Embodied Models of Health: Mind-Body Unity and the Psychological Determinants of Physical Health

Abstract

This dissertation examines the principle of mind-body unity and the mechanisms by which psychological processes shape physical health outcomes. Across three papers, I investigate how attention, beliefs, and expectations interact to influence physiological processes — from wound healing to post-surgical recovery — and propose a unifying theoretical framework that accounts for these effects. In Chapter 1, I present an experimental study demonstrating that physical healing is directly influenced by perceived time, independent of real time. Using a within-subjects design, I show that experimentally induced wounds healed significantly faster when participants believed more time had passed and slower when they believed less time had passed, even though the true elapsed time was always the same. These results suggest that the effect of time on physical healing is inseparable from the psychological experience of time. In Chapter 2, I develop the Embodied Models of Health (EMH) theoretical framework to account for the broad array of mind-body effects on health documented over the last 50 years. I review evidence from the literatures on placebo effects and health mindsets, arguing that these phenomena are products of continuous interaction between attention, beliefs, and expectations. The EMH framework introduces a specific mechanism — the role of attention as a belief-weighted mediator between mind and body — and offers a novel, hierarchical model of health in which psychological processes serve as primary organizers of physiological outcomes. In Chapter 3, I move from the laboratory to a clinical setting, testing whether manipulating healing time expectations following cataract surgery influences actual recovery. In a randomized controlled trial, I find that participants who internalized faster expected healing times and attended to day-to-day variability in their recovery experienced significantly greater improvements in visual acuity compared to participants in an active control group. The specificity of this interaction, in which attention to healing predicted recovery only when paired with internalized expectations, provides the first empirical support for the EMH framework's prediction that attention amplifies physiological outcomes in a direction consistent with one's beliefs. Together, these three studies advance our understanding of the psychological determinants of physical health and offer both a theoretical framework and empirical evidence for the principle of mind-body unity.