Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids killed more than 17,000 Americans in 2017, marking a five-fold increase since 1999. High prescribing rates of opioid analgesics have been a substantial contributor to prescription opioid misuse, dependence, overdose and heroin use. There was recognition approximately ten years ago that opioid prescribing patterns were contributing to this startling increase in negative opioid-related outcomes, and federal actions, including Medicare reimbursement reform and regulatory actions, were initiated to restrict opioid prescribing. The current manuscript is a description (...) of those actions, the effect of those actions on opioid prescribing and related patient outcomes. We also describe our proposal of methods of expanding these efforts as an important piece to further reduce opioid-related misuse, dependence, and overdose death. (shrink)

Several disciplines share an interest in the evolutionary selection pressures that shaped human physical functioning and appearance, psyche, and behavior. The methodologies invoked from the disciplines studying these domains are often based on different rhetorics, and hence may conflict. Progress in one field is thereby hampered from effective transfer to others. Topics at the intersection of anthropometry and psychometry, such as the impact of sexual selection on the hominin face, are a typical example. Since the underlying theory explicitly places facial (...) form in the middle of a causal chain as the mediating variable between biological causes and psychological effects, a particularly convenient conceptual and analytic scenario arises as follows. Modern morphometrics allows analysis of shape both “backwards” and “forwards” . The two computations are commensurate, hence the two kinds of effects can be compared and evaluated as directions in the same morphospace. We suggest translating the morphometric methodology of “Darwinian aesthetics” into this space, where psychological and other processes of interest can be coded commensurately. Such a translation permits researchers to relate the effects of biological processes on form to the perceptions of the same processes in one unified “psychomorphospace.”. (shrink)

The notion of love in Freud’s work and in lacan’s work is explored here in a preliminary fashion, and their many different attempts to discuss love are compared and contrasted. Concepts such as libido, narcissism, anaclisis, the ego-ideal, the ideal ego, ego-libido, object-libido, and the imaginary are brought to bear on Freud’s rather “obsessive” theory of love, and Lacan’s views of passion in his early work are given special attention.

The 8th volume in this edition contains the works written by Benjamin Constant between March 1813 and April 1814. The texts are different in nature. Alongside a work of fiction, »Florestan or the Siege of Soissons«, the reader will find »The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation«, various propagandistic writings penned in the service of the Prince-Royal of Sweden, and finally »Reflections on Constitutions and Guarantees«, a work of political theory. All these texts are precursors of the works from the period (...) of the First Restoration and the Cent-Jours assembled in Volume 9, so that these two volumes are closely interrelated. (shrink)