Health Psychology: Health Psychology

Health Psychology:

• Health Psychology:

• - exciting and relatively new field devoted to

• understanding psychological influences on

• how people stay healthy, why people

• become ill and how they respond when

• they do get ill

Health Psychologists focus on:

• Health Psychologists focus on:

• - health promotion and maintenance
• - prevention and treatment of illness
• - etiology and correlates of health, illness and dysfunction
• - the health care system and the formulation of health policy

Disease was believed to be:

• Disease was believed to be:

• - evil spirits entering the body

• - the result of the imbalance of blood, black bile,

• yellow bile and phlegm

• - God’s punishment for evil-doing

• Advances in science looked to bodily factors rather than the mind as bases for health and illness

Psychoanalytic Contributions:

• Psychoanalytic Contributions:

• - Freud’s early work on conversion hysteria:

• - unconscious conflicts produce physical

• disturbances such as “glove anesthesia”

• (sudden loss of speech, hearing, or sight),

• tremors, muscular paralysis, possible eating

• disorders

Psychosomatic Medicine:

• Psychosomatic Medicine:

• - Dunbar and Alexander:

• - linked patterns of personality to specific illnesses

• - helped shape belief that bodily disorders are caused by emotional conflicts

• - criticisms:

• - methodological problems

• - conflict and personality not sufficient to produce illness

• - restricted the range of medical problems caused by psychological and social factors

- Increased attention to traditional East Asian medical philosophies and practices

• - Increased attention to traditional East Asian medical philosophies and practices

• The field of neuroscience has developed powerful new practices that help answer questions like:

• - How do placebos work?
• - Why are many people felled by functional disorders that seem to have no underlying biological causes?
• - Why is chronic pain so intractable to treatment?

Biopsychosocial model:

• Biopsychosocial model:

• - health and illness are consequences of the

• interplay of biological, psychological and

• social factors

• Biomedical model:

• - all illness can be explained on the basis of

• aberrant somatic bodily processes;

• psychological and social processes are

• irrelevant to disease process

Advantages of the Biopsychosocial Model:

• Advantages of the Biopsychosocial Model:

• - macrolevel processes and microlevel processes

• interact to produce a state of health or illness

• - the mind and body cannot be distinguished in

• matters of health and illness

• - researchers have adopted a systems theory

• approach to health and illness

Clinical implications:

• Clinical implications:

• - diagnosis should always consider biological,

• psychological and social factors in assessing an

• individual’s health or illness

• - recommendations for treatment must examine all

• three sets of factors

• - the relationship between the patient and the

• practitioner is significant

Nightmare Deaths:

• Nightmare Deaths:

• - unexpected nocturnal deaths to Southeast Asian refugee

• males

• - rare, genetically-based malfunction in the heart’s

• pacemaker

• - men who were successfully resuscitated said they had

• been having severe night terror

• - biological, psychological and cultural factors were

• involved in the deaths

- changing patterns of illness

• - changing patterns of illness

• - advances in technology and research:

• - role of Epidemiology in Health Psychology
• - morbidity and mortality

• - expanded health care services

• - health care is the largest service industry in
• the U.S.

- increased medical acceptance

• - increased medical acceptance

• - health psychology research:

• - the role of theory

• - experiments

• - correlational studies
• - prospective designs
• - retrospective research

Careers in practice:

• Careers in practice:

• - physicians, nurses and allied health professionals

• Careers in research:

• - conduct research in public health, psychology

• and medicine