Psychological effects concepts

Darwin was a pluralist. He was very careful to state that natural selection is not the only motor of evolutionary change. He invented the concept of sexual selection, the only addition to natural selection which evolutionary psychology theorists are prepared to include in their pantheon. We need not be Lamarckian to accept that other processes are at work. The existence of neutral mutations, founder effects, genetic drift, exaptations and adoptations (Dover, 2000) all enrich the picture. 

To validate the disease status of mental illness, psychiatrists resort to three overlapping claims, interpretations, or, perhaps most precisely, strategies. They are. (1) Mental illnesses are brain diseases. (2) Mental illnesses are real diseases, manifested by abnormal behaviors. (3) The term disease identifies the physician s perception of the patient s ailment, whereas the term illness identifies the patient s perception of it, in effect abolishing the possibility of distinguishing between sign and symptom, objective evidence of illness and subjective complaint. I shall briefly review the first and second views in this chapter, and consider the third, which pertains more to a philosophical than to a psychological analysis of the concept of disease, in the next chapter. 

Rynes, S., Weber, C., and Milkovich, G. (1989), The Effects of Market Survey Rates, Job Evaluation, and Job Gender on Job Pay, Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 1, pp. 114-123. Schwab, D. P. (1980), Job Evaluation and Pay Setting Concepts and Practices, in Comparable Worth Issues and Alternatives, E. R. Livernash, Ed., Equal Employment Advisory Council, Washington, DC. 

In general, performance measures have a more specific and diiect relation to a presumed psychological concept than physiological measures. Increases in reaction time due to an increase in task difficulty are explained in terms of an increase in processing time. Also here aspecific effects (e.g., changes in motivation, time of day, time on task, etc.) may confound this relation, although they may be controlled or corrected. 

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