Department of Pharmacology, Cornell University Medical CollegeThis survey illustrates the interdisciplinary nature of psychopharmacologic research. In order to conduct meaningful psychopharmacologic inquiry, a variety of different conceptual and methodic frames of reference must be drawn upon. Lehmann 208 effectively emphasized the eclectic nature of experimental design in psychopharmacology-a design that must critically employ appropriate controls and statistical validation, that must do justice to biochemical, neurophysiologic, and behavioral mechanisms of drug action, that must be sensitive to the dynamics of personality functions, and that must respect the fundamentals of dose and time parameters of drug action. These, then, are the ingredients out of which experience and imagination can shape effective tools to obtain conclusive answers to speCific and meaningful questions on drug effects or normal and pathologic behavior and personality functions.
In the beginning was the hypothesisOn the basis of certain, mostly biochemical, key events, three different hypotheses of normal and abnormal behavior have been put forward in the past. While the validity of these hypotheses did not remain uncontested, everyone of them has led to practical developments for drug treatment of pathologically depressed personality functions. In fact, most of the clinical reports on antidepressive drug actions are, in concept of study and interpretation of results, committed to one or another of these hypotheses. In general terms, these hypotheses embody the concept of neurohumoral transmission and receptor specificity in the' central nervous system. The existence of three types of receptors within the brain, related to the physiologic turnover of three types of substrates, has been inferred.'4. 96 Serotonin hypothesis. Originally, the implication of serotonin ( 5-hydroxytrypta-
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