Alexander Bain's Mind and Body (1872): An underappreciated contribution to early neuropsychology

Decoding defensive systems

Our understanding of the neuronal circuits and mechanisms of defensive systems has been primarily dominated by studies focusing on the contribution of individual cells in the processing of threat-predictive cues, defensive responses, the extinction of such responses and the contextual modulation of threat-related behavior. These studies have been key in establishing threat-related circuits and mechanisms. Yet, they fall short in answering long-standing questions related to the integrative processing of distinct threatening cues, behavioral states induced by threat-related events, or the bridging from sensory processing of threat-related cues to specific defensive responses. Recent conceptual and technical developments has allowed the monitoring of large populations of neurons, which in addition to advanced analytic tools, have improved our understanding of how collective neuronal activity supports threat-related behaviors. In this review, we discuss the current knowledge of neuronal population codes within threat-related networks, in the context of aversive motivated behavior and the study of defensive systems.

Creators of the Vocabulary of Anglophone Psychology and Their Relationships

The vocabulary of anglophone psychology largely developed during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The creators of this vocabulary include such well-known names as William James, Joan Riviere, E. L. Thorndike, and James Strachey. Along with others, they invented many new words and word meanings for psychology. The more a psychologist responded to the need for new vocabulary the more likely were they to be mentioned in publications. Moreover, linguistically creative psychologists occurred together in publications to a greater extent than less linguistically creative psychologists, with William James having the most co-occurrences. A network is presented that links each member of a sample of 59 linguistically creative psychologists to the other member of the sample with whom they most frequently co-occur (e.g., E. L. Thorndike co-occurs most frequently with William James). For each pair, we provide brief descriptions of their similarities and/or differences. There is also a cluster of translators who created new English words and word meanings in order to capture the meanings of words in other languages that had no satisfactory equivalents in English. Generally speaking, the more success psychologists have had in filling the lacunae in psychology’s vocabulary, the more they have been recognized by others.