The differentiation of pathological stress responses from responses that are appropriate and adaptive is a challenge with little to guide the clinician. This refreshment considers adjustment disorder and possible approaches to distinguishing those who have the disorder from those who are responding ‘normally’ to stressful events.

It is known that tactile stimulation (TS) during ontogeny modifies brain plasticity and enhances the motor and cognitive skills. Our hypothesis was that early handling including TS would increase play and exploratory behaviour in commercial pigs under standardized test conditions. Piglets from 13 litters were subjected to three handling treatments from 5 to 35 days of age: all the piglets were handled (H), none of the piglets were handled (NH) or half of the piglets in the litter were handled (50/50). At 42 days of age, the pigs’ behaviour was observed in pairs in a novel pen with a ‘toy’ (tug rope). The main results were that more locomotor play was performed by pigs from litters where all or half of them had been handled, whereas social exploratory behaviour was more pronounced in pigs from litters where half of them had been handled. Although behaviour was affected by the interaction of treatment with sex or with weight category, we propose that the handling procedure does seem to have acted to increase locomotor skills and that handling half of the piglets in the litter may have triggered a series of socio-emotional interactions that were beneficial for the whole group.

The well-replicated observation that many people maintain mental health despite exposure to severe psychological or physical adversity has ignited interest in the mechanisms that protect against stress-related mental illness. Focusing on resilience rather than pathophysiology in many ways represents a paradigm shift in clinical-psychological and psychiatric research that has great potential for the development of new prevention and treatment strategies. More recently, research into resilience also arrived in the neurobiological community, posing nontrivial questions about ecological validity and translatability. Drawing on concepts and findings from transdiagnostic psychiatry, emotion research, and behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, we propose a unified theoretical framework for the neuroscientific study of general resilience mechanisms. The framework is applicable to both animal and human research and supports the design and interpretation of translational studies. The theory emphasizes the causal role of stimulus appraisal (evaluation) processes in the generation of emotional responses, including responses to potential stressors. On this basis, it posits that a positive (non-negative) appraisal style is the key mechanism that protects against the detrimental effects of stress and mediates the effects of other known resilience factors. Appraisal style is shaped by three classes of cognitive processes – positive situation classification, reappraisal, and interference inhibition – that can be investigated at the neural level. Prospects for the future development of resilience research are discussed.

In spite of the large amounts of money invested in research, breeding, and the improvement of commercial egg-type strains, high environmental temperature (HET) has been identified as a major non-genetic constraint limiting expression of their full genetic potential. This environmental stressor has been implicated in adverse marked effects on egg production and eggshell quality of hens. Reports have conclusively indicated that poor performance (i.e. drop in egg production and poor eggshell quality) of layers reared in thermally-stressed environments could be adduced to a complex interplay of low feed intake, malfunctioning of the endocrine system, acid-base imbalance and poor physiological functioning of organs and mechanisms connected with the entire egg production process, via follicular recruitment and growth, ovulation, egg formation, shell formation, egg development, oviposition and oviposition interval.