Healthy in a crummy world: Implications of primal world beliefs for health psychology

Aaron Beck's insight-that beliefs about one's self, future, and environment shape behavior-had major implications for health psychology research and practice. Yet, beliefs about one's environment have remained relatively understudied. A recent comprehensive empirically-driven effort has led to the identification of 26 primal world beliefs, or primals, (e.g., the world is: harmless vs. threatening, stable vs. fragile, just vs. unjust, meaningful vs. meaningless, improvable vs. too hard to improve, beautiful vs. ugly). Primals have been theorized to influence many outcomes of interest to different psychological subdisciplines, and a psychometrically rigorous effort has developed a Primals Inventory to measure them. In this brief report, we aim to introduce primals' potential implications for health psychology research and practice. After summarizing primals' theorized general function, we illustrate their connection to health processes and outcomes via five illustrative hypotheses. These hypotheses concern how primals might influence (a) the cardiotoxic stress axis; (b) conserved transcriptional response to adversity gene expression patterns; (c) health behaviors; (d) treatment effectiveness; and (e) risk of developing chronic diseases. Further research on primals in relation to health processes and outcomes might lead to new avenues of scientific inquiry and innovative methods of improving the trajectory of our societys health and well-being.