ABSTRACT
The naturalistic stressful experience of having an operation has been the focus of a sizable amount of research. It is one of a few phenomena of interest to health psychologists on which there has been a body of research so that an attempt to clarify the “state of the art” might be useful. The research has varied in methodological sophistication and the connections with theory have often been very loose. To enhance future work on the stress of surgery, theoretical orientation has been imposed on the research. This review is limited to studies that used an experimental design and adult elective surgical patients as subjects. Limiting the review to studies of adult elective surgical patients restricts the degree of threat to the subject’s life from the surgery, insures that the subjects had forewarning of the surgery, and eliminates the need to consider developmental factors. Studies with a primary focus on the effects of individual differences on coping with surgery are not included. Identification of general patterns in the research is an essential forerunner to identification of the influence of individual differences.
