The idea that what is intrinsically good for people must be something they want or care about is a compelling one. Goal-fulfillment theories of well-being, which make this idea their central tenet, have a lot going for them. They offer a good explanation of why we tend to be motivated to pursue what’s good for us, and they seem to best explain how well-being is especially related to individual subjects. Yet such theories have been under attack recently for not being (...) able to account for robust or basic bads, such as pain and nausea. This paper argues that a psychologically informed goal-fulfillment theory can accommodate intuitions about robust bads by relying on aversions. Attending to aversion highlights a different sort of problem for goal-fulfillment theories, which comes from the possibility of a person who is so depressed that they have no goals or desires at all. We end the paper with a discussion of how empirically informed goal-fulfillment theories can account for the badness of the most serious form of depression. (shrink)

Dreams represent threat, but appear to do so metaphorically more often than realistically. The metaphoric representation of threat allows it to be conceptualized in a manner that is constant across situations (as what is common to all threats begins to be understood and portrayed). This also means that response to threat can come to be represented in some way that works across situations. Conscious access to dream imagery, and subsequent social communication of that imagery, can facilitate this generalized adaptive process, (...) by allowing the communicative dreamer access to the problem solving resources of the community. [Revonsuo; Solms]. (shrink)

Charney's dismissal of well-established methods in behavioral genetic research is misguided. He claims that studies of heritability and genetic association depend for their validity on six assumptions, but he cites no sources to support this claim. We explain why none of the six assumptions is strictly necessary for the utility of either method of genetic analysis.

Cramer et al. articulate a novel perspective on comorbidity. However, their network models must be compared with more parsimonious latent variable models before conclusions can be drawn about network models as plausible accounts of comorbidity. Latent variable models have proven generative in studying psychopathology and its external correlates, and we doubt network models will prove as useful for psychopathology research.