My first response to the introduction and chapter 1, is that the authors did a great job explaining the Terman study and why it is immensely important to study a large number of individuals throughout their lives. The Terman study measured the participant’s personalities, their careers, their habits, their stresses, and their health and longevity. The authors also addressed the uncertainty about whether this study would still hold true for individuals nowadays.
The book states that “many health threats are not simply due to bad luck. Rather, there are systematic individual differences in susceptibility to injury and disease, who gets sick and who stays well.” These differences in susceptibility are associated with many factors, including biological differences or social relations. This made me think back to the textbook and how we discussed the biopsychosocial model in class. I believe that addressing health from just one of the three perspectives, either biological, psychological, or sociological, is incomplete. For example, most physicians don’t ask about an individual’s personality traits, activity level as a child, or family’s history of divorce. Last year I took a Psych class about chronic pain, and one of our assignments was to write a paper about the biopsychosocial aspects of an individual’s chronic pain. It was one of my favorite assignments, because I learned a lot about how psychology affects one’s health after interviewing a woman with Multiple Sclerosis.