Health Psychology has received numerous papers over the past several months on topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of them concern depression, anxiety, stress, or other forms of distress in the general population or in health care workers. We have received far fewer papers on COVID-related health behaviors and health communications—factors that have played central roles in the spread of the pandemic and that are major topics in health psychology.

Our experience is consistent with the published scientific literature on the pandemic. A Medline search that we conducted in late September yielded over 23,000 English-language articles pertaining to COVID-19. Over 1,400 of them concerned topics that are within the scope of Health Psychology. As shown in Table 1, COVID-related mental disorders comprised the largest category. Many other studies concerned other forms of stress or emotional distress. At least 248 articles addressed the profound ethnic and racial disparities in COVID-19 infection and death rates and in access to health care that are accentuating longstanding health inequities; 22 (9%) of these articles addressed behavioral or psychosocial aspects of COVID-19 health disparities. Thus, the literature on the behavioral and psychosocial aspects of the pandemic has been dominated, so far at least, by research on stress or distress. Fewer reports have been published so far on critical COVID-related health behaviors, health communication, or health disparities.

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health agencies around the world agree that preventive health behaviors including social distancing, wearing masks, and hand washing are the keys to limiting SARS-CoV-2 contagion, hospitalizations, and deaths, especially at a time when effective vaccines are not yet available. These agencies have identified a number of factors that increase vulnerability to SARS-CoV-2 infection or that contribute to adverse outcomes, such as obesity (Belanger et al., 2020; Tartof et al., 2020) and vaping (Armatas et al., 2020; Dumas et al., 2020; “The EVALI Outbreak and Vaping,” 2020) in which health behaviors also play critical roles. They have also reported that the pandemic has created interrelated crises of social isolation, psychiatric disorders, substance abuse, violence, and domestic abuse (Chandan et al., 2020; Czeisler et al., 2020; Devi, 2020; Makaroun et al., 2020; Ragavan et al., 2020; Roesch et al., 2020). These health-related behavioral and psychosocial problems have been within the province of health psychology since its inception as a specialty.

For these reasons, the field of health psychology has a special responsibility to apply its expertise to the psychological and social pathologies that are associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, including problems like vaccine hesitancy, resistance to preventive health behaviors such as wearing masks, and social isolation, to name just a few. Health psychologists can also make important contributions to solution-focused research to improve public health communication strategies and to develop interventions for the long-term sequelae of COVID-19.

We also have a responsibility to address the health disparities that have long plagued racial and ethnic minority populations and that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Compared to the COVID-19 pandemic, no other public health crisis has so rapidly and convincingly demonstrated the tragic impacts of racial and ethnic biases and other social determinants of health. A variety of disadvantages such as poverty and limited access to health care have placed people of color at elevated risk for poor health outcomes over many decades. The CDC now recognizes that discrimination also increases the risk of illness and death from COVID-19 (National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Division of Viral Diseases, 2020). Racism poses an urgent threat to the health of minority communities, and it calls for innovative solutions and actions. Health psychology must join this battle and become part of the solution, without delay.

Health psychologists have been taking these responsibilities very seriously (e.g., Arden & Chilcot, 2020; Garfin et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2020). For example, health psychologists have been working, often within multidisciplinary collaborations, on strategies to reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (Bogg & Milad, 2020; Michie et al., 2020; Ruiz & Revenson, 2020; West et al., 2020). They have had prominent roles in some of the most informative early research on social and behavioral aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as in the International COVID-19 Awareness and Responses Evaluation project (Lejtenyi, 2020) and in a study of the impact of the pandemic on physical activity in children (Dunton et al., 2020). They have also started to address psychosocial aspects of racial and ethnic disparities in COVID susceptibility, care, and outcomes (e.g., Valenzuela et al., 2020; Valrie et al., 2020).

On the contrary, some major reports on behavioral or psychosocial aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic have not included any health psychologists as coauthors (e.g., Alsan et al., 2020; Bavel et al., 2020; Shook et al., 2020). Their absence suggests that we may need to do more to increase our visibility within the scientific community and our participation in this vital research.

The same could be said about health psychology in the public arena. Experts who can address the behavioral and psychosocial aspects of the pandemic have been in great demand on news and talk shows, newspapers, and social media. Psychologists have been called upon many times to offer insights and advice for coping with the pandemic, but with few exceptions (e.g., Keilar, 2020), those who appear are usually not specialists in health psychology. On September 9, 2020, for example, CNN ran a story under the headline, “The Psychology Behind Why Some College Students Break COVID-19 Rules” (Andrew, 2020). Although this story focused on health risk behaviors, the reporter spoke with a developmental psychologist, a counseling psychologist, and a clinical psychologist, but not with a health psychologist. Similarly, the expert panelists at a CNN coronavirus town hall on May 21, 2020 (Cooper & Gupta, 2020) included a school psychologist and a professor of psychology with a background in neuroscience, but not a health psychologist.

