A new journal for a clear proximity and a useful collaboration

Since its beginning health psychology, as a research and intervention field, has considered as health contexts a broad and wide-ranging environment, which goes beyond the health systems themselves. From the disease’s treatment and prevention, to health promotion, education and protection, it intends to cover all health-related social production. Additionally, it integrates all useful principles derived from Psychology, which allow an efficient management of disease and illness, and the sustainability of health. Furthermore, the need for a mind/body integrative approach to health and disease, and the promotion of both mental and physical health, gave the impulse to the clinical health psychology, which emerged as a synthesis of clinical and health psychology’s contributions (Pais-Ribeiro & Leal, 2011). Other combinations have been arising in the context of multi-disciplinary interventions, assessment and research approaches, developed during the last decades, and targeting the well/ill-being and adjustment/maladjustment, among others, in the context of health and disease. More precisely, in this framework, the individual has not been the only focus, as the dynamics of groups, communities and populations have also been targeted in the search of predictors of health and disease. The environment surrounding the individual plays an important part, both on Kurt Lewin’s (1946) conceptualization of the human behaviour and on Lalonde’s (1974) health field concept, which includes all matters affecting health (Lalonde, 1974; Pais-Ribeiro & Leal, 2011) and, therefore, it might be incomplete to acknowledge an individual’s health or disease without considering his/her physical and social environment. Hence, the community setting has an indisputable value in terms of the level of analysis and action when it comes to health: the role of collective action, the development of partnerships in health-promoting communities and the psycho-socio-demographic factors influencing the community participation in health, have been object of attention (Campbell & Murray, 2004). The individual well-being, including health promotion, improvement of 1 doi:10.5964/pch.v1i1.