Although Health Psychology was recognised as a speciality area by the American Psychological Association in 1978, research publications within its domain appeared in the 1930s and earlier. These publications focused on a variety of topics such as treatment for stuttering and rehabilitation from neurological disorders. Current topics in health and behaviour cover a much wider array of issues, and behavioural health research has been described by many investigators as ranging ‘from the cell to society’. This is an ambitious caption for any discipline and it is impossible to cover all aspects of the discipline in this brief summary. The first section of this article, ‘Pathways from society to cell’, describes three themes that characterise much of contemporary behavioural health research. The second section provides a thumbnail sketch of two behavioural health topics: research aimed at disease prevention (primary prevention) and research on stress management, which examines the biological pathways for prevention and the management of existent disease. The third section focuses on the self-management of chronic illness (secondary prevention). It provides a brief overview of research spearheaded by our laboratory and by investigators in laboratories elsewhere. The section pays special attention to the theoretical issues involved in generating a psychological model of health behaviour. We conclude with a brief comment on how these theoretical issues might apply to behavioural health research in emerging nations.
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