Robert Ader was born on February 20, 1932, in the Bronx, New York, and died at the age of 79 years on December 20, 2011, in Pittsford, NY. Robert (Bob) Ader had an extraordinary impact on the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and psychosomatic medicine in general and psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) in particular. In his 1980 presidential address to the American Psychosomatic Society (1), Bob first ...

Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) emerged in the neurosciences in the late 1970s to early 1980s and has extended to influence the fields of psychology, psychiatry, endocrinology, physiology, and the biomedical research community. This review documents the journey of PNI from the early 1980s to the present. Today, we recognize that the highly complex immune system interacts with an equally complex ner...

BACKGROUND Poor sleep is prospectively linked to all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. Inflammatory processes may be an important biological mechanism linking poor sleep to cardiovascular disease. Such processes involve active participation of signaling molecules called cytokines in development of atherosclerotic plaques. PURPOSE I review evidence from experimental sleep deprivation and cli...

A number of researchers have documented an association between depression and immunological dysregulation (1, 2). Extending this line of work, Jung and Irwin (3) reported a provocative and potentially important finding: Major depression interacted with cigarette smoking to promote lower natural killer (NK) cell activity. Among 245 men, NK cell activity was similar in nondepressed smokers and no...

Sleep has a critical role in promoting health. Research over the past decade has documented that sleep disturbance has a powerful influence on the risk of infectious disease, the occurrence and progression of several major medical illnesses including cardiovascular disease and cancer, and the incidence of depression. Increasingly, the field has focused on identifying the biological mechanisms u...

It is well established in vertebrates that there are many intricate interactions between the immune system and the nervous system. Here, we present behavioural evidence indicating a link between the immune system and the nervous system in insects. We show that otherwise non-infected bumblebees whose immune systems were challenged by a non-pathogenic immunogenic elicitor (lipopolysaccharide) hav...

The field of psychoneuroimmunology has witnessed an explosion of empirical findings during the last two decades. Research has documented the mechanisms through which stressful emotions alter white blood cell function. Stress diminishes white blood cell response to viral infected cells and to cancer cells. Moreover, vaccination is less effective in those who are stressed and wounds heal less rea...

The study of immunity has become an important area of investigation for researchers in a wide range of areas outside the traditional discipline of immunology. For the last several decades, psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) has strived to identify key interactions among the nervous, endocrine and immune systems and behavior. More recently, the field of ecological immunology (ecoimmunology) has been es...

This chapter presents some key concepts relevant to an understanding of psychobiological and psychosocial processes in health and illness. Although the focus of this book is on psychobiological processes, the two are very closely related, so it is important to acknowledge the role of psychosocial processes before proceeding further. The biopsychosocial model of health is introduced and contrast...