ABSTRACT
The inability to express emotion has been consistently reported in psychosocial studies of cancer patients. Furthermore, expression of negative affect has been correlated with better survival in cancer patients. Patients who were nodes positive showed higher scores on the Courtauld Emotional Control suppression of anger subscale, thereby extending previous findings by implicating suppression of anger in the progression of neoplastic disease. Intensive biomedical research in oncology since the Second World War has been relatively unsuccessful in curbing the escalating incidence of cancer. This failure has resulted in researchers following a more ’inclusive’ model of health and illness, the biopsychosocial model, which asserts that disease may be usefully analysed at several different levels. Pysicians have suggested that emotional expression may be involved in cancer onset and progression. Gross, in a article, surveyed 18 studies which directly relate emotional expression to cancer onset and progression.
