Vulnerability to Psychopathology: A Biosocial Model

Vulnerability to Psychopathology: A Biosocial Model Marvin Zuckerman. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. 1999, 535 pp., (hardcover). A great deal has been learned about psychopathology, but still many questions remain. One of the most important questions remaining to be answered is why people are vulnerable to the different variants of psychopathology ? Zuckerman has made this broad question the focus of his new book. It is a book that is remarkable by its scholarship. It provides a compendium of information on the history of mental disorders, and research findings on their course, diagnosis and prevalence, comorbidity, demographic features, genetic and biological characteristics, and social factors, and is punctuated by a strong biological orientation. Zuckerman indicates that his new book was written as a "logical sequel" to his previous book on the Psychobiology of Personality (Zuckerman, 1991). His book, which is divided into eight chapters, provides a review of the wealth of findings on psychopathology. The first cluster of chapters of the book deals with general considerations including diathesis-stress models (chapter 1), and diagnosis (chapter 2); the second cluster, and main body of the book (chapters 3 to 7), describes theory and research on a selected number of specific disorders, and the final concluding chapter is concerned with the prognosis of the future science of psychopathology. In the first chapter we learn that diathesis-stress theories are not monolithic but exhibit great variety. His model extends Paul Meehl's orientation to schizoprhenia to other disorders, and thus focuses on a biological diathesis and social stress (e.g., parenting) that increases risk of disorders. Zuckerman's book largely restricts the term diathesis to genetic and biological factors. As it happens, then, he questions the basis for the notion of cognitive vulnerability. His grounds for this are that the concept of a cognitive predisposition to psychopathology is not empirically well supported, and that it could simply be a "typical expression of a biological disposition" (p. 7), or other "interpersonal" and "developmental" factors (p. 197). For example, he suggests that research has not adequately demonstrated that cognitive factors predict subsequent levels of depression or other disorders, and are not simply state-manifestations of the disorders. These views are challenged by recent research of the Temple-Wisconsin depression project (e.g., Alloy, Abramson, Hogan et al., 2000). Although Zuckerman's book clearly reflects a monumental undertaking of scholarship, its review of the rapidly advancing cognitive literature on psychopathology is dated. Readers who are interested in a cognitively oriented approach to vulnerability to psychopathology will thus need to look for other references (e.g., Alloy & Riskind, in press). Along with his restriction of the concept of vulnerability to biological diathesis, Zuckerman's book pays little attention to methodological issues, and particularly to issues important for cognitively oriented researchers. Readers who are interested in such issues will have to turn to other sources, such as the excellent chapter by Alloy, Abramson, Raniere, & Dyller, (1999). …