ABSTRACT
Studies of the ways in which biological processes regulate behaviour are crossdisciplinary: they draw extensively from developments in physiology, neuroanatomy, genetics and pharmacology, as well as from developments in psychology. Because of this cross-disciplinary nature, psychobiology encompasses a large and diverse range of research activities. However, common to most of these activities is a focus on the nervous system as the primary biological structure of interest. Of course, the nervous system presents a major challenge to our understanding; to compound this challenge, behaviour is also a notoriously difficult process to characterize and analyse, even in its outwardly most simple forms. These problems of diversity and complexity have encouraged a degree of specialization which makes it impossible to present a short overview covering all of today’s most active areas of research; consequently, the present review is very selective. There is no single unifying theory or approach to psychobiology, so the main focus here will be on the methods used by psychobiologists to address a variety of research questions. However, before describing current methods and their applications in selected areas, some basic background material is necessary.
