Psychology 350
Psychopathology

Dr. Salvatore (Sam) Catanzaro
Executive Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
Professor of Psychology

Illinois State University

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The "Mind-Body Problem" section of Chapter 12 is a challenging but important section. Here's a brief review that I hope you find helpul.

The question that we start with is, "How can we understand possible causal influences of psychological experiences (like thought and emotions) on physical conditions (like the presence of stigmata, the functioning of the immune system, the incidence of heart disease, etc.)?"

This question has been considered to be the "Mind-Body Problem" in European traditions. For a long time, Mind (or soul) and body were considered to distinct and separate aspects of human beings. This position was institutionalized when Descartes, who wanted to understand the functioning of the body in biomechanical terms, prevented himself from becoming a heretic in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church by declaring that the soul was separate from the body (although it resided in a particular part of the brain) and not subject to scientific understanding. This is a position called dualism, because it posits two aspects of humans.

Even in secularized versions, this is a common assumption people make even to this day. It is the basis for Bill Moyers's befuddlement at the success of psychological methods for helping people with physical conditions. (Bill Moyers was the host in the video we watched, Healing and the Mind.)

An alternative to dualism is monism, in which Mind (or soul) and body are viewed as two aspects of the one organism. Like two sides of the one coin, they are inseparable but different. When we study the human organism scientifically, we can focus on one side or another, or we can try to understand the correlations between the two sides. We don't think of one as causing the other, but we do think of them as linked.

Monism is a solution to the Mind-Body problem that makes anti-reductionism possible.

The textbook indicates that growing research suggests that the are links between psychological functioning and physical health. For example, there is a statistical correlation between depression and risk of cancer. How might this happen?

The example to illustrate this is a hypothetical woman with a pessimistic explanatory style--a diathesis (risk factor) for depression. There are several steps to cancer in this example.

• After the death of her husband, she in fact becomes depressed. (The stressful loss triggers the diathesis to develop into disorder).
• Her depression has behavioral and physiological aspects.
• Among the physiological effects is a reduction in the efficiency of her immune system.
• Like most people, she probably has some potentially cancerous cells in her body. However, her immune system is impaired, so it might not fight and kill them ("lyse" them) as well as it normally would.
• Thus, a few cells which ordinarily would have been no health threat could multiply and grow into a dangerous tumor.

We might also consider how the experience of group therapy might help women with metastatic breast cancer live longer, as we saw in Healing and the Mind. One current hypothesis is that expressing painful emotions in a supportive environment and increasing connections with other humans beings enhances immune system functioning. Therefore, the body can fight the cancer more effectively.

I hope that this helps. Still have a question? Send me an e-mail by clicking here. The subject header has been set to "MindBody."

Salvatore J. Catanzaro, Illinois State University, Department of Psychology