Education and Training 459Although health psychology has become a well-established
disciplinary domain within psychology in Europe, the regula-
tion of the profession in Europe is very diverse. Some
countries, such as England, Holland, and Austria, have
licensing and registration procedures (Johnston & Weinman,
1995; Strauss-Blasche, 1998; Taal, 1998; Weinman, 1998)
whereas others, such as Greece, Romania, and Portugal, do not
(Anagnostopoulu, 1998; Baban, 1998; McIntyre, 1998). The
lack of regulation poses problems in terms of quality control of
services provided and could have damaging effects on the
credibility of the profession. In general, it appears that having
a division of health psychology within the country’s national
association is an important step towards regulation of the
profession. The position of the European Federation of
Professional Psychologists’Associations (EFPPA) is that reg-
ulation should be done at a national and not European level
(Lunt & Poortinga, 1996). However, they have established
training guidelines for professional health psychologists in an
attempt to define minimal training standards across all
European countries.
EDUCATION AND TRAINING
In the early 1980s, the first systematic attempts were made to
identify education and training opportunities in the broad area
of health psychology. Belar identified 42 doctoral programs
and 43 postdoctoral programs offering one or more elements
of such education (Belar & Siegel, 1983; Belar, Wilson, &
Hughes, 1982). Gentry, Street, Masur, and Asken (1981)
identified 48 internship programs. Within doctoral programs
of that era, the predominant model (70%) was that of a health
psychology track within another area of psychology (usually
clinical, counseling, or school psychology).
In 1983, the first national conference specifically devoted
to graduate education and training was held at Arden House,
New York. Chaired by Stephen M. Weiss, the conference de-
veloped recommendations for doctoral, internship, and post-
doctoral curricula and training experiences for those pursuing
careers in either research or the practice of health psychology
(Stone, 1983). Core curricular graduate-level components
included biological, social, and psychological bases of health
systems and behavior as well as health research training,
ethics, interdisciplinary collaboration, and access to health
care settings under the mentorship of experienced psychol-
ogy faculty. A defining text oriented to education and
training requirements also resulted from this conference:
Health Psychology: A Discipline and a Profession(Stone
et al., 1987).
In addition to the didactic educational requirements, the
professional practice specialty of clinical health psychology
requires sound training experiences in health assessment,
interventions, and consultations. Fundamental to education
and training in clinical health psychology is the scientist-
practitioner model, a biopsychosocial approach, faculty role
models for research and practice, access to health care set-
tings, participation and active supervision by a multidiscipli-
nary faculty in a health care setting, and exposure to diverse
clinical problems and populations.
The conference in 1983 also established the Council of
Health Psychology Training Directors. This group provides a
forum to discuss education and training issues across bac-
calaureate, graduate, and postgraduate levels and to develop
policy related to health psychology education and training.
The council has been involved in developing guidelines for
the accreditation of education and training programs that
would inform the APA Committee on Accreditation in their
review process. The first postdoctoral program in health
psychology was accredited by the APA in 2001.
One measure of the growth of the new field was that by
1990, Sayette and Mayne found that health psychology was
the most frequently noted area of faculty research in APA-
accredited clinical psychology doctoral programs.
The needs of already trained practitioners who wish to
develop more expertise so as to ethically expand their areas of
practice have also been recognized, especially as the knowl-
edge base for practice has expanded and the field has become
more mainstream. In 1997, Belar and colleagues developed a
model for self-assessment to facilitate practitioners’ identifi-
cation of gaps in knowledge and skills. Self-assessment could
then permit the design of appropriate continuing-education
activities for the ethical expansion of practice (Belar et al.,
2001).
Nearly 20 years after the Arden House Conference, the
APA Division of Health Psychology agreed to sponsor another
national conference under the leadership of then president
Kenneth A. Wallston (also a longtime editor of the division’s
newsletter,The Health Psychologist). The conference, held in
2000, was designed to focus future issues for the discipline
and the profession. Participants examined specific areas with
respect to implications of new research for education and
training, clinical practice, research, and public policy, includ-
ing: evolution of the biopsychosocial model; advances in
medicine; changes in population demographics, health care
economics, and the health psychology marketplace; needs and
advances in primary prevention; and developments in inter-
ventions. Participants reported that there was an increased
need for attention in the doctoral curriculum to genetics,