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The Evidence for the Pharmaceutical Strengthening of Attachment: What, Precisely, Would Love Drugs Enhance?

In recent decades, scientists have begun to identify the brain processes and neurochemicals associated with the different stages of love, including the all-important stage of attachment. Experimental findings—readily seized upon by those bioethicists who want to urge that we sometimes have good reas...

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Autor principal: Herissone-Kelly, Peter N.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Cambridge University Press 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9672932/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36398517
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0963180122000196
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author Herissone-Kelly, Peter N.
author_facet Herissone-Kelly, Peter N.
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description In recent decades, scientists have begun to identify the brain processes and neurochemicals associated with the different stages of love, including the all-important stage of attachment. Experimental findings—readily seized upon by those bioethicists who want to urge that we sometimes have good reason pharmaceutically to enhance flagging relationships—are presented as demonstrating that attachment is regulated and strengthened by the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin. I shall argue, however, that often what the experimental data in fact show is only that exogenous administration of such chemicals can control and intensify the trappings of attachment, not attachment itself. That this is sometimes overlooked by both scientists and ethicists, is due to attachment being miscategorised as a set of feelings or a drive, rather than as a disposition to think about, feel toward, and behave toward its object in certain distinctive ways.
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spelling pubmed-96729322022-11-29 The Evidence for the Pharmaceutical Strengthening of Attachment: What, Precisely, Would Love Drugs Enhance? Herissone-Kelly, Peter N. Camb Q Healthc Ethics Research Article In recent decades, scientists have begun to identify the brain processes and neurochemicals associated with the different stages of love, including the all-important stage of attachment. Experimental findings—readily seized upon by those bioethicists who want to urge that we sometimes have good reason pharmaceutically to enhance flagging relationships—are presented as demonstrating that attachment is regulated and strengthened by the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin. I shall argue, however, that often what the experimental data in fact show is only that exogenous administration of such chemicals can control and intensify the trappings of attachment, not attachment itself. That this is sometimes overlooked by both scientists and ethicists, is due to attachment being miscategorised as a set of feelings or a drive, rather than as a disposition to think about, feel toward, and behave toward its object in certain distinctive ways. Cambridge University Press 2022-10 /pmc/articles/PMC9672932/ /pubmed/36398517 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0963180122000196 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Herissone-Kelly, Peter N.
The Evidence for the Pharmaceutical Strengthening of Attachment: What, Precisely, Would Love Drugs Enhance?
title The Evidence for the Pharmaceutical Strengthening of Attachment: What, Precisely, Would Love Drugs Enhance?
title_full The Evidence for the Pharmaceutical Strengthening of Attachment: What, Precisely, Would Love Drugs Enhance?
title_fullStr The Evidence for the Pharmaceutical Strengthening of Attachment: What, Precisely, Would Love Drugs Enhance?
title_full_unstemmed The Evidence for the Pharmaceutical Strengthening of Attachment: What, Precisely, Would Love Drugs Enhance?
title_short The Evidence for the Pharmaceutical Strengthening of Attachment: What, Precisely, Would Love Drugs Enhance?
title_sort evidence for the pharmaceutical strengthening of attachment: what, precisely, would love drugs enhance?
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9672932/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36398517
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0963180122000196
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