Psicología y salud: entre el corazón y el cerebro

Resum

The psychology of the XXth century has basically been a psychology of action and cognitive mind. The emotions and affects -central features of clinical psychology- have been left out of the main area of interest of the two paradigms which have dominated the field of experimental psychology in this century: the behaviorist and the cognitive. The paper traces the initial configuration of a new paradigm, centered on emotion, and analyzes its fundamental characteristics. It starts with an analysis of the relative failure of behavior therapy as un explicit compromise to vinculate clinical psychology to experimental psychology. It continues with a consideration of the rights and wrongs of both behaviorism and cognitive psychology and of their respective metaphors -the sensorimotor machine and the electronic computer- suggesting the need of a different metaphor based on the biological computer. Psychology ought to study human behavior, considered in the broadest sense -what we do, think and feel-, in close relationship with the biological body which sustains it: a living organism with muscles, brain and heart. The new neuropsychological and psychophysiological technologies of functional imaging and recording of the brain, heart and muscles are the main drive of this new conceptual revolution. The paper focuses then on a prospective analysis of the theoretical implications of recent research findings on emotion and stress trying to construct a building which integrate the biological and psychological aspects of behavior with no bias towards any type of reductionism. Finally, the theoretical and empirical contributions of the study of the heart's protective reflex -the cardiac defense response- are analyzed as un example of the close interconection between the peripheral bodily functions -the heart- and the higher cerebral functions -the neocortex-, the deep structures of the emotional brain acting as an interphase of both.