9. Health, Adjustment, & Resilience Flashcards
Adjustment
The process of altering behaviour in order to reach a harmonious relationship with one’s environment.
Health Psychology
A subdiscipline of psychology interested in studying relations between the mind and body, and how these two components respond to challenges from the environment to produce illness or health.
What Big 5 trait is reliably associated with positive health outcomes?
Conscientiousness
Stress
The subjective feeling/response that is produced by uncontrollable and threatening events. Events that cause stress are called stressors.
Interactional Model
And limitations
Objective events happen to a person, but personality factors determine the impact of those events by influencing the person’s ability to cope. This is called the interactional model because personality is assumed to moderate (that is, influence) the relation between stress and illness.
Limitations: Researchers were unable to identify stable coping responses that were consistently adaptive or maladaptive for any single person
Transactional Model
In this model of personality and health, personality has three potential effects: (1) it can influence coping, as in the interactional model; (2) it can influence how the person appraises or interprets the events; and (3) it can influence exposure to the events themselves.
So it’s not an event that causes stress but how the event is appraised/interpreted by the person.
Moderator
A variable that influences the direction or degree of relationship between two other variables.
Sometimes thought of as a risk multiplier.
Health Behaviour Model
Personality does not directly influence the relation between stress and illness. Instead, personality affects health indirectly, through health-promoting or health-degrading behaviours. This model suggests that personality influences the degree to which a person engages in various health-promoting or health-demoting behaviours.
Mediation
A scenario in which the effect of one variable on another “goes through” a third variable. We might observe a relationship between A and B, but these two variables may actually be related because A leads to C, and C in turn leads to B.
E.g. Conscientiousness correlated with longevity, as conscientiousness leads to better health behaviours
Predisposition Model
In health psychology, this model suggests that associations may exist between personality and illness because a third variable is causing them both.
Illness Behaviour Model
Personality influences the degree to which a person perceives and pays attention to bodily sensations, and the degree to which a person will interpret and label those sensations as an illness.
Healthy Neuroticism
A new concept that stresses the potential health benefits of neuroticism. Such benefits may result from increased hypervigilance about one’s health, which may lead an individual to seek out care or treatment earlier. On the other hand, there is evidence that neuroticism is healthy when it occurs alongside a high level of conscientiousness.
