EXPLAINING DEPRESSION: A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF FAMILY PHYSICIANS’ AND NEUROSCIENTISTS’ ACCOUNTS OF EXPLANATORY MODELS AND THE CHEMICAL IMBALANCE HYPOTHESIS OF DEPRESSION

The etiological explanations for depression, along with the received views of the way the brain and body function, have shifted from an excess of black bile to impaired neuroplasticity and neuroimmune functions. A common biological explanation for depression is the chemical imbalance hypothesis, which posits that depression is caused by a deficiency of monoamines, particularly serotonin, in the depressed person’s brain. Many scholars have argued that the chemical imbalance hypothesis is unable to adequately explain depression and antidepressant treatment. However, while the etiological understanding of depression is complex and incomplete, the chemical imbalance hypothesis remains pervasive and persuasive among laypersons and clinicians. I begin this dissertation with an introduction to biological psychiatry and neuroscience. The dissertation includes a brief history of Western/English approaches to the diagnosis and etiology of depression, a chapter on my ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions, two manuscript-style research studies, and concludes with a general discussion. In the two studies, I demonstrate how a sample of family physicians and neuroscientists accounted for using the chemical imbalance hypothesis of depression and other explanations of depression, the persuasive rhetorical features in their arguments, and the functions achieved by these accounts. In study 1, I analyzed an interview data set with 11 family physicians. Using a discursive analytic approach, I argue that these physicians are utilizing the chemical imbalance hypothesis as a persuasive rhetorical device to motivate patients toward treatment, to attempt to minimize self-blame and stigma, to instill hope and confidence in the treatment, and to contribute generally to scientific knowledge among patients. In the discussion I provide a critique of the general assumptions upon which their arguments rely. For study 2, I interviewed 10 neuroscientists who conduct depression research. Using a discursive analytic approach, I present how a sample of neuroscientists working on a biological understanding of depression argue for and/or against the chemical imbalance hypothesis of depression. I argue that they maintain support for the chemical imbalance hypothesis through the construction of depression as a brain-based disorder and the brain as functioning through chemical transmissions, and that they argue against the chemical imbalance hypothesis by defining this hypothesis as a specific deficiency of serotonin and drawing attention to the failings and shortcomings of the hypothesis. I argue that their rhetorical construction of a distinction between a general chemical imbalance and a specific serotonin deficiency allows for the maintenance and support of the fundamental assumption that depression is a brain-based disorder, while simultaneously denying that depression is exclusively a problem with the serotonin system. I discuss alternative explanations of depression proposed by the scientists and show how they construct the serotonin hypothesis as a persuasive rhetorical device resistant to replacement. The results of studies 1 and 2 suggest that the chemical imbalance hypothesis of depression, while limited in its specific form to explain the cause of depression, has value and merit in scientific and lay discourses. In the general discussion, I summarize the arguments for and against the chemical imbalance hypothesis and suggest ways that the general chemical imbalance explanation can be augmented with additional ideas from contemporary neuroscience. I discuss the discipline of translational neuroscience, which aims to bridge the gap between science and practice, and provide commentary using extracts from the interviews. I conclude with a reflexive examination of my position

Three Essays on the Impact of Inducement Prizes on Innovation

Innovation prizes are an increasingly popular tool used by policy makers, firms, and non-governmental organizations to induce innovation. This is surprising given the paucity of systematic research to justify their use and empirical evidence of their impact. In this dissertation, I explore the relationship between inducement prizes and innovation and shed light on the impact of prizes on the rate and direction of innovation. In the first study, I explore whether inducement prizes increase the relative returns to research collaboration at the level of the individual researcher. I investigate how researchers’ participation in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge affects rates of post-prize research collaboration. Findings suggest that prize participation reduces the costs of future collaboration by incentivizing researchers to learn how to work on complex real-world problems requiring multiple domains of expertise. Increases in collaboration occur on the extensive margin (more unique coauthors) and intensive margin (more papers with existing coauthors) and persist for years after the prize, suggesting that the costs of cross-domain collaboration are fixed rather than variable. In the second study, I examine how inducement prizes influence the discovery of scientific breakthroughs. Focusing on the field of robotics research, I explore the effects of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge on the post-prize salience of a branch of robotics research used heavily by prize-participant teams compared to a control group of contemporaneous research in the same field but unrelated to the prize. I find that prize-relevant research experiences a disproportionate increase in forward citations after the conclusion of the prize and that prize participants’ use of a specific breakthrough technology known as the Kalman filter plays a key role driving the results. Findings suggest that in research fields where prizes provide objective benchmarks for the performance of competing approaches, they may influence the direction of research by resolving uncertainty and enabling the discovery of breakthrough ideas. In the final study, I examine the effects of multiple dimensions of team experience on performance in an annual aerospace engineering competition organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Findings suggest that experienced team leaders are most strongly related to performance and that experience at the leader and team member levels may be partial substitutes. Results also highlight that experience affects performance differently during the design phase compared to the execution phase of the competition.Ph.D

The Rise and Fall of the University of Toronto's Innovations Foundation: Lessons from Canadian Technology Transfer

This study explains the rise and fall of the Innovations Foundation, the University of Toronto's first office dedicated to the transfer of university-developed technologies to industry. Drawing on extensive archival research, ten interviews with key informants, and other sources, the case study traces the evolution of the Foundation from its launch in 1980 to its closure in 2006. The study delineates three distinct business models under which the Foundation operated from 1980 to 1990, 1990 to 1999, and 1999 to 2006. The reasons for the adoption and failure of each model are explored and a historically grounded, context-sensitive explanation of the university's decision to dismantle the Foundation in 2006 is provided. This explanation emphasizes the importance of managing unrealistic expectations for Canadian university technology transfer, and adds weight to a growing consensus on the importance of historical path-dependence as a conceptual tool for understanding the persistence of differentials in technology transfer performance among universities.MAS