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The German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus once remarked that psychology has a long past but a short history.1 The same could be said of health psychology, which describes the discipline of psychology as it relates to health and illness. Twenty-five years ago, Joseph Matarazzo developed the "gold standard" definition: "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, and 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." The contributions to which Matarazzo alludes in his article in The American Psychologist cover an enormous range of areas of expertise. The challenge continues to be (1) delineating the boundaries of health psychology even within general psychology, and (2) sorting out health psychology's overlap with other disciplinary areas such as behavioral medicine. Health psychology is linked to many fields. The closest Library of Congress classification is R726.5-726.8 (clinical health psychology; medicine and psychology), although there is overlap with categories such as BF (psychology), RC435-571 (psychiatry), RC49-52 (psychosomatic medicine), RA427.8 (health promotion), RA781 (exercise for health), and RA785 (relaxation; stress management).
The books discussed in this essay, most of which were published in the 1990s, were selected for their quality, breadth, depth, and importance. Although there is clear interplay with other academic areas, the books are categorized according to topics important to health psychology: Historical and Interdisciplinary Contexts of Health Psychology, Theoretical Issues in Health Psychology, Behavior Change Related to Health, Changing Specific Health-Related Behaviors, The Concept of Stress, Applications to Specific Diseases and Conditions, Diversity Issues and Special Populations, and Practicing Health Psychology. A section entitled Additional Sources of Information provides a brief overview of some important serials and electronic resources.
HISTORICAL AND INTERDISCIPLINARY CONTEXTS OF HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY
Beyond its connections to general psychology, health psychology's most important link is to behavioral medicine. In 1977 Gary E. Schwartz and Stephen M. Weiss published results from a conference that defined and established goals for behavioral medicine. The Proceedings of the Yale Conference on Behavioral Medicine described this specialty as "the field concerned with the development of behavioral science knowledge and techniques relevant...