Illness Representations and Coping With Health Threats

This chapter provides an overview of our research into how people interpret and cope with health threats. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first explains the theoretical model guiding our research effort. The second describes the application of the model to long-term, asymptomatic illnesses such as hypertension. The third section examines studies on coping with stressful medical treatments, especially cancer chemotherapy. The fourth section briefly discusses interventions, i.e., the process of changing knowledge and attitudes to alter health and illness behaviors. The basic theme uniting these sections is that individuals are motivated to regulate or minimize their health-related risks and to act to reduce these health threats in ways consistent with their perceptions of them.