British journal of health psychology
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Br J Health Psychol · Nov 2006
Comparative StudyMind the gap... in intelligence: re-examining the relationship between inequality and health.
Wilkinson contends that economic inequality reduces the health and life expectancy of the whole population but his argument does not make sense within its own evolutionary framework. Recent evolutionary psychological theory suggests that the human brain, adapted to the ancestral environment, has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment and that general intelligence evolved as a domain-specific adaptation to solve evolutionarily novel problems. Since most dangers to health in the contemporary society are evolutionarily novel, it follows that more intelligent individuals are better able to recognize and deal with such dangers and live longer. ⋯ They also show that an average IQ has a very large and significant effect on population health but not in the evolutionarily familiar sub-Saharan Africa. At the micro level, the General Social Survey data show that, while both income and intelligence have independent positive effects on self-reported health, intelligence has a stronger effect than income. The data collectively suggest that individuals in wealthier and more egalitarian societies live longer and stay healthier, not because they are wealthier or more egalitarian but because they are more intelligent.
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Br J Health Psychol · Nov 2006
An electronic diary assessment of the effects of distraction and attentional focusing on pain intensity in chronic low back pain patients.
The present study examined the effects of a manipulation of attention to pain (i.e. attentional focusing vs. distraction) on pain intensity in daily life of patients with chronic low back pain. It was hypothesized that attentional focusing would lead to decreased pain intensity in high pain fearful individuals, whereas distraction from pain would be associated with decreased pain intensity in low pain fearful individuals. ⋯ A manipulation of attention to pain in daily life of patients with chronic low back pain proved difficult to accomplish. As the manipulation check was generally unsuccessful, no clear inferences about the underlying theory can be made. Future research within the field of pain treatments (e.g. in vivo exposure) might benefit greatly from electronic diary assessments studies.