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Essay on Historical Development of Health Psychology
Joseph Matarazzo in 1980 offered a definition of health psychology which has become widely accepted: “Health psychology is the aggregate of the specific educational, scientific and professional contributions of the discipline of psychology to the promotion and maintenance of health, the prevention and treatment of illness, the identification of etiologic and diagnostic correlates of health, illness and related dysfunction, and the analysis and improvement of the health care system and health policy formation.”
This definition emphasizes the diversity of issues encompassed by the emerging discipline. There is also variety in the approaches brought to those issues. Some health psychologists would see themselves primarily as clinicians, others as psycho-physiologists, and others still as cognitive psychologists; some will practice health psychology in the health care settings, others will teach and research in academic institutions—what unifies them is their interest in the areas delineated by Matarazzo and their approaches to these issues.
The recognition of health psychology as a clearly designated field is very recent, as we have seen; however, many of the ideas and basic concepts have been around psychology for a great deal longer. The relationship between mind and body and the effect of one upon the other has always been a controversial topic amongst philosophers, psychologists and physiologists. Within psychology, the development of the study of psychosomatic disorders owes much to Freud. Psychologists such as Dunbar (1943), Ruesch (1948) and Alexander (1950) attempted to relate distinct personality types to particular diseases with an implicit causation hypothesis. Work of this type has become more sophisticated in its approach and the chapters in the book on coronary heart disease and cancer are illustrative, and critical, of this orientation. This approach has been largely abandoned by health psychologists in favor of more behavioral or biological approaches, which seek to employ interventions derived from behavioral medicine....................
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