Abstract
The functional theory of psychogenic illness proposes that the human capacity for psychological states to cause physical illness evolved during the Paleolithic as an adaptive mechanism for ensuring mutually interdependent behaviour under conditions when mutual interdependence was essential for survival. This integrative theory is consistent with existing data from several disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, ecology and health psychology, and leads to two sorts of empirical consequence for health psychology. First, the theory acts as a heuristic for suggesting the most predictive psychological units for use in health psychology: the current weak or inconsistent results may be the consequence of using an inappropriate psychological unit, namely behavioural aggregation. Secondly, the theory provides predictions about how psychological variables should interact with type of disease, age and sex.
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