ABSTRACT
The behaviours that we adopt to maintain health and avoid and control disease reflect our medical and psychosocial histories. These histories are stored as memories of events (e.g., memories of illness in ourselves, family members and friends and socially derived information about health and disease from teachers and mass media), and knowledge and skills for avoiding and treating illness (e.g., dietary practices, exercise, use of over the counter preventives and medications and seeking medical care and using prescribed treatments). The schemata in this knowledge base in combination with new somatic sensations and information about illness in other persons, generate illness representations whose attributes define the cause, identity (symptoms & label), potential consequences, possibility for control and time-lines associated with each of these attributes (time for development: for cure, disability and/or death). These representations point to specific coping procedures for avoiding and managing the defined threat and generate goals for evaluating coping outcomes. Thus, illness representations vary over settings and over time, and shape how we cope with illness and treatment.
