Academic literature on the topic 'Selye, Hans, 1907-'

More than eighty years after Hans Selye (1907–1982) first developed a concept describing how different types of environmental stressors affect physiological functions and promote disease development (called the “general adaptation syndrome”) in 1936, we herein review advances in theoretical, mechanistic, and clinical knowledge in stress research, especially in the area of gastroenterology, and summarize progress and future perspectives arising from an interdisciplinary psychoneurobiological framework in which genetics, epigenetics, and other advanced (omics) technologies in the last decade continue to refine knowledge about how stress affects the brain-gut axis in health and gastrointestinal disease. We demonstrate that neurobiological stress research continues to be a driving force for scientific progress in gastroenterology and related clinical areas, inspiring translational research from animal models to clinical applications, while highlighting some areas that remain incompletely understood, such as the roles of sex/gender and gut microbiota in health and disease. Future directions of research should include not only the genetics of the stress response and resilience but also epigenetic contributions.

Temperament is a complex behavioral trait that describes characteristic patterns of response to environmental, particularly social, conditions and perturbations. Disparities in the tendency to approach or avoid novelty or readiness to engage in aggressive interactions have been documented in comparisons between species (Christian 1970), subspecies (Gonzalez et al. 1981), populations within species (Champoux et al. 1994), inbred lines of laboratory animals (Scott and Fuller 1965), domesticated versus wild populations (Price 1984), and individuals within a species (Benus et al. 1992). Differences in physiological stress response systems (Selye 1937) are commonly identified as an important proximate mechanism underlying these temperament differences (Huntingford and Turner 1987, Kagan et al. 1988). Social systems of animals are perceived as emerging from relationships between individuals (Hinde 1983). Individual interactions, in turn, are hypothesized to reflect individual behavioral strategies which maximize inclusive fitness (Silk 1987). Selection on a physiological system, which can dramatically affect the pattern and outcomes of individual interactions, could produce evolutionary change in social organization and social behavior. Many workers explicitly suggest that temperament differences among primate species are adaptive in many instances, yet admit that the specific ecological and social selection pressures to which the neuroendocrine system is responding are often unclear (Thierry 1985, Clarke et al. 1988, Richard et al. 1989). Species-level comparisons have not offered many testable comparative models, probably because of confounding effects such as large phylogentic distances or uncertain phylogeny, inadequate knowledge of ecological and social conditions in the wild, drift, and convergent evolution. In short, little progress has been made toward understanding the evolution of stress-response patterns in primates. In this chapter I suggest that comparisons of geographically and genetically separated primate populations or subspecies may be an alternative and more successful approach to addressing the evolution of stress responses and the disparate social behaviors that result. Population and geographic comparisons are likely to be profitable for three reasons: (1) comparisons are less likely to be confounded by phylogenetic disparities (Arnold 1992), (2) the factors imposing different selective regimes among localities can perhaps be more readily identified, (3) hypothesis testing may be facilitated because populations suitable for testing a model will be easier to identify than new species.