Pain is as diverse as it is ubiquitous. It is perhaps the health condition that most people experience most often. In many cases, this will entail short-lived pain associated with acute injury. Importantly though, pain is a symptom for a multitude of diseases, including those of the central nervous system. In addition, for reasons incompletely understood, acute pain can devolve into chronic pain, and chronic pain is also part of the symptomatology of certain long-lasting diseases, such as arthritis and cancer. Given the enormous number of people suffering from pain – estimates are around 10% of the world population living with chronic pain – this has been a very active research field for a long time, investigating both the underlying mechanisms of (chronic) pain, as well as potential new treatments for pain.

Arguably, the female brain is the most overlooked organ in neuroscience. Largely for practical reasons, relating to short estrous cycle in laboratory rodents, the lion’s share of research in behavioural pharmacology, and neuroscience in general, has historically been performed with male animals. The realisation that the female brain – in fact, the entire female body – differs in many ways from its male counterpart, spurred by the awareness that treatments that work in males do not necessarily do so in females and vice versa, has led to a long overdue interest in sex differences in neuroscience. This urges researchers to include subjects of both sexes in their study, and this has led to a very active research field in recent years.

In order to highlight the diversity and innovation in these research fields, the next two Special Issues of Behavioural Pharmacology will be devoted to Pain (to appear in early 2024) and Sex Differences (to appear late in 2024). We therefore invite scientists in the fields of behavioural pharmacology, experimental psychology, behavioural neuroscience and psychiatry, with an active interest in either pain or sex differences, to submit reports of original, unpublished empirical studies, for inclusion in the Special Issue. Review papers are particularly welcome, but as the Special Issue may include a number of invited reviews, these should be discussed with the Editors at an early stage to avoid duplication. The Editors welcome correspondence from potential authors, so if you are planning to prepare a paper for submission, do please let us know. Also, please ask one of the Editors if you are uncertain whether a report of your research would be suitable for inclusion.

All papers should be submitted online at www.editorialmanager.com/bpharm. Contributors are urged to submit as early as possible and should in any case aim to do so before the end of August 2023 (Pain) or February 2024 (Sex Differences). Later submissions might be accepted, but the later your submission is received, the higher the likelihood that it may miss the publication deadline. We guarantee, however, that any submission that meets quality standards but is accepted too late for inclusion in the Special Issue will be published as soon as possible thereafter.

Louk Vanderschuren (Editor)

Paul Willner (Associate Editor)

Emily Jutkiewicz (Associate Editor)

Bart Ellenbroek (Reviews Editor)