Cognitive Neuroscience and Depression: Legitimate Versus Illegitimate Reductionism and Five Challenges

Abstract

The provocative articles in this Special Issue underscore the potential of cognitive neuroscience to achieve fruitful integration across diverging levels of analysis. After a discussion of different forms of reductionism and the pragmatic, ideological, and cognitive obstacles standing in the way of achieving integrative explanatory pluralism, I outline five challenges to applying cognitive neuroscience to the study of depression and allied conditions: (1) comorbidity, (2) etiological heterogeneity, (3) ambiguity concerning causal primacy, (4) distinguishing state from trait markers, and (5) distinguishing specific from nonspecific treatment effects. Greater attention to these challenges should assist in bringing about consilience in the conceptualization of depression.

The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC): An analysis of methodological and conceptual challenges

“…There is extensive cooccurrence and, even more troublingly, covariation, among many putatively separable psychological conditions, suggesting that these conditions are often slightly different variants of shared etiological processes (Cramer, Waldrop, van der Maas, & Borsboom, 2010;Vaidyanathan, Patrick, & Iacono, 2011). For many DSM disorders, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; Brady, Killeen, Brewerton, & Lucerini, 2000), childhood externalizing and internalizing disorders, and all personality disorders (Grove & Tellegen, 1991), comorbidity e in the sense of co-occurrence e is the rule rather than the exception, with the substantial majority of individuals with a given condition meeting criteria for one or more additional conditions (Lilienfeld, 2007). In an especially extreme case, one patient in a published study met diagnostic criteria for all ten DSM personality disorders (Widiger et al, 1998).…”

“…For RDoC to succeed, it will need to proceed with humility and with full recognition of the hard-won lessons of the past. From the vantagepoint of this essay, the four most valuable caveats to bear in mind moving forward are that (a) the biological level of analysis, although essential, will not be sufficient to understand psychopathology (Ilardi, Rand, & Karwoski, 2007;Lilienfeld, 2007;Miller, 2010), (b) the level of analysis of constructs (e.g., biological) should not be confused with the level of analysis of indicators of these constructs, (c) the psychometric properties of biological and other laboratory indicators must be demonstrated empirically, not merely presumed, and (d) a system of biological predispositions toward psychopathology is not a classification system of psychopathology, although it can inform such a system. If, but only if, RDoC absorbs the valuable insights imparted by decades of research in psychometric, social, personality, cultural, and developmental psychology, it may begin to deliver on its ambitious promises.…”

Moving Psychopathology Forward

“…That is, one can provide psychotherapy and show that it alters biology, and one can give medication and observe a reduction in (psychological) symptoms, but there is not a single case of a fully-worked-out mechanism for how such an effect occurs. As noted above and argued elsewhere (Lilienfeld, 2007; Miller, 1996, 2010; Miller & Keller, 2000), the reductionist assumption pervasive in recent decades is not viable. New thinking is needed to understand the relationship between biological and psychological phenomena.…”

Singing the Brain Disease Blues

“…The brain disease model implies erroneously that the brain is necessarily the most important and useful level of analysis for understanding and treating addiction. Like Buchman and colleagues, we believe that it is far more productive to view addiction as a behavior that operates on several levels, ranging from molecular function and structure to brain physiology to psychology to psychosocial environment and social relations (see also Kendler 2005;Lilienfeld 2007). The lower levels of explanation, particularly the brain, are merely among them-and not necessarily the most informative for practical purposes.…”