Health Psychology and Quality of Life Research II. [antikvár]

CARDIAC PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY AND HEALTH Jaime Vila. University of Granada. Spain. INTRODUCTION. The idea that the heart plays an important role not only in biological functioning but also in psychological functioning is an old one. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who probably had the greatest influence in western culture and thinking, declared that the biological basis of all animic activity was the heart and not the brain. A Similar idea is expressed in popular thinking about affections and emotions. For the majority of people, both positive and negative emotions such as love, anger or fear, have their natural expression more in the language of the heart than in the language of the brain. Not only lay-people or poets, but also scientific psychologists accept a clear distinction between cold and hot behaviors and cognitions. While the computer metaphor -a no-blooded machine- might be more or less compatible with the cold and rational behaviors, the hot and emotional ones clearly require a warm-blooded creature with a heart prevailing over the brain. CARDIAC PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY. The scientific study of the relationships between psychological and cardiac functioning is the subject of cardiac psychophysiology. Psychophysiology -a major cornerstone of Health Psychology- deals with the links between the psychological and the biological functioning. It has been defined as "the study of the physiological correlates of behavior" (Greenfield and Sternbach, 1972) or, more recently, as "the use of physiological measures to understand the psychological processes underlying behavior (Turpin, 1989). Psychophysiology emphasizes the causal links between psychology -as the independent variable- and physiology -as the dependent one-.