This study compared the behavioral effects of 3 anticonvulsants in impulsive aggressive men. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel groups design, participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 6-week treatments: phenytoin (n = 7), carbamazepine (n = 7), valproate (n = 7), or placebo (n = 8). The efficacy measure was the average aggression score, a global severity index from the Overt Aggression Scale (J. M. Silver & S. C. Yudofsky, 1991). Analysis showed a significant reduction in impulsive aggression during all 3 anticonvulsant conditions compared with placebo. However, the treatment effect during carbamazepine administration was slightly delayed compared with phenytoin and valproate. These findings suggest that increased use of anticonvulsants could make a significant impact in the control of impulsive aggression in both mental health and criminal justice settings.
For some years now Professor Clark Hull has been instructing psychologists, by both precept and example, in logic and scientific method. He would doubtless be gratified at such concrete illustration of the effectiveness of his teaching as an attempt to apply it to his own doctrine. One can only applaud when he urges that a system of scientific theories be internally consistent, that it constitute a deductive system with the minimum necessary number of assumptions and that specific implications of (deductions from) these postulates be checked by empirical fact. Competent psychological theorists-and there are some-have always practiced these things. The burden of his complaint about current theories would hence appear to refer to their want of attention to his other requirements, namely, clarity and explicitness in definitions and postulates. For examples of these virtues he refers us to Newton or, in case we "may not be overly familiar with the technical details of classical mathematical physics," to Euclid. This is good counsel indeed. If, as history seems to indicate, the several sciences are going in the direction of deductive systems (some would say, even, a deductive system), it behooves us to look at geometry, the deductive system par excellence. The geometers have had ample time-two thousand years-and practice aplenty in handling such systems and we may well learn from them. It might be noted in passing that it took the geometers their 2,000 years to make the definitions and postulates of Euclidean geometry explicit, in the sense of leaving as little as possible undefined, and they are not satisfied yet: this in a system that is purely deductive, in which the selection of postulates is wholly arbitrary and which is not required at any point to check with
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