Summary
Contents
How do we understand health in relation to society? What role does culture play in shaping our experiences of, and orientation to, health and illness? How do we understand medicine and medical treatment within a sociological framework?
Psychosocial Factors
Psychosocial Factors
Used as a summary label, psychosocial factors characterize socio-environmental and personal conditions and attributes that increase or decrease the risk of illness over the lifecourse.
The study of psychosocial factors has a long history emerging from sociological, psychological and medical disciplines. For example in sociology William Farr in the mid-1800s noticed different mortality rates in marital groups while Sigmund Freud in psychology some decades later examined the role of adverse early life experiences in the genesis of adult psychopathology. The groundwork for psychophysiological research was laid down by Walter Cannon in the late 1920s in the study of bodily changes related to emotional arousal, followed by Hans Selye (1956) who identified the physiological correlates of stress in his seminal text, The Stress of ...