The brain and body need to adapt constantly to changing social and physical environments. A key mechanism for this adaptation is the ‘stress response’, which is necessary and not negative in and of itself. The term ‘stress’, however, is ambiguous and has acquired negative connotations. We argue that the concept of allostasis can be used instead to describe the mechanisms employed to achieve stability of homeostatic systems through active intervention (adaptive plasticity). In the context of allostasis, resilience denotes the ability (...) of an organism to respond to stressors in the environment by means of the appropriate engagement and efficient termination of allostatic responses. In this review, we discuss the neurobiological and organismal factors that modulate resilience, such as growth factors, chaperone molecules and circadian rhythms, and highlight its consequences for cognition and behavior. (shrink)

The brain is an ever‐changing organ that encodes memories and directs behavior. Neuroanatomical studies have revealed structural plasticity of neural architecture, and advances in gene expression technology and epigenetics have demonstrated new mechanisms underlying the brain's dynamic nature. Stressful experiences challenge the plasticity of the brain, and prolonged exposure to environmental stress redefines the normative transcriptional profile of both neurons and glia, and can lead to the onset of mental illness. A more thorough understanding of normal and abnormal gene expression (...) is needed to define the diseased brain and improve current treatments for psychiatric disorders. The efforts to describe gene expression networks have been bolstered by microarray and RNA‐sequencing technologies. The heterogeneity of neural cell populations and their unique microenvironments, coupled with broad ranging interconnectivity, makes resolving this complexity exceedingly challenging and requires the combined efforts of single cell and systems level expression profiling to identify targets for therapeutic intervention. (shrink)