An Introduction to Health Psychology

HEALTH
PSYCH

AN INTRODUCTION

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1 Chapter One:
What Is Health Psychology?

2 Chapter Outline
•Definition of health psychology
•The mind-body relationship: a brief history
•The rise of the biopsychosocial method
•The need for health psychology
•Health psychology research
•What is health psychology training for?
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3 Health Psychology
•Studies psychological influences on people
•How they stay healthy
•Why they become ill
•How they respond when they get ill
•Health: Complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being
•Wellness: Optimum state of health

4 Focus of Health Psychologists
•Health promotion and maintenance
•Prevention and treatment of illness
•Etiology and correlates of health, illness, and dysfunction
•Etiology: Origins or causes of illness
•Improvement of health care system and the formulation of health
policy

5 The Mind-Body Relationship: A Brief History
•Disease during prehistory - Considered to arise when evil spirits
entered the body
•Humoral theory of illness - Diseases resulted when the humors or
circulating fluids of the body were out of balance
•Personality types associated with the humors
•Blood - Passionate temperament
•Black bile - Sadness

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•Black bile - Sadness

6 The Mind-Body Relationship: A Brief History

•Yellow bile - Angry disposition
•Phlegm - Laid-back approach to life
•Disease in Middle Ages - God’s punishment
•Renaissance to present day - Technical bases of medicine are
understood
•Dependent on laboratory findings and looked to bodily factors
•Diagnosis - Organic and cellular pathology
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7 Table 1.1 - The Biomedical model: Why is It Ill-suited to
Understanding Illness?

8 Conversion Hysteria
•Specific unconscious conflicts produce physical disturbances
symbolizing repressed psychological conflicts
•Conceptualized by Sigmund Freud
•Gave rise to psychosomatic medicine

9 Psychosomatic Medicine
•Specific illnesses are produced by people’s internal conflicts
•Perpetuated in the work of Dunbar and Alexander
•Linked patterns of personality to specific illnesses
• Criticism - Conflict or personality type is not sufficient to produce
illness

10 Biopsychosocial Model
•Health and illness are consequences of the interplay of biological,
psychological, and social factors
•Advantages
•Maintains the macrolevel and microlevel processes continually
interact to influence health and illness
•Emphasizes both health and illness

11 Clinical Implications of the Biopsychosocial Model
•Process of diagnosis can benefit from understanding the interacting
role of biological, psychological, and social factors
•Significance of the relationship between patient and practitioner is
made clear which improves:
•Patient’s use of services
•Efficacy of treatment

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•Patient’s use of services
•Efficacy of treatment
•Rapidity with which illness is resolved

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12 The Biopsychosocial Model: The Case History of Nightmare
Deaths
•Purpose - To see how completely the mind and body are intertwined
in health
•Sudden nocturnal deaths among male refugees from Southeast
Asia after the Vietnam war
•Occurred in the first few hours of sleep
•Autopsies revealed no specific cause of death
•Reasons
•Genetic susceptibility
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13 The Biopsychosocial Model: The Case History of Nightmare
Deaths
•Victims were overwhelmed by:
•Cultural differences
•Language barriers
•Difficulties finding satisfactory jobs
•Immediate trigger provided by:
•Family argument
•Violent television
•Frightening dreams
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14 Need for Health Psychology
•Increase in chronic or lifestyle-related illnesses
•Acute disorders: Tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other infectious
diseases
•Chronic illnesses: Heart disease, cancer, and respiratory diseases
•Advances in technology and research
•Expanded health care services
•Increased medical acceptance

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•Expanded health care services
•Increased medical acceptance

15 Theory

•Set of analytic statements that explain a set of phenomena
•Advantages
•Provide guidelines for how to do research and interventions
•Generate specific predictions that can be tested and modified
•Help tie together loose ends

16 Experiment
•Two or more different conditions are created to which people are
assigned randomly and their reactions are measured
•Randomized clinical trials: Conducted to evaluate treatments or
interventions and their effectiveness over time
•Evidence-based medicine: Medical interventions go through
rigorous testing and evaluation of their benefits before they
become the standard of care

17 Correlational Studies

•Correlational research: Measures whether a change in one variable
corresponds with changes in another variable
•Disadvantage - Difficult to determine the direction of causality
unambiguously
•Advantage over experiments - More adaptable
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18 Prospective Research
•Looks forward in time to see how:
•Group of people change
•Relationship between two variables changes over time
•Conducted to understand the risk factors that relate to health
conditions
•Longitudinal research: Same people are observed at multiple points
in time

19 Retrospective Designs
•Looks backward in time in an attempt to reconstruct the conditions
that led to a current situation
•Were critical in identifying the risk factors that led to the
development of AIDS

20 Role of Epidemiology in Health Psychology
•Epidemiology: Study of the frequency, distribution, and causes of
infectious and noninfectious disease in a population

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•Epidemiology: Study of the frequency, distribution, and causes of
infectious and noninfectious disease in a population
•Morbidity: Number of cases of a disease that exist at some given

point in time
•Mortality: Numbers of deaths due to particular causes

21 Methodological Tools

22 What is Health Psychology Training For?

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