Hostility, unemployment and health status: testing three theoretical models.

This study examined three theoretical models of hostility, health and life context. According to the psychosocial vulnerability hypothesis, there is an interaction between hostility and adverse conditions. The increased health risk in hostile individuals is assumed to stem from their lower ability to benefit from existing psychosocial resources. The second hypothesis, called here the social context model, considers adverse conditions as an antecedent of both hostility and health problems. The third model states that hostility is a predictor of being selected to adverse conditions involving risk to health (the selection hypothesis). The results from a survey of a population-based random samp…