How do individuals conceive illness and symptoms? Do theirconceptions conflict with the physician's views of theirillness, and what happens if they do? This book thoroughlyexplores the field of disease representation, describes anddiscusses lay illness models in a variety of social, historical and cultural contexts.

This monograph discusses how people view and respond to their own illness, how this view differs from the physician's, and the consequences this difference might have for the patient-physician relationship.

1 Mental Representation, Health, and Illness: An Introduction.- Illness Schemata and the Representational Approach.- Current Trends in Illness Cognition Research.- The Present Volume.- Future Directions for Research and Theory in Illness Cognition.- 2 Lay Illness Models in the Enlightenment and the 20th Century: Some Historical Lessons.- Contemporary Lay Illness Models.- Lay Illness Models in the Enlightenment.- A Historical Note on Hippocratic-Galenic Medicine.- Clinical Lessons From Historical Research.- 3 Understanding the Understanding of Illness: Lay Disease Representations.- The Nature of Disease Representations.- Implications of Disease Representations.- Future Directions.- Conclusion.- 4 Situational, Dispositional, and Genetic Bases of Symptom Reporting.- The Prevailing View of Health Complaints: Naive Realism.- Situational Factors That Influence Health Complaints.- Dispositional Bases of Symptom Reporting: The Central Role of Negative Affectivity.- Heritable Bases of Symptom Reporting.- Integrating the Situational, Dispositional, and Heritability Approaches.- The Symptom Perception Model.- Implications of the Findings.- 5 Psychological Reactions to Risk Factor Testing.- Previous Research on Risk Factor Testing.- The TAA Enzyme Paradigm.- Extensions to Actual Risk Factors.- Conclusion.- 6 Laypersons' Judgments of Patient Credibility and the Study of Illness Representations.- Patient Credibility in Contemporary Biomedicine.- Patient Credibility and the Lay Perceiver.- Research Evidence on Lay Perceptions of Patient Credibility.- Conclusion.- 7 Illness Representations in Medical Anthropology: A Critical Review and a Case Study of the Representation of AIDS in Haiti.- Historical Background.- Four Anthropological Approaches to the Study of IllnessRepresentations.- Case Study: AIDS Comes to a Haitian Village.- The Cultural Context of Illness Representations: Six Questions for the Researcher.- Conclusions.- 8 A Mental Representation Approach to Health Policy Analysis.- A Mental Representation Approach to Problem-Structuring.- A Mental Representation Approach to Policy Analysis in the Area of Alcohol Abuse.- A Mental Representation Approach to Policy Analysis in the Area of Multiple Sclerosis.- Implications of a Mental Representation Approach for Community Intervention.- Conclusion.- Appendix. Patient Coping/ Physician Orientation Instrument: Subscales and Sample Items.- 9 Assessing Illness Schemata in Patient Populations.- Why a Schema Approach?.- The Construct of Schema.- Research Findings.- Implications.- Appendix. Schema Assessment Instrument.- 10 Symptom Perception, Symptom Beliefs, and Blood Glucose Discrimination in the Self-Treatment of Insulin-Dependent Diabetes.- Insulin-Dependent Diabetes Mellitus: Consequences and Treatment.- Problems in Self-Treatment of IDDM.- A Self-Regulation Model of Diabetes Management.- Blood Glucose Symptomatology.- Accuracy of Symptom Perception and Beliefs.- Accuracy of Subjective BG Discrimination.- Clinical Intervention to Improve BG Estimation.- Conclusion.- 11 The Active Side of Illness Cognition.- Why Study Illness Cognition?.- The Construction of Common Sense Models.- Conclusion.