chapter 1 (what’s health psychology?)

Question 1

health psychology

Answer 1

sub area 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.

Question 2

health

Answer 2

a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. -WHO, 1948

Question 3

etiology

Answer 3

the origins and causes of illness.

Question 4

mind-body relationship

Answer 4

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.

Question 5

conversion hysteria

Answer 5

the viewpoint advanced by freud that specific unconscious conflicts can produce physical disturbances symbolically of the repressed conflict; no longer a dominant viewpoint in health psychology.

Question 6

psychosomatic medicine

Answer 6

field within psychiatry, related to health psychology, that developed in early 1900’s to study and treat particular diseases believed to be caused by emotional conflicts, such as ulcers, hypertension, and asthma. term is now more broadly used to mean an approach to health-related problems and diseases that examines psychological as well as somatic origins.

Question 7

behavioural medicine

Answer 7

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.

Question 8

biopsychosocial model

Answer 8

view that biological, psychological, and social factors are all involved in any given state of health or illness.

Question 9

biomedical model

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

systems theory

Answer 10

viewpoint that all levels of an organism in any entity are linked to each other hierarchically and that change in any level will bring about change in other levels.

Question 11

acute disorders

Answer 11

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. most common cause of illness and death until early 20th century.

Question 12

chronic illnesses

Answer 12

illnesses that are long lasting, are the main contributors to disability and death today, and are usually irreversible.

Question 13

epidemiology

Answer 13

study of the frequency, distribution, and causes of infectious and non-infectious diseases in a population, based on an investigation of the physical and social environment.

Question 14

morbidity

Answer 14

number of cases of a disease that exist at a given point in time; may be expressed as number of new cases (incidence) or as total number of existing cases (prevalence).

Question 15

mortality

Answer 15

the number of deaths due to a particular cause.