Perceived Access to Self-Relevant Information Mediates Judgments of Privacy Violations in Neuromonitoring and Other Monitoring Technologies

Advances in technology are bringing greater insight into the mind, raising a host of privacy concerns. However, the basic psychological mechanisms underlying the perception of privacy violations are poorly understood. Here, we explore the relation between the perception of privacy violations and access to information related to one’s “self.” In two studies using demographically diverse samples, we find that privacy violations resulting from various monitoring technologies are mediated by the extent to which the monitoring is thought to provide access to self-relevant information, and generally neuromonitoring did not rate among the more invasive monitoring types. However, brain monitoring was judged to be more of a privacy violation when described as providing access to self-relevant information than when no such access was possible, and control participants did not judge the invasiveness of neuromonitoring any differently than those told it provided no access to self-relevant information

Explanatory Pluralism in Psychiatry: What Are We Pluralists About, and Why?

Progress in molecular-genetic, neurological, epidemiological, psychological, and socio-economic inquiries into psychiatric diseases – to mention but some of the fields involved – is flanked by burgeoning philosophical reflections on mental disorders and on psychiatry as a discipline. The multifactorial and multilevel nature of these pathologies, the problematic mind-brain relation, nosologic, diagnostic and therapeutic issues all demand conceptual and methodological clarification. In recent years, pluralistic stances have been put forward both from the philosophy of science and philosophy of psychiatry perspective and from that of psychiatry itself in the elaboration of models of diseases and their explanation. Starting from a close look at some recent works on the ways in which psychiatrists actually deal with mental disorders, this contribution aims to shed some light on what explanatory pluralism endorsed in psychiatry can amount to, what motivates it and what implications it can have