Context Informed consent is crucial in daily clinical practice and research in medicine and psychiatry. A recent neuroethical investigation explored the psychological factors that are crucial in determining whether or not subjects give consent. While cognitive functions have been shown to play a central role, the impact of empathy and emotions on subjects' decisions in informed consent remains unclear. Objective To evaluate the impact of empathy and emotions on subjects' decision in informed consent in an exploratory study. Design Decisional capacity (...) and informed consent to a subsequent imaging study were evaluated with the MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool for Clinical Research (MacCAT-CR). Empathy and emotion recognition were measured with the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET) and the Florida Affect Battery (FAB). Setting Psychiatric subjects were recruited from a general psychiatric hospital and a forensic state hospital. Patients A mixed group of 98 healthy men and forensic and non-forensic psychiatric subjects were investigated. Results Both empathy (MET) and emotion recognition (FAB) correlated with MacCAT-CR scores. Higher cognitive empathy and good emotion recognition (compared with low empathy and emotion recognition) were associated with increased decisional capacity and higher rates of refusal to give informed consent. Conclusions This study shows an empirical relationship between decision-making and informed consent, on the one hand, and emotions and empathy on the other. While this study is exploratory and preliminary, the findings of a relationship between informed consent, emotions and empathy raise important neuroethical questions with regard to an emotional-social concept of informed consent and potential clinical implications for testing informed consent. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe publication of Johannes Kepler's brilliant and revolutionary Astronomia nova has hitherto been viewed as somehow inevitable. This paper argues that, on the contrary, the book's very existence and a measure of its unusual form and content are in fact highly contingent, and derive from a legal dispute between Kepler and Tycho's heirs over the right to capitalize on his astronomical legacy. On Tycho's death, Kepler rather accidentally found himself in charge of Tycho's posthumous astronomical publications, especially the highly (...) prestigious Rudol phine Tables. Tycho's legal heirs, not having been paid by the emperor for Tycho's astronomical assets and feigning Kepler's unworthiness as his successor, wrested this mandate back. Ordered in turn to justify his employment, Kepler contrived the Astronomia nova as an interim announcement of the fruits of his astronomical research. In an effort to block Kepler's continuing exploitation of Tycho's observations, the heirs obtained the legal right to censor his publications, which severely threatened his philosophical freedom. The threat of editorial interference was responsible in part for Astronomia nova's unusual narrative form. (shrink)