The use of agricultural pesticides is increasingly associated with public health problems and negative impacts on the environment, in addition to the lack of protective actions developed by Brazilian environmental agencies. Our objective in this study was to analyze the relationships in the process that lead to the perception of risk of damage to human health by the use of pesticides in the riverine farming communities of the São Francisco Valley, in Brazilian northeast. We carried out a qualitative literature review, using the Constructivist Grounded Theory applied to the review of published scienti c articles. The elements in the perceptive process found were: 1) the environment; 2) conditioning factors; 3) the perception of the human body; 4) the memory; 5) socio-cognitive processing; 6) automatic response; 7) the decision process and 8) the behavior. Each of those elements and its relationships guide where the causes of an inadequate perception to resolve them.