Basic Behavioral Science Enhances Nation’s Mental Health

Soon the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) will officially issue a new report, Basic Behavioral Science Research for Mental Health: A National Investment. This document, the culmination of a two­year effort — co-chaired by APS Past-President Gordon Bower (Stanford University) and myself — highlights the recent accomplishments of basic researchers in psychology and related behavioral, cognitive, and social science.

The NIMH Behavioral Science Task Force, which prepared the report, included a subcommittee of behavioral scientists from the National Advisory Mental Health Council, the Director and Chiefs of the Neuroscience and Behavioral Science Branch of NIMH, and a distinguished panel of 46 researchers in fields ranging from ethology to cultural anthropology. In the final analysis, however, the focus was on psychology in all its aspects.

Break With the Past

NlMH has examined the behavioral sciences before — most recently in a 1989 report prepared by a committee chaired by APS Fellow Anne C. Petersen, now Deputy Director of the National Science Foundation. Like that report, and in contrast to other recent NIMH reports, this new report deals with the psychological and social factors affecting the normal behavior of the whole person. The report reminds us of the important contributions already made by basic behavioral science research to clinical practice, including the whole range of interventions collectively known as behavior therapy, new experimental paradigms for testing the effects of psychotropic drugs, and innovative techniques for marriage and family counseling.

The report also includes a strong defense of animal research, for what it can tell us about such things as learning and motivation, social influences on biological processes, effects of experience on biological structure and function, origins of intelligence, and diversity of behavioral adaptations to the environment.

The bulk of the report is devoted to a selective review of the last 30 years’ advances in understanding behavioral processes with separate chapters devoted to emotion and motivation; vulnerability and resilience; perception, attention, learning, and memory; thought and communication; social influence and social cognition; family processes and social networks; and sociocultural and environmental processes.

Themes

Woven throughout the report is a number of themes: (1) various aspects of mind and behavior develop at different rates, in response to both biological and environmental changes; (2) behavioral comparisons across species and cultures inform us about both the evolutionary origins of health-relevant behaviors and the diversity of behavioral solutions to the problems posed by the environment; and (3) individual variation is as important as variation across groups.

Perhaps most important, the report underscores the primacy of reciprocal influence, or bidirectionality of causation — between biology and culture, between the individual and society, and between emotion and cognition.

Taken together, these advances in our understanding clarify the meaning of normal psychosocial functioning and provide new insights into the roots of major social problems, like poverty and violence, that have major mental health implications.

Future Research

The report also looks to the future of behavioral research. It contains many suggestions for future research in various areas of behavioral science, but most important, it presents a series of recommendations for strengthening basic behavioral science research.

These recommendations include, first and foremost, increased support for investigator-initiated research, and for research training — and it reminds policymakers that within living memory, funding rates on such proposals were at least double what they are today. As NIMH moves back under the umbrella of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), it argues vigorously that the range and depth of behavioral-science peer review arrangements be maintained, strengthened, and proliferated throughout the NIH system. It encourages collaborations between basic and clinical investigators, so that each component of the research enterprise will be enriched and strengthened by the other.

The report argues for continued, and increased, NIMH support for research on behavioral and social processes in nonhuman animals, in both laboratory and naturalistic environments. It calls on NIMH to support the development of improved research methodologies, including statistical and computational techniques for analyzing complex behavioral systems, and to support and maintain multimedia archives of research data generated by NIMH-sponsored projects. Finally, it envisions new funding arrangements that would make long-term and lifespan developmental studies possible.

National Plan for Behavioral Research

In comparison to what we knew, or thought we knew, only a few decades ago, the current knowledge base in the behavioral, cognitive, and social sciences is almost unrecognizable. The report is a record of remarkable achievement, something for us all to celebrate. But there is still much to be learned, and NIMH support is critical to that effort. Shortly after the Task Force report is released, the NIMH will begin to formulate a national plan for behavioral science research, similar to plans already in place for research on schizophrenia, mental disorders in childhood and adolescence, the homeless mentally ill, and neuroscience. This plan will be presented to Congress and be part of the federal budget-planning process.

From its founding in 1948, NIMH has understood that psychology is the basic science for mental health, and it has acted on that understanding by supporting a vigorous program of basic research in behavioral, cognitive, emotional, motivational, and sociocultural processes. This commitment has not been reduced by some politicians’ questioning of the virtues of behavioral and social science, calls to shift resources from basic to applied research, or by highly visible advances at the frontiers of neuroscience. In fact, there have been many congressional calls for greater support for behavioral research (see nearly any past issue of the Observer for evidence of this support). But if NIMH is to succeed in maintaining and strengthening its portfolio of basic behavioral research, it needs help from us. I urge all APS members to read the report, and to seize the opportunity afforded by its publication to redouble our own efforts to promote basic behavioral research: with our elected representatives, with the students in our classes, with local media, and with the public at large.