Editorial: The Evolution of Interdisciplinary Research on Human Behavior, Brain, and Body

Abstract

The scientific study of human behavior has traditionally been the subject of many different disciplines such as anthropology, biology, economics, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology. For a long time, researchers within each of these disciplines worked in isolation from others, such that each discipline had its own set of theories, methods, results, and explanations. Although conceptual and methodological boundaries between disciplines still exist, more behavioral scientists working in the 21st century are crossing these boundaries than ever before. Psychologists and biologists have been particularly active in establishing interdisciplinary bridges, but this has occurred only in recent history. In the early decades of the 20th century, there was only one main bridge connecting the study of human behavior in psychology and biology, although this bridge had two different names, depending on the direction in which it was crossed. Psychologists called it biological psychology, or biopsychology, while in biology it was known as psychobiology. But in the last 50 years, biopsychology has evolved and diversified into a number of new neuroscience subdisciplines (behavioral, social, affective, cognitive, and cultural neuroscience, among others), while psychobiology has hybridized with other branches of biology and produced even more subdisciplines such as psychophysiology, psychoneuroendocrinology, psychoimmunology, and behavioral genetics. Among the latest arrivals in this evolutionary process of discipline “speciation” are subdisciplines focusing on the biological substrates of social relationships such as social neuroscience and social neuroendocrinology, reflecting a historical shift in interest in the human behavioral sciences, from the study of learning in the laboratory to that of social processes in the real world. Although psychology and biology have led the way in the evolution of interdisciplinary studies of human behavior, this process has also involved other behavioral disciplines such as anthropology, economics, and psychiatry giving rise to new subdisciplines such as neuroanthropology, human biology and ecoimmunology, neuroeconomics, and biological psychiatry. As is the case of subdisciplines in psychology and biology, the range of action of these disciplines is not limited to behavior, but Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology (2015) 1:1–3 DOI 10.1007/s40750-014-0001-5