1 Health Psychology Introduction to Second Edition

Health psychology is concerned with the study of psychological processes in health, illness and health care, and this book has been structured to provide an authoritative overview of the fi eld. Later in this introduction we will outline some of the key issues and areas within health psychology but, before that, we would like to summarise the changes to the book since the fi rst edition. The fi rst edition of this book was published in 2004 and was very well received by the health psychology community. In 2008, we obtained very constructive feedback on the fi rst edition and this has been used as the basis for planning the second edition. The most important feedback concerned the generally high quality of the chapters, all of which were written by subject experts. However, our attention was also drawn to the fact that some key topics were either missing or only partially covered. In particular it was recommended that the book needed to provide a good quality coverage of all the key areas and topics listed in syllabus recommendations for masters degreelevel health psychology programmes, such as those provided by the British Psychological Society (Division of Health Psychology Training Committee, 2008). Thus, in this edition, we have not only continued to ensure that all the chapters are written by subject experts but we have also substantially extended the scope of the book by adding many new chapters, which has resulted in a very comprehensive coverage of the key areas. In particular, there is greater coverage of specifi c health behaviours, health-behaviour models and processes, individual and contextual factors, and underlying psychobiological processes. Since the book has now grown considerably in size and breadth of coverage, the original editors were really pleased to be joined by David French and Kavita Vedhara as co-editors for this edition in order to extend the scope and expertise of the editorial team. In order to achieve all this, we have added 20 entirely new chapters as well as changing a number of existing chapters. In addition to providing a general overview of the role of behaviour in health (Steptoe et al., Chapter 2), we now have included specifi c chapters focusing on the key behaviours which have signifi cant infl uences on health and well-being. Thus we now include separate chapters on smoking (Shahab & West, Chapter 3), physical activity (Biddle, Chapter 4), eating behaviour (Odgen, Chapter 5), alcohol and drug use (Hammersley, Chapter 6) and sexual health and behaviour (Parsons & Wells, Chapter 7), all of which now ensures that the book has a really comprehensive coverage of those health-related behaviours that make a major contribution to public health. The fi rst edition had a single, general chapter which covered the social-cognition models used to explain variation in health-related behaviours. We have now split this material into three chapters, to refl ect the advances in knowledge brought about largely by the rapid increase in quality and quantity of intervention studies using these models. We have included a chapter on risk perception (Wright, Chapter 9), which also covers research on the effectiveness of different approaches to risk communication in changing healthrelated behaviour, in addition to chapters on changing health-related behaviours using both stage models (Sniehotta & Aunger, Chapter 11), and non-stage or