Psychosomatic research today: a clinician's overview.

Emphasis is placed on the opportunities and importance, at this time, of continuing with clinically oriented psychosomatic research. For instance, the multidimensional studies of sleep and of depression are beginning to throw new light on psychosomatic processes, and so too are the studies of life events and illness. Short-term prospective clinical investigations provide an attractive framework for such work and they can be complementary to long-term survey studies investigating relationships between constitutional characteristics including personality, and social conditions and disease. There are some useful new tools for measureing psychological characteristics.