A Contemporary Overview of Behavioral Teratology

The publication of the Handbook of Behavioral Teratology (Riley and Vorhees, 1986), the first volume of its kind, marked a watershed in this behavioral research specialty. Since its tentative beginnings in the early 1960s, behavioral teratology, through the scientific achievements of its practitioners, has slowly matured into a generally accepted research specialty. Borrowing theory and principles from its parent discipline, teratology, it evolved its own specialized subject matter, concepts, scientific methods, and analytic techniques. Its first adherents came largely from the field of experimental psychology. These early workers saw evocative implications in the descriptions of prenatal exposure to teratogenic agents on the developing central nervous system (CNS) and they pondered the meaning that these effects had for the expression of abnormal behavior.