist view, see S. Olivieri, T. Cantopher, and J. Edwards, “Two Hundred Years of Anxiolytic Drug Dependence,” Neuropharmacology 25 (1986): 669–70. For a more complacent view of the safety of anti-anxiety drugs, see A. Nagy, “Possible Reasons for a Negative Attitude to Benzodiazepines as Antianxiety Drugs,” Nordisk Psykiatrisk Tidsskrift 4 (1987): 27–30. My best guess is that taken regularly, the anti-anxiety drugs tend to become impotent and addictive.
J. Tinklenberg, “Anti-Anxiety Medications and the Treatment of Anxiety,” in Barchas et al., Psychopharmacology, 226–42, provides useful descriptive data.
15. For a recent upbeat review of lithium and its side effects, see J. Jefferson, “Lithium: The Present and the Future,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 5 (1990): 4–8. Lithium is being used more and more on unipolar depression as well as on manic-depression. The data are suggestive, but the side effects are still definitely a danger.
16. K. Dodge, J. Bates, and G. Pettit, “Mechanisms in the Cycle of Violence,” Science 250 (1990): 1678–83, is a “politically correct” article notable for the completeness of its environmental theorizing on the cycle of abuse, and its complete absence of genetic theorizing.
17. D. Buss, “Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypotheses Tested in 37 Cultures,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1989): 1–49, discusses cogently the evolution of sexual attractiveness. See especially the quoted comment within by N. Thorn-hill on the evolution of feminine beauty. See also D. Buss, “Evolutionary Personality Psychology,” Annual Review of Psychology 42 (1991): 439–91, for related theorizing.
18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations (London: Blackwell, 1953), paragraphs 77–83, sets the stage for this argument by showing that nouns in ordinary language have no necessary feature that defines them. Rather, nouns like games consist of a family resemblance of overlapping elements. Inasmuch as evolution selects traits like beauty, intelligence, and motor coordination, which have no necessary defining feature, the problem of finding their underlying genetic structure will be identical to the problem of finding a necessary condition defining a word. To say that these traits are polygenic (determined by many genes) is to miss the point.
On my analysis, then, these traits are not interestingly genetic—the combination of genes that underlie them is too large and overlapping. But they are heritable, nonetheless.
19. One quibble concerning personality traits in identical twins reared apart rises from selective placement by adoption agencies. When identical twins are separated and put up for adoption, agencies might place them similarly. So the offspring of religious parents might go to religious homes, and the offspring of rich parents to