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...

Studies of PTSD employing symptom provocation have seldom included self-report measures of the symptoms provoked. Doing so could benefit psychobiological research by improving diagnostic discrimination and capturing the heterogeneity of responses to scriptdriven imagery, and treatment research by complementing existing outcome measures. This paper describes the initial development and psychomet...

OBJECTIVE Most research on the effects of severe psychological stress has focused on stress-related psychopathology. Here, the author develops psychobiological models of resilience to extreme stress. METHOD An integrative model of resilience and vulnerability that encompasses the neurochemical response patterns to acute stress and the neural mechanisms mediating reward, fear conditioning and ...

Several studies have reported an association between deviant behaviour and cortisol reactivity to stress. However, relatively few studies have investigated the relationship between psychobiological stress reactivity and sexual risk-taking behaviours. In this study, cortisol reactivity to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) was measured in 26 healthy young adults prior to the administration of a...

Our program of research focuses on shame as a key emotional response to "social self" threats (i.e., social evaluation or rejection). We propose that shame may orchestrate specific patterns of psychobiological changes under these conditions. A series of studies demonstrates that acute threats to the social self increase proinflammatory cytokine activity and cortisol and that these changes occur...

Diagnosis and treatment of children affected by disruptions of attachment (out of home placement, multiple changes of primary caregiver) is an area of considerable controversy. The possible contribution of psychobiological theories is discussed in three parts. The first part relates the attachment theoretical perspective to major psychobiological theories on the developmental associations of pa...

This study investigates the psychobiological impact of psychoanalysis in its four-hour setting. During a period of five weeks, 20 subsequent hours of psychoanalysis were evaluated, involving two patients and their analysts. Before and after each session, saliva samples were taken and analysed for cortisol (sCortisol) and secretory immunoglobuline A (sIgA). Four time-series (n=80 observations) r...

Self-portraits are more likely to show the artist's right than left cheek. This phenomenon may have a psychobiological basis: Self-portraitists often copy their subject from mirrors and, if they prefer to present their left cheek (more expressive due to right-lateralization of emotions) to the mirror, this would result in a right-cheek bias in the painting. We tested this hypothesis using Selfi...

Arguments are presented that paintings are unable to induce basic psychobiological emotions because they do not powerfully engage with spectators’ intimate associativememory systems. However, it is suggested that art installations containing properties subsumable under the classical concept of the sublime (physical grandeur, rarity, novelty, an association with beauty and with biologically sign...