Chapter 1: An overview of Psychology and Health

Question 1

What is Health psychology?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

What can health psychologists do?

Answer 2

-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.

Question 3

What do you need to become a health Psychologist?

Answer 3

A doctoral degree in psych, that is concentrated in health, illness and medical care

Question 4

What is health commonly defined as?

Answer 4

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

Question 5

What is the problem with describing health as the absence of something?

Answer 5

A man who is smoking but otherwise feeling great- is he healthy?

Question 6

What is the illness/wellness continuum?

Answer 6

• 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.

Question 7

What is Health?

Answer 7

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)

Question 8

What was the historical cause of disease?

Answer 8

Sorcery, Object intrusion (magical intrusion of things like bones and pebbles and hair), Supernatural possession

Question 9

What were the early culture’s treatment for disease?

Answer 9

Magical rituals often involving spirits or deities or Trephination: drilling holes in the skull to allow evil spirits to escape

Question 10

Who was the father of medicine?

Answer 10

Hippocrates

Question 11

What did hippocrates believe were the causes of disease?

Answer 11

He had the humoural theory of illness: humour=plant or animal fluid. Balanced humours related to good health, unbalanced humours related to illness.

Question 12

What did hippocrates believe was the treatment for disease?

Answer 12

Eat good diet, avoid excess, objective to achieve humoral balance. Bloodletting.

Question 13

What was the body and mind distinction and who was the first person to propose it?

Answer 13

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.

Question 14

Who was Galen?

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

What happened in the middle ages?

Answer 15

Advancement of knowledge slowed considerably. Dissections of human and animals prohibited.
Church came to control the practice of medicine

Question 16

What did they believe were the causes for disease in the middle ages?

Answer 16

demons, God’s punishment for evil

Question 17

What were the treatment for disease in the middle ages?

Answer 17

Treatment for disease: priests treated illness, often involved torturing the body to drive out evil spirits

Question 18

Who rejected the mind/body problem?

Answer 18

St. Thomas Aquinas, he saw them as interrelated and this renewed interest and influenced future philosophers.

Question 19

What happened in the renaissance and after?

Answer 19

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

Question 20

Who was rene Descartes?

Answer 20

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)

Question 21

What is the biomedical model?

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

What are some assumptions of the biomedical model?

Answer 22

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.

Question 23

What is the Biopsychosocial model of health?

Answer 23

biology, psychology and sociology affect and are affected by the persons health

Question 24

What are the role of biological factors?

Answer 24

Genetic materials and processes inherited from parents and Function and structure of persons physiology

Question 25

What are the role of psychological factors?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

What are the role of social factors?

Answer 26

• We live in a social world
• We affect people and they affect us
• Societal values
• Community
• family

Question 27

How do we know what we know?

Answer 27

Scientists conduct systematic and unbiased research

Question 28

What is a theory?

Answer 28

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

Question 29

What is a variable?

Answer 29

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)

Question 30

Define mortality and morbidity

Answer 30

Mortality=death

Morbidity= illness, injury and disease

Question 31

What is prevalence vs. incidence

Answer 31

Prevalence=number of cases

Incidence=number of NEW cases

Question 32

What is a pandemic vs. an epidemic?

Answer 32

Epidemic: incidence of disease that has increased rapidly
Pandemic: an epidemic that has increased to international proportions

Question 33

What is an experiment?

Answer 33

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

Question 34

What does random assignment do?

Answer 34

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.

Question 35

What is placebo effect?

Answer 35

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

Question 36

What could you use to prevent from a scientist biasing the results?

Answer 36

A double blind procedure. in which both the participants and the researcher are blind to which pills are thee active ones.

Question 37

What are the criteria to make a causal claim?

Answer 37

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)

Question 38

What is a non experimental design?

Answer 38

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

Question 39

What are the three types of non-experimental design?

Answer 39

Genetic, Correlational, and Quasi experimental

Question 40

What is a correlational design?

Answer 40

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.

Question 41

What is a quasi experimental design?

Answer 41

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

Question 42

What are twin studies?

Answer 42

research on hereditary factors focused on studying differences between monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins

Question 43

What are adoption studies?

Answer 43

compare traits of adopted children with those of their natural parents and their adoptive parents

Question 44

What are epigenetics?

Answer 44

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)

Question 45

What is a positive association?

Answer 45

R values above zero, both variables are moving in the same direction

Question 46

What is a negative association?

Answer 46

R values below zero, variables are moving in opposite directions