Psychopharmacology is the study of the effects of psychoactive drugs on the functioning of the central nervous system at all levels of analysis, thus embracing cognition, behavior, psychological states, neurophysiology, neurochemistry, gene expression, and molecular biology. It includes, as an integral part of its domain, the interaction of environmental and genetic factors with psychoactive drug action, the medicinal and social uses of drugs, and the misuse and abuse of psychoactive substances.
The aim of this comprehensive encyclopedia is to provide detailed information on psychopharmacology and its sub-disciplines, such as clinical psychopharmacology, molecular neuropsychopharmacology, behavioral pharmacology in laboratory animals, preclinical psychopharmacology, and human experimental psychopharmacology.
The wide-ranging entries in the Encyclopedia of Psychopharmacology are written by leading experts drawn from a broad diversity of backgrounds and areas of specialization. The entries, comprehensive but succinct, provide basic and clinical scientists in academia, as well as industry, with the most important and relevant information on recent developments in psychopharmacology and its closely allied disciplines. The essential information about the field contained in these entries is readily accessible to clinicians, scholars, students, teachers, and interested laypeople.
Ian Stolerman received the BPharm degree of the School of Pharmacy, University of London, in 1964 and a Ph.D. in Psychopharmacology at University College London in 1969. This was followed by postdoctoral experience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (New York) and the University of California, Los Angeles. He then moved to Birmingham to become a member of the Medical Research Council Neuropharmacology Unit. In 1980 he relocated to the Institute of Psychiatry, London as a member of the MRC External Scientific Staff. He headed the Institute's Section of Behavioural Pharmacology and was co-chair of the its addictions Interdisciplinary Research Group. His research included studies on nicotine and on mixtures of psychoactive drugs and was funded primarily by the UK Medical Research Council, the US National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Wellcome Trust. Ian Stolerman was a founder of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society and became its first President in 1986. He received the title Professor of Behavioural Pharmacology in 1995. From 1992 to 2005 he served as Co-Editor of the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence. He was also on the Councils of the British Association for Psychopharmacology and the Research Defence Society, was President of the International Society of Addiction Journal Editors and of the Society for Stimulus Properties of Drugs. Ian Stolerman established the Drug Discrimination Database, a unique research tool for both students and research professionals interested in the neurobiological bases of addiction, that was funded for nearly 30 years by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse. In 2008 the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, honored him with the title of Emeritus Professor of Behavioural Pharmacology. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Psychopharmacology (2010).
Lawrence Price attended the University of Michigan, where he received a B.S. with highest honors in psychology and high distinction in 1974, followed by an M.D. in 1978. After an internship in internal medicine at Norwalk Hospital in Norwalk, Connecticut, he completed residency and fellowship training in psychiatry at Yale University. From 1982 until 1996, he was on the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University, serving as Associate Professor and Director of the Clinical Neuroscience Research Unit at the Connecticut Mental Health Center in New Haven, Connecticut. Since 1996, he has been Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University. From 1996 until 2012, he was Clinical Director, Director of Research, and Chair of the Institutional Review Board at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, subsequently serving as Chief Medical Officer from 2012 until 2014. He is currently President of Butler Hospital and Executive Chief of the Brain and Behavioral Health Service Line of Care New England. Dr. Price's primary research interests have involved the phenomenology, clinical psychopharmacology, neuropharmacology, and neurobiology of mood, anxiety, and addictive disorders. He has published nearly 450 scientific papers, and was identified by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the top ten authors of high-impact papers in psychiatry from 1990 to 1999. A Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, he is one of the principal developers of the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS), the standard assessment tool for OCD. In addition to his research activities, Dr. Price has received numerous awards for his teaching, mentoring, and clinical work, and is Editor of The Brown University Psychopharmacology Update and a Principal Editor for clinical psychopharmacology of Psychopharmacology.
