Perceptions of Health and Illness: Current Research and Applications. Edited by K. J. Petrie and J. A. Weinman. Harwood Academic Publishers: New York. 1998.

‘ [I]f men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ This quote from Thomas & Thomas (1928) expresses the symbolic interactionist credo that individual behaviour is guided by what people (both men and women I presume) believe to be true rather than by ‘truth’ as defined by some objective or consensual standard. This belief in the causal role of the subject in behaviour has, mostly implicitly, been the driving force behind social psychology’s intense interest during the last 25 years in cognitive process and particularly in the errors and biases that plague social judgements. If I believe my neighbour to be hostile, I am apt to behave toward him as if he is a hostile person. To understand and predict my behaviour, it makes no difference whether he, in fact, bears any hostile intention toward me because my behaviour derives not from him directly but from my perception of him. Once one accepts this fundamental link between the subjective definition of a situation and behaviour, then understanding the origins and content of perceptions (and especially misperceptions) becomes a central task of any behavioural science. Although the role of culturally-based folk beliefs in lay medical practices has been a topic of research in the sociological and anthropological literatures for some time, it has only been in the last 10 years or so that psychologists have begun to use their quite different methodological techniques to explore the cognitive underpinnings of health-related behaviour. This book, however, is good evidence of the substantial progress made in this relatively short period of time. It represents an essential update on this rapidly maturing field since the publication of the last major review by Skelton & Croyle in 1991 and I highly recommend it not only to researchers working in the field of illness cognition and behaviour but to anyone interested in a better understanding of the subtle ways in which what we believe about illness affects what we do about it. Research on illness perceptions in health psychology can trace its origins to work by Howard Leventhal and a few others in the mid1980s. In fact, although never presented as such, this book reads like an homage to Howard Leventhal and his rightful role as father to the field of illness cognition and behaviour. His elegant self-regulation model, developed over some 30 years of research, views illness behaviour as emerging through a complicated process in which individuals attempt to integrate semantic information about disease labels (‘Mr Jones, you have hypertension’) with somatic information (‘I don’t have any symptoms’) and then use the resulting illness representation to guide attempts to cope with the illness threat itself (by seeking medical attention or adhering to prescribed medication) while simultaneously coping with the emotions caused by the illness threat (through denial, avoidance, social supporting seeking, etc.). Leventhal’s self-regulation perspective serves as the explicit theoretical framework for almost every chapter of the book (and can be sensed lurking not far in the background of the others). The book is split, somewhat loosely, into three sections. The first, is intended to provide theoretical and methodological background for the more applied contributions in the last two sections. Appropriately enough, the section begins with a chapter by Howard Leventhal and colleagues providing a very nice review of the intellectual development of both the self-regulation model and the five factor view (e.g. identity, time-line, consequences, causes and controllability) that has emerged from empirical work on illness representations. The authors do an excellent job of illustrating the theoretical and empirical links between Leventhal’s current ideas and his early work on the use of fear in persuasion and preparation for medical procedures. The chapter also provides a good discussion of some of the limitations of current