11. Health Psychology Flashcards
____ ____ is devoted to understanding psychological influences on how people stay healthy, why they become ill and how they respond when they do get ill.
Health Psychology
History of health psychology
Early theorists believe that disease arose when ____ ____ entered the body. To rid the body of these spirits, a crude type of what today is called neurosurgery was performed using Stone Age tools.
evil spirits
This surgery, called ____, involved drilling holes in the skull of the diseased individual to allow the evil spirits to escape.
trepanation
The Greeks later ascribed illness to poor bodily functioning. Hippocrates proposed the ____ ____ __ ____, which asserts that disease is caused by an imbalance in the four fluids or humours of the body – blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Fluid imbalance produced both psychological and physical changes.
humoural theory of illness
The Middle Ages saw the return of conceptions of disease as a result of ____ forces, reflecting the dominance of religion at the time. Disease was considered to be God’s punishment for wrongdoing. Treatments, generally controlled by the church, focused on torturing the body to atone for wrongdoing.
mystical
The Renaissance, beginning of the 15th century, witnessed great strides in medical knowledge and treatment. During this period of time, major contributions were made by Leeuwenhoek in ____ and buy Morgagni in the area of ____.
microscopy, autopsy
Descartes (1596 to 1650) proposed his theory of ____ ____, which contends that the mind and the body a completely separate entities.
Cartesian dualism
The role of the ____ in disease took precedence rather than the mind.
body
The development of microscopy led to observations of individual cells within the human body, which laid the foundation for the ‘____ theory of illness’, the idea that illness and disease results from abnormalities within individual cells.
cellular
The____ model takes a reductionist view of illness, reducing disease to biological causes at the level of individual cells.
biomedical
____ and social factors that effect health are virtually ignored.
Psychological
Freud realised that some illnesses could not be traced to an underlying ____ cause.
biological
The idea that changes in physiology mediate the relationship between unconscious conflicts and illness.
Psychosomatic medicine
The idea that health and illness stem from a combination of biological, psychological and social factors.
Biopsychological model of health
The ____ ____ ____ suggests that health behaviours are predicted by four factors: the perceived susceptibility to the health threat, the perceived seriousness of the health threat, the benefits and barriers of undertaking particular health behaviours, and cues to action.
Health belief model
(1) Refers to a persons perception that he is likely to contract a particular illness. Optimistic bias – people believe that they are far less likely than other people to contract particular illnesses.
Perceived susceptibility to a health threat
(2) Refers to an individual’s perception of the impact of particular illness would have on her life.
Perceived seriousness or severity of the health threat
(3) In deciding whether or not to adopt a health behaviour, people evaluate whether the ____ to be gained from stopping the behaviour outweigh the costs or ____ associated with the termination of the behaviour.
benefits and barriers of undertaking particular health behaviours
(4) Refer to ancillary factors that influence whether or not a person is willing to begin a healthy behaviour or terminate an unhealthy one.
Cues to action
In the 1980s the health belief model was modified to include the component of ‘self efficacy’, a persons belief in her ability to successfully undertake a particular action or behaviour. With the addition of self-efficacy the health belief model assumed a new name …
Protection motivation theory of health
Like the health belief model takes the social cognitive view towards health behaviours, broadly stating that behaviours stem from behavioural intentions.
Theory of reasoned action
____ to perform a particular behaviour are necessary first steps towards actually performing the behaviour.
Intentions
Behavioural intentions are a function of two components: ____ towards the behaviour and the ____ ____ surrounding the behaviour.
attitudes, subjective norms
____ represent the beliefs one has that a particular behaviour will produce a particular outcome and one’s evaluation of those outcomes.
Attitudes
____ ____ reflects someone’s perception of how significant other individuals will view the behaviour and the motivation to comply with the desires of those others.
Subjective norms
This includes all the components of the theory of reasoned action plus self-efficacy, sometimes referred to as perceived behavioural control.
Theory of planned behaviour
