The autonomic nervous system and behaviour

This short paper reviews what is known about the autonomic responses that accompany stressful type behaviour and provides a description of the neural mechanisms which integrate the autonomic and somatic motor activities during such behaviour. First, I briefly summarise what is known about the mechanisms which normally regulate autonomic outflow. Then, I compare the neural sites responsible for eliciting behavioral responses. Next, I show how these behavioural and autonomic responses are evoked in parallel during stressful behaviour. Finally, I describe one example of how normal homeostatic mechanisms are overridden during the stressful behaviour pattern. Many of these topics have recently been reviewed in detail. Since much of the experimental work has been done on experimental animals, either anaesthetized or awake, it is important to keep in mind that their responses may not always be the same as those evoked in humans, so I also refer to what we know in human subjects.