Broadly defined psychobiology is a wide field of scientific endeavor, which bridges the artificial divide imposed by the Cartesian philosophy of things of the mind and things of the body. Starting in the early decades of the 20th century, mind-body research developed new avenues of understanding in Western science. It became increasingly clear that processes attributed to the psyche, including emotions, cognitions, memories, and personalities, had important effects upon physiological events, could disrupt homeostasis, determined and controlled allostasis, and arose, in fact, from biological phenomena driven by cell biology, biochemistry, genomics and, in a larger sense, interactomics. In brief, psychobiology reunited, at last, the sciences of psychology and physiology. Current advanced research in psychobiology proffers a new perspective on human and animal behavior, with cognitions, emotions, and traits describing the interaction between biological systems and behavior. Today, novel frontiers in psychobiology research encompass how cognition (what we are thinking) and mood (how we are feeling) combine with, determine and are engendered by biological events. The superb chapters that compose this book are written by the premier internationally and most renowned psychobiologists in the world at this time. They examine several of the most important domains of psychobiology research today: from a novel conceptualization of stress in the context of the person-environment fit model, to the modulation of immune surveillance by perceived stress, the alterations of cognition by pharmaceutical use and over-use, as well as from athletic training or ionization poisoning to, ultimately, the brain-gut interaction. The role of functional MRS in the study of advanced research questions in psychobiology is also discussed in depth. Taken together, this collection of chapters make this book on advanced psychobiology both timely and critical. Expectations are that future research development in psychobiology, as the field continues to advance, will continue to strive to understand how psychological and biological connections shape the human experience. Psychobiology will increasingly provide a uniquely new perspective in psychology on the one hand, and on the other hand, in biology along several of the dimensions proffered in this book.
Professor Chiappelli was born and raised in Western Europe. He obtained his bachelor's (1975), master's (1981) and Ph.D. degrees (1986) at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Having completed his post-doctoral training at UCLA, he obtained his first NIH 5-year grant and established his laboratory in human fundamental and clinical psychoneuroimmunology at the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration in 1992. In 1994, he was recruited by the UCLA School of Dentistry, which he has served continuously in the tenured faculty track for the last two decades. Professor Chiappelli also served as Special Assistant to the Vice-Provost for Graduate Education at UCLA. Professor Chiappelli, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Fulbright Alumnus, was conferred an honorary doctorate for his contribution to the establishment of the novel science of comparative effectiveness research in the health sciences in general, and in endodontics in particular, in 2013. Professor Chiappelli also contributes to the graduate health sciences program at the California State University, Northridge (CSUN).
