Health Psychology

8th edition Shelley E. Taylor

Chapter One: What Is Health Psychology?

McGraw-Hill/Irwin

2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

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
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Health Psychology (cont.)

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

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2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Mind-Body Relationship: A Brief History

Disease was believed to be: - evil spirits entering the body - the result of the imbalance of blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm - Gods punishment for evil-doing

Advances in science looked to bodily factors rather than the mind as bases for health and illness
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The Mind-Body Relationship: A Brief History (cont.)

Psychoanalytic Contributions:
- Freuds 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
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The Mind-Body Relationship: A Brief History (cont.)

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
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The Mind-Body Relationship: Current Perspectives

- 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?

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2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Biopsychosocial Model in Health Psychology

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
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The Biopsychosocial Model in Health Psychology (cont.)

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
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The Biopsychosocial Model in Health Psychology (cont).

Clinical implications:
- diagnosis should always consider biological, psychological and social factors in assessing an individuals health or illness - recommendations for treatment must examine all three sets of factors - the relationship between the patient and the practitioner is significant
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The Biopsychosocial Model in Health Psychology (cont.)

Nightmare Deaths:
- unexpected nocturnal deaths to Southeast Asian refugee males - rare, genetically-based malfunction in the hearts pacemaker - men who were successfully resuscitated said they had been having severe night terror - biological, psychological and cultural factors were involved in the deaths
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Why is the Field of Health Psychology Needed?

- 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.
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Why is the Field of Health Psychology Needed (cont.)?

- increased medical acceptance - health psychology research:
- the role of theory - experiments - correlational studies - prospective designs - retrospective research

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2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

Why train in Health Psychology?

Careers in practice:
- physicians, nurses and allied health professionals

Careers in research:
- conduct research in public health, psychology and medicine

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2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.