Theoretical innovations in social and personality psychology and implications for health: Introduction to special issue.

Abstract

University of California at MercedThe fields of social psychology and personality psychologyhave a rich legacy of advancing efforts to understand and improvea wide variety of health outcomes. Leon Festinger’s earliest workon cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) was predicated inlarge part on his interest in why smokers fail to quit despiteawareness of the significant dangers of smoking known even then.Kurt Lewin’s early work on group dynamics addressed the prob-lem of how to convince homemakers to purchase foods that wereless appealing but nevertheless more nutritious (Lewin, 1943).Some of the foundational work on fear appeals by Irving Janis andHoward Leventhal (Janis, 1967; Leventhal, 1970) addressed thegrowing incidence of gum disease, sexually transmitted infection,smoking, and failure to take protective actions such as gettingtetanus shots. Personality traits such as optimism, resilience, har-diness, and extraversion have been linked to a wide variety ofsubclinical and clinical disease endpoints (for reviews see Fried-man, 2000; Smith, Gallo, Shivpuri, & Brewer, 2012). Becausethese lines of research are grounded in theory-based approaches,delineate mediating processes, and strive to identify causal rela-tionships, they have advanced both theory and practice in healthcontexts. It comes as little surprise that social and personalitypsychologists played a significant role in the development ofhealth psychology as an independent discipline in the late 1970s.Much has happened in these fields since that time. The last fourdecades have witnessed burgeoning interest in implicit processesand links between affect and cognition, a rapidly growing field ofself-regulation research, and the expansion of theory and methodsin the area of personal relationships. Some topics at the interfaceof social/personality and health psychology have waxed andwanedinpopularity(e.g.,locusofcontrol),othershavemaintaineda steady momentum (e.g., persuasion), and still others haveevolved into new areas of inquiry (e.g., affect and stress). More-over, the health landscape has afforded a steady stream of newissues and challenges including managed care, Internet-facilitatedaccess to personal health information, a norm of shared decision-making in medical contexts, changing guidelines regarding the useof preventive medical care, newer commercial products such astanning beds and e-cigarettes, disconcerting levels of obesity, andgreater recognition of comorbidities. All of these developmentscan be linked somewhere along the line to principles of self-regulation, communication, persuasion, judgment, interpersonalrelationships, and individual differences. For example, the greaterinvolvement of patients in medical decisions behooves us to un-derstand how such decisions are influenced by emotional pro-cesses, nonverbal cues, and relationships with close others andmedical providers.The initial idea for this special issue emerged from a series ofactivities designed to better integrate scientific advances in social/personality psychology with research and practice in health con-texts. One such activity was a pair of “think-tank” meetingssponsored by the U. S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) in whichsocial/personality psychologists presented on the “state of thescience” in a wide variety of areas and reflected with NCI scien-tistsonhowthisworkmightinformthedesignandimplementationofnew approaches for interventions to promote health and well-being(see, e.g., http://dccps.nci.nih.gov/bimped/meeting_iisptccr.html).NCI also sponsored a summer training institute for junior socialand personality psychologists—to highlight how work in thesedisciplines can address a wide range of health problems (institutefaculty presentations may be downloaded from http://dccps.nci.nih.gov/bbrb/spsi.html). In addition, NCI helped support a series ofhealth-themed preconferences at annual meetings of the Societyfor Personality and Social Psychology (see http://sphnetwork.org/conferences.html). These activities further led to the developmentof a new professional network—the Social Personality and Health