Chapter 1 Flashcards
Etiology
refers to the origins or causes of illness, and the health psychologists are especially interested in the behavioral and social factors that contribute to health or illness and dysfunction, factors that can include health habits such as alcohol consumption, smoking, etc.
“health”
a complete sense of well being, not an absence of illness.
conversion hysteria
According to Freud, specific unconscious conflicts can produce particular physical disturbances that symbolize the repressed psychological conflicts. In conversion hysteria, the patient converts the conflict into a symptom via the voluntary nervous system, he or she then becomes relatively free of the anxiety or conflict otherwise produced.
Dunbar’s and Alexander’s works helped shape the emerging field of _______ ______ by offering profiles of particular disorders believed to be psychosomatic in origin - that is bodily disorders caused by emotional conflicts: ulcers, hyperthyroidism, arthritis, essential hypertension
psychosomatic medicine
biopsychosocial model
The idea that the mind and the body together determine health and illness logically implies a model for studying these issues. This model is called the biopsychosocial model. As its name implies, its fundamental assumption is that health and illness are consequences of the interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors.
biomedical model
maintains that all illness can be explained on the basis of aberrant somatic processes, such as biochemical imbalances or neurophysiological abnormalities. The biomedical model assumes that psychological and social processes are largely independent of the disease process.
systems theory
approach to health and illness. Systems theory maintains that all levels of organization in any entity are linked to each other hierarchically and that change in any one level will effect change in all other levels.
acute disorders
such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other infectious diseases - were among the major causes of illness and death in Canada. Acute disorders are short-term medical illnesses, often the result of a viral or bacterial invader and usually amenable to cure.
chronic illnesses
heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, and cancer - are the main contributors to disability and death, especially in industrialized countries. Chronic illnesses are slowly developing diseases with which people live for a long time.
Epidemiology
is the study of the frequency, distribution, and causes of infectious and noninfectious disease in a population, based on investigation of the physical and social environments.
Morbidity
refers to the numbers of cases of a disease that exist at some given point in time. Morbidity may be expressed as the number of new cases (incidence) or as the total number of existing cases (prevalence).
Mortality
refers to the number of deaths due to a particular cause.
experiment
In an experiment, a researcher creases two or more conditions that differ from each other in exact and predetermined ways. People are then randomly assigned to experience these different conditions, and by their reactions are measured. “randomized clinical trials”
cor relational research
in which the health psychologist measures whether a change in one variable corresponds with changes in another variable. A cor relational study might identify, for example, people who are high in hostility have a higher risk for cardiovascular disease.
prospective research
looks forward in time to see how a group of individuals change, or how a relationship between two variables change, or how a relationship between two variables changes, over time. For example, if we were to find that hostility develops relatively each in lofe, but other risk factors for hostility develop later, we might feel more confident that hostility is an independent risk factor.
