alth professionals have developed interventions for changing people's perspectives on life and their resultant feelings, it becomes possible, through psychological interventions, to influence immune system functioning. The literatures reviewed in this article assume an underlying model of illness that includes environmental events, coping mechanisms, psychological states, activation of particular regions in the nervous system, and immune system function as variables (Anton), Schneiderman, et al., 1990). The model explains how environmental events such as loss or trauma make immune system suppression more likely. However, immune suppression is the end result of a cascade of events involving mediating variables. The occurrence of an environmental stressor makes immune suppression more likely but by no means inevitable. Given an environmental stressor, people appraise the situation and have the option of acting in ways to reduce the impact of the stressor. The processes of appraisal and behaving to reduce the impact of the stressor are collectively called "coping." Depending on a person's coping mechanisms, particular psychological states can occur. A psychological state has a wide variety of manifestations. Psychological states are associated with activation of particular brain regions and regions in the autonomic nervous system; with particular overt affective behaviors (for example, crying, exhibiting a low threshold for anger, shaking with anxiety); and with particular self-reports of affect. Specific psychological states also have immune system consequences (Nee, 1995). Mapping out the chemical or neuronal messages between the nervous system (the source of psychological states) and the immune system is a vigorous area of current research (Maier, Watkins, & Fleshner, 1994). This article first examines some of the general findings relating personality variables, environmental conditions, and coping mechanisms to immune system function. ...
