Until the 1970s, there were no books, journals, or university courses on health psychology. Although the field's intellectual roots stretch back to the beginnings of psychology more than a century ago, its formal emergence depended on a convergence of influences (Friedman & Silver, 2007), including psychosomatic medicine, social‐psychological and socio‐anthropological perspectives on medicine, epidemiology, and medical and clinical psychology. Today, health psychology is a principal area of significant social science research and practice, with vital implications for the health and well‐being of individuals and societies. Understanding the explosive trajectory of health psychology is useful to appreciating the strengths of the field and to approaching this new encyclopedia, the Wiley Encyclopedia of Health Psychology.
What is the nature of health? That is, what does it mean to be healthy? The way that this question is answered affects the behaviors, treatments, and resource allocations of individuals, families, health practitioners, governments, and societies. For example, if it is thought that you are healthy unless and until you contract a disease or suffer an injury, then attention and resources are primarily allocated toward “fixing” the problem through medications or surgical repairs. This is the traditional biomedical model of disease (sometimes called the “disease model”). Indeed, in the United States, the overwhelming allocation of attention and resources is to physicians (doing treatments) and to pharmaceuticals (prescription drugs and their development). In contrast, health psychology developed around a much broader and more interdisciplinary approach to health, one that is often termed the biopsychosocial model.
The biopsychosocial model (a term first formally proposed by George Engel in 1968) brings together core elements of staying healthy and recovering well from injury or disease (Stone et al., 1987). Each individual—due to a combination of biological influences and psychosocial experiences—is more or less likely to thrive. Some of this variation is due to genetics and early life development; some depends on the availability and appropriate applications of medical treatments; some involves nutrition and physical activity; some depends on preparations for, perceptions of, and reactions to life's challenges; and some involves exposure to or seeking out of healthier or unhealthier environments, both physically and socially. When presented in this way, it might seem obvious that health should certainly be viewed in this broader interdisciplinary way. However, by misdirecting its vast expenditures on health care, the United States gives its residents mediocre health at high cost (Kaplan, 2019). To approach these matters in a thorough manner, this encyclopedia includes four volumes, with Volume 1 focusing on the biological bases of health and health behavior, Volume 2 concentrating on the social bases, Volume 3 centering around the psychological and clinical aspects, and Volume 4 focused more broadly on crosscutting and applied matters.
Key parts of health depend on biological characteristics and how they interact with our experiences and environments. So, for example, in Volume 1, there are articles on injury to the brain, alcohol effects on the brain, nutrition, drug abuse, psychophysiology, and the tools and key findings of neuroscience. Note that even individuals with the same genes (identical twins) can and do have different health and recovery outcomes, and the articles delve into such complexities of health. Of course humans are also social creatures, and people’s growth, development, and health behaviors take place in social contexts. So, in Volume 2, there are articles on such fundamental matters as social support, coping, spirituality, emotion, discrimination, communication, psychosocial stress, and bereavement.
Because our approaches to and conceptions of health are heavily influenced by society's institutions and structures revolving around medical care, much of health psychology derives from or intersects with clinical psychology and applied behavioral medicine. Volume 3 covers such clinical topics as psycho‐oncology, depression, drug abuse, chronic disease, eating disorders, and the psychosocial aspects of coronary heart disease. Finally and importantly, there are a number of special and cross‐cutting matters that are considered in Volume 4, ranging from relevant laws and regulations to telehealth and health disparities. Taken together, the articles triangulate on what it truly means to be healthy.
What are the most promising directions for the future that emerge from a broad and deep approach to health? That is, to where do these encyclopedia articles point? One key clue arises from a unique opportunity to enhance, extend, and analyze the classic Terman study of children who were followed and studied throughout their lives (Friedman & Martin, 2012). These studies revealed that there are lifelong trajectories to health, thriving, and longevity. Although anyone can encounter bad luck, a number of basic patterns emerged that are more likely to lead to good health. That is, for some individuals, certain earlier life characteristics and circumstances help propel them on pathways of healthier and healthier behaviors, reactions, relationships, and experiences, while others instead face a series of contingent stumbling blocks. There are multipart but nonrandom pathways across time linking personalities, health behaviors, social groups, education, work environments, and health and longevity. The present encyclopedia necessarily is a compendium of summaries of the relevant elements of health and thriving, but one that would and can profitably be used as a base to synthesize the long‐term interdependent aspects of health.
In sum, this encyclopedia is distinctive in its explicit embrace of the biopsychosocial approach to health, not through lip service or hand‐waving but rather through highly detailed and extensive consideration of the many dozens of topics crucial to this core interdisciplinary understanding.