Previous studies at the Program for Biosocial Research at Northern Illinois University utilized an electronic instrument to conduct voice analysis for the purpose of determining the amount of psychophysiological stress experienced by a political speaker. These studies then tested the technique on the speeches of three presidents during international crises: John F. Kennedy during the 1961 Berlin crisis, Lyndon B. Johnson during the crisis in the Dominican Republic, and Richard M. Nixon during the United States incursion into Cambodia.

This article updates the Somit et al. (1980) survey of literature in biology and politics. The flow of work continues at a growing rate. In the period from January 1, 1980 to December 31, 1981, at least 125 items have appeared: six books; forty-four articles, chapters in books, or monographs; sixty-four conference papers; three unpublished, undelivered manuscripts; eight Ph.D. dissertations or master's theses. Over this twenty-four month span, there have been twenty-nine “new entrants,” persons who have not previously authored a work in biology and politics.

Political behavior, like all human behavior, can be studied using the S–O–R paradigm, where S is a particular stimulus, 0 is the human organism, and R is a response or behavior (cf. Tursky, Lodge, and Cross, 1976). Here at the Laboratory for Behavioral Research at Stony Brook we are currently conducting research projects that investigate each of these components of the paradigm and the interactions among them. Before reviewing these projects, however, I will briefly describe our laboratory facilities.

With the support of a grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, research is currently underway on a major effort to rethink the basic theoretical issue that inspired the emergence of sociobiology. That issue, in a nutshell, concerns the explanation for the origins and evolution of social life (human societies being only one example among many others).

Human nutrition provides a subject area in which biology and politics interact in two respects. First, nutrition is a factor in human political behavior that may affect both individual decision-making performance and mass participation. Specific conditions, such as hypoglycemia, may affect individual performance, while inadequate energy intakes and qualitative deficiencies may influence mass behavior. Second, public policy affects the nutritional status of individuals and populations. Agricultural policy, food trade policy, nutritional intervention programs, foreign and domestic food aid, and social welfare policies are among the categories of governmental outputs that help determine nutritional conditions in populations and their component groups. Nutritional status, in turn, has feedback effects through mass behavior on political inputs. Thus, human nutrition presents a problem of biopolitical interactions that involves a mutually interdependent relationship with cybernetic properties.