Psychosocial Processes and Health: A Reader

Understanding the links among social environment, emotion, behavior, and illness is a growing theme in medical and health education. The booming development in this field is reflected in the growth of disciplines such as health psychology, psychosocial epidemiology, and behavioral medicine. Until now, however, the basic literature has been awkwardly dispersed across medical and social science journals. Now the most important articles of the past thirty years are brought together in a single volume. The thirty-one articles are grouped around themes such as "Life stress, social support and health," "Psychophysiological processes in diseases," and "Behavioral interventions in medicine." The articles include such provocative topics as "Can lifestyle changes reverse coronary heart disease?," "Psychological response to breast cancer: effect on outcome," and "Psychological stress and susceptibility to the common cold." Each section is prefaced by an up-to-date review of the subject by the volume editors. Uniting biomedical, psychological, and social perspectives, this text will be an invaluable resource for both scholars and students of medicine, health sciences, and clinical and health psychology.

The book contains black-and-white illustrations.

State-of-the-art summaries of research in psychosocial factors and health.

Steptoe, Andrew (Univ of London); Wardle, Jane (Univ of London)

This book is a collection of 31 papers previously published over a broad range of medical, psychological, and sociological journals. Although many of the papers are relatively new, the oldest dates back 30 years. The contributors are, therefore, the authors of the original papers.