Editorial introduction to the special issue on stress resilience

The journal Neurobiology of Stress was launched to address the needs of an expanding group of researchers investigating the neural underpinnings of the stress response, neural plasticity and adaptation as consequences of stress and the translation of these consequences to neuropsychiatric disease in humans. This growth of stress research was driven by an increased realization that exposure to adverse events is causal to many chronic debilitating neuropsychiatric diseases. The significance of stress in human disease becomes magnified when considering evidence that it bridges neurobehavioral symptoms with peripheral symptoms such as obesity, irritable bowel and immune dysfunction, resulting in the complex medical-psychiatric co-morbidities that have become prevalent in our society. In considering a topic for the inaugural issue of the journal we took note of the recurring theme in the stress neurobiology literature of individual variability in responses to stressors and their consequences. Much stress research has focused on identifying factors that render an individual vulnerable to the negative consequences of stressor exposure. The rationale is that by understanding mechanisms underlying vulnerability, susceptible individuals can be identified and vulnerability can be countered or attenuated. More recently, the concept of stress resilience has been embraced. Although inversely related to vulnerability, resilience is not simply its opposite as many examples presented in the following reviews