It is understandable that the media, government agencies, school systems, and health care organizations would turn to developmental and school psychologists for questions about the effects of the pandemic on children, or to clinical and counseling psychologists for questions about COVID-related mental health problems. It is also appropriate for experts who are not psychologists to be asked to weigh in on certain behavioral or psychosocial aspects of the pandemic, such as when political scientists, law enforcement officials, and public health experts are asked why irate customers would attack frontline workers for promoting compliance with masking mandates at retail stores (MacFarquhar, 2020). Nevertheless, we believe that more could be done to ensure that health psychologists are high on the list of experts that reporters, policymakers, and others in the public arena will call upon to address questions about the behavioral and psychosocial aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as other public health problems and concerns.

How we see ourselves helps to determine how others see us. Since its inception, the field of health psychology has been preoccupied with prevalent chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, and we have paid less attention to infectious diseases. For example, only about 8% of the thousands of papers that have been published in Health Psychology have focused on infectious diseases or vaccination-related topics. Most of these reports concern HIV/AIDS (e.g., Fisher et al., 2006; Fisher et al., 1996; Hatzenbuehler et al., 2008; Safren et al., 2009) or other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs; e.g., Corbin & Fromme, 2002; Widman et al., 2014); only about one fifth of them focused on other infectious diseases. This could help to explain why scientists from other fields, policymakers, or reporters might overlook health psychologists when they need to engage experts in behavioral and psychosocial aspects of infectious diseases.

The good news is that health psychologists have shown much more interest in infectious diseases and vaccination-related issues in the past decade than was evident before then. Of all the papers ever published in Health Psychology on vaccination-related issues or infectious diseases other than STDs, 54% have been published since 2010. Similarly, across all of the highest-impact European and North American health psychology journals, 53% of the papers that have focused on these topics have been published since 2010. The highest impact pre-COVID papers focused on protective health behaviors during pandemics (Bish & Michie, 2010), vaccination (Betsch & Sachse, 2013; Bish et al., 2011; Ernsting et al., 2013; Gerend et al., 2013; Hornsey et al., 2018; Keenan et al., 2012; Krawczyk et al., 2012; Mantzari et al., 2015), overutilization of antibiotics (Sirota et al., 2017), hand hygiene (King et al., 2016), susceptibility to viral challenge (Miller et al., 2016), the Ebola epidemic (Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2017), the H1N1 flu pandemic (Karademas et al., 2013), and infections in cancer patients (Ruel et al., 2015).

The upsurge of interest in these topics is traceable to a series of disconcerting developments including successive epidemics of emerging infectious diseases, overutilization of antibiotics, and the spread of vaccination hesitancy and antivaccination movements. Our interest increased exponentially this year when our lives and those of everyone around us were turned upside down, or in some cases ended, by the COVID-19 pandemic. A growing list of publications on behavioral and psychosocial aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic in such high-impact journals as The Lancet (Betsch et al., 2020) and Nature Human Behavior (Bavel et al., 2020; Betsch, 2020) provides evidence of psychologists’ increasing visibility in work on infectious diseases and vaccination.

This is the right time to consider how the field of health psychology can build on these developments. If there were a larger and more visible cadre of health psychologists who specialized in novel communicable diseases, the behavioral aspects of epidemics, or the psychology of vaccine hesitancy, they would probably be on speed dial at national and local media outlets at a time like this. However, these professionals might have a challenging career path if they were to specialize too narrowly in epidemics or pandemics. The world has not experienced anything like COVID-19 since the 1918 flu pandemic, over 100 years ago. It seems less difficult to build a research career or a clinical practice around the behavioral or psychosocial aspects of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, or cancer—conditions that are with us in large numbers every day—than around pandemics and life-threatening epidemics that confront us only sporadically.

Despite this challenge, we believe that there are viable ways for interested health psychologists to develop special expertise, deep knowledge, recognition, and public visibility as experts in the behavioral and psychosocial aspects of infectious diseases. The development of this new subspecialty within health psychology would be consistent with a recent call for an integrated approach to agent, host, environmental, and behavioral factors in emerging infectious diseases (Morens & Fauci, 2020). It would build on adjacent areas in which health psychologists already have special expertise such as HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (e.g., Feldstein Ewing & Bryan, 2020; Hart et al., 2017), vaccination (e.g., Ayling et al., 2019; Bednarczyk, 2018), adherence (Bassett et al., 2019; Cornelius et al., 2018; Gathright et al., 2017), and health disparities (Harkness et al., 2020; Hostinar et al., 2017; Lee et al., 2017). Subspecialty training opportunities could be developed at pre- and postdoctoral levels in departments of psychology, psychiatry, and medicine and in health behavior divisions at schools of public health. In addition to providing a subspecialization path for trainees with a special interest in infectious diseases, pre- and postdoctoral training programs in health psychology should consider placing a greater emphasis across the board on infectious diseases, public health, prevention, and health inequities.

Finally, health psychology organizations must create more opportunities for health psychologists to apply and disseminate their expertise in the behavioral and psychosocial aspects of infectious diseases, vaccine hesitancy, and related problems. They should work to ensure that health psychologists with special expertise are visible and available when government agencies, health care organizations, or media representatives need experts in the behavioral and psychosocial aspects of infectious diseases or vaccination. We hope that health psychology organizations and training centers will recognize the need for concerted efforts to strengthen our role in the current pandemic and in the succession of epidemics we will surely face in the years ahead.^[1]