Chapter 1: An overview of Psychology and Health Flashcards
What is Health psychology?
A Relatively new field based in psychology with 4 goals:
- Promote and maintain health
- prevent and treat illness
- Identify the cause and diagnostic correlates of health
- Analyze and improve health care systems and health policy
What can health psychologists do?
-work in hospitals, clinics, academia, government.
They can provide therapy for adjustment to problems related to disease.
-Help people make difficult behavioral changes.
-Can conduct research, can help inform policy.
-Educate health care providers on how to meet patient needs.
What do you need to become a health Psychologist?
A doctoral degree in psych, that is concentrated in health, illness and medical care
What is health commonly defined as?
health is commonly defined as the absence of objective signs that the body is not functioning properly (high blood pressure), subjective symptoms would be like pain and nausea
What is the problem with describing health as the absence of something?
A man who is smoking but otherwise feeling great- is he healthy?
What is the illness/wellness continuum?
- Shows different health statuses
- Left of neutral: health gets progressively worse
- Right of neutral: health gets progressively better
- Segments: dominant features of health statuses based on physical condition and lifestyle. Medical treatment Begins on the left side of neutral and Can bring person back to neutral. Healthy lifestyles Can bring person back to neutral and Can bring them to the far right.
What is Health?
state of physical, mental and social well-being and not just the absence of illness or disease” (someone with a disease can still be healthy, for example a diabetic)
What was the historical cause of disease?
Sorcery, Object intrusion (magical intrusion of things like bones and pebbles and hair), Supernatural possession
What were the early culture’s treatment for disease?
Magical rituals often involving spirits or deities or Trephination: drilling holes in the skull to allow evil spirits to escape
Who was the father of medicine?
Hippocrates
What did hippocrates believe were the causes of disease?
He had the humoural theory of illness: humour=plant or animal fluid. Balanced humours related to good health, unbalanced humours related to illness.
What did hippocrates believe was the treatment for disease?
Eat good diet, avoid excess, objective to achieve humoral balance. Bloodletting.
What was the body and mind distinction and who was the first person to propose it?
Mind has no impact/relationship with health (dominant view today)
Body: our physical being, including skin, muscles, bone, heart and brain
Mind: abstract processes that include thoughts, perceptions an feelings
Mind/body problem: we can separate the mind and body conceptually, but do they actually function independently? Plato was one of the first to propose it.
Who was Galen?
He was a roman physician (2nd century CE) believed in the humoural theory and the mind/body split but made new innovations by dissecting animals. He discovered that illness can be localized w/ pathology in certain parts of the body. Discovered that different diseases have different effects.
What happened in the middle ages?
Advancement of knowledge slowed considerably. Dissections of human and animals prohibited.
Church came to control the practice of medicine
What did they believe were the causes for disease in the middle ages?
demons, God’s punishment for evil
What were the treatment for disease in the middle ages?
Treatment for disease: priests treated illness, often involved torturing the body to drive out evil spirits
Who rejected the mind/body problem?
St. Thomas Aquinas, he saw them as interrelated and this renewed interest and influenced future philosophers.
What happened in the renaissance and after?
Scientific revolution (human centered instead of God centered. Influence of descartes. Science and medicine grew rapidly with improvements in the microscope and dissections. Surgery become more popular after antiseptic techniques and anesthesia came about in the mid 1800s
Who was rene Descartes?
believed the mind and body were separate entities but had three new ideas:
- Body as a machine: describes the mechanisms of action and sensation (e.g., how we experience pain)
- Mind and body were separate but could communicate through the pineal glands in the brain
- Believed animals had no souls and that human souls leave their body at death (dissections began again)
What is the biomedical model?
All diseases or physical disorders can be explained by disturbances in physiological processes, which result from injury, biochemical imbalances, bacterial or viral infection and the like. Biomedical model does not factor the person as a unique individual.
What are some assumptions of the biomedical model?
Health= absence of disease. Disease is an affliction of the body. Disease is separate from psychological or social processes of the mind. Emphasis on diagnosis and treatment, Doctors fix the condition, cure the disease, patient is passive. Dualistic- mind and body separate. Health problems are now chronic rather than acute.
What is the Biopsychosocial model of health?
biology, psychology and sociology affect and are affected by the persons health
What are the role of biological factors?
Genetic materials and processes inherited from parents and Function and structure of persons physiology
What are the role of psychological factors?
Cognition: mental activity that encompasses perceiving, learning, remembering, thinking, etc.
Emotion: subjective feelings that affect and are affected by, our thoughts
Motivation: process that initiates someone to do something, its direction and persistence
What are the role of social factors?
- We live in a social world
- We affect people and they affect us
- Societal values
- Community
- family
How do we know what we know?
Scientists conduct systematic and unbiased research
What is a theory?
Theory: tentative explanation of why and under what circumstances certain things occur. Enables us to make predictions. Helps us understand the relationship between variables. Provides a roadmap of what and how to study phenomena
What is a variable?
a measure of a characteristic, object, or event that can change (has more than one level meaning it can change and it is not constant)
Define mortality and morbidity
Mortality=death
Morbidity= illness, injury and disease
What is prevalence vs. incidence
Prevalence=number of cases
Incidence=number of NEW cases
What is a pandemic vs. an epidemic?
Epidemic: incidence of disease that has increased rapidly
Pandemic: an epidemic that has increased to international proportions
What is an experiment?
A controlled study where researchers manipulate an independent variable to study its effect on the dependent variable
Sometimes called a trial in health research
Experiments are well controlled
Manipulate= researcher controls “level” or independent variable
Controlled=removing confounding variables
What does random assignment do?
Helps us equate the groups before manipulation, balances randomly.Therefore existing characteristics should be equal in both groups and have the same effect on the dependent variable.
What is placebo effect?
A placebo is an inactive substance or procedure
Placebo group: thinks they are getting the treatment and receive the same instruction as the experimental group
Influence of placebo on dependent variable is called placebo effect
What could you use to prevent from a scientist biasing the results?
A double blind procedure. in which both the participants and the researcher are blind to which pills are thee active ones.
What are the criteria to make a causal claim?
Levels of independent and dependent variable must correspond (or vary) together (covariance)
The cause preceded the effect (temporal precedence)
All other causes have to be ruled out (internal validity)
What is a non experimental design?
No manipulation of the independent variable and no equating of the groups.
- -Do not provide causal evidence
- -Despite lack of causal inference, still very useful
- -Sometimes not realistic to randomly assign people to groups
- -Cant manipulate things from the past
- -Cant have people do something harmful
What are the three types of non-experimental design?
Genetic, Correlational, and Quasi experimental
What is a correlational design?
A correlation is relationship between two variables, as one changes so does the other. Magnitude and direction of the correlation are important. A correlational study is non experimental investigations of the degree and direction of statistical association between two variables.
What is a quasi experimental design?
Look like experiments (because there are separate groups) but they aren’t because people were not randomized to groups. Independent variable: can, or can not, be manipulated
Conclusions: still correlational
What are twin studies?
research on hereditary factors focused on studying differences between monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins
What are adoption studies?
compare traits of adopted children with those of their natural parents and their adoptive parents
What are epigenetics?
the study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself. influenced by the environment. (a change in phenotype without a change in genotype)
What is a positive association?
R values above zero, both variables are moving in the same direction
What is a negative association?
R values below zero, variables are moving in opposite directions
