Chapter 1 Flashcards
Health psychology
The subarea within psychology devoted to understanding psychological influences on health, illness, and responses to those states, as well as the psychological origins and impacts of health policy and health interventions.
Health
A complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
Wellness
Optimum state of health.
Etiology
The origins and causes of illness (Eg. Alcohol consumptions, smoking, exercise, etc.)
What four factors does health psychology represent?
- The educational, scientific, and professional contributions of psychology to the promotion and maintenance of health.
- The prevention and treatment of illness.
- The identification of the causes and correlates of health and illness.
- The improvement of the health care system and the formulation of health policy.
What are the three treatment-related behaviours? Provide an example of each:
- Screening behaviours (Eg. cancer screening)
- Care-seeking behaviours (Eg. Going to the doctor)
- Maintenance and adherence behaviours (Eg. Treatment adherence and discontinuation)
Mind-body relationship
The philosophical position regarding whether the mind and body operate indistinguishably as a single system or whether they act as two separate systems; the view guiding health psychology is that the mind and body are indistinguishable.
Conversion hysteria
The viewpoint, originally advanced by Freud, that specific unconscious conflicts can produce physical disturbances symbolic of the repressed conflict; no longer a dominant viewpoint in health psychology.
Psychosomatic medicine
A field within psychiatry, related to health psychology, that developed in the early 1900s to study and treat particular diseases believed to be caused by emotional conflicts, such as ulcers, hypertension, and asthma; the term is now used more broadly to mean an approach to health-related problems and diseases that examines psychological as well as somatic origins.
Behavioural medicine
The interdisciplinary field concerned with integrating behavioural science and biomedical science for understanding physical health and illness and for developing and applying knowledge and techniques to prevent, diagnose, treat, and rehabilitate.
Biopsychosocial model
The view that biological, psychological, and social factors are all involved in any given state of health or illness.
Biomedical model
The viewpoint that illness can be explained on the basis of aberrant somatic processes and that psychological and social processes are largely independent of the disease process; the dominant model in medical practice until recently.
What are the primary differences between the biomedical model and the biopsychosocial model?
Systems theory
The viewpoint that all levels of an organization in any entity are linked to each other hierarchically and that change in any level will bring about change in other levels.
Acute disorders
Illnesses or other medical problems that occur over a short period of time, that are usually the result of an infectious process, and that are reversible.
