The field of health psychology encompasses both person and environment variables. In the study of persons, health psychologists explore who stays healthy, who becomes sick, who successfully manages disease, and who recovers (Adler and Mathews, 1994). In the study of environments, health psychologists examine the psychosocial pathways by which unhealthy environments impact on persons and their health (Taylor, Repetti and Seeman, 1997). As personality psychologists, the contributors to this special issue are more concerned with person variables than with environment variables, and they provide an analysis of several personality variables implicated in the onset, course, and outcome of chronic illness.
Although the special issue includes both empirical and review papers, there are more of the latter, which probably reflects the state of the art of the field. The past two decades have witnessed considerable activity in the study of personality and health, and we are now in a position to take stock of progress. It is immediately apparent that research has been dominated by investigating the links between personality and the two leading causes of death in developed countries: cancer and heart disease. Three papers in the special issue focus on these links.
In the opening article, Amelang reports the most recent findings from his ongoing prospective study of cancer and heart disease in a community sample. He finds that traditional health-related constructs such as neuroticism discriminate between those who become sick and those who stay well, but his data do not replicate the controversial findings of Grossarth-Maticek and Eysenck (see e.g. Grossarth-Maticek and Eysenck, 1995). The scope of personality variables is extended in Denollet's article in which he examines the impact of emotional distress on the progression of heart disease. His work is distinguished by the emphasis on the importance of interactions among personality variables, which is a likely future direction as the field moves to more complex models. He proposes that the interaction between negative affectivity and social inhibition is implicated in poor prognosis in heart disease. Sanderman and Ranchor provide an overview of the evidence relating personality variables to onset and course of heart disease and CCC 0890Β±2070/97/050317Β±02$17.50