Essay Questions Flashcards
Discuss the four methods for optimising media use to health behaviour change
Refining communication - central and peripheral processing
Use of Fear: should arouse some degree of fear, increase sense of severity
Information framing - The framing of behaviour change as positive or negative to health consequences (benefits of reducing engagement in a health risk behaviour as opposed to health consequences for continuing to engage).
Audience Targeting - choosing the appropriate audience for broadcasting
Describe the environmental manipulations that may be used to influence health-related behaviour
Cues to action - or remove cues to unhealthy behaviour
Enable healthy behaviour by minimising its associated costs
maximise the cost of engaging in health-risk behaviours
Once a symptom is perceived, people do not consider it in isolation but rather relate it to other aspects of their experiences and to their wider concepts of illness. Describe the three broad influences upon symptom interpretation
Culture differences - a. the extent to which individuals are ready to respond to perceived symptoms. This can include expression of pain, and acceptance of treatment and pain medication. It is argued that these cultural variations are learned during socialisation.
individual differences - in how symptoms are interpreted, some people go about their daily activities while experiencing what would be perceived as debilitating illness symptoms by another person.
Disease prototype - are the cognitive schemata that influence whether a particular bodily sensation is perceived as a symptom or illness, and subsequently how it is responded to. These disease prototypes help people match physical sensations that might not otherwise be interpretable, by placing the symptoms in the context of their knowledge and experience of certain illnesses.
Discuss the general explanations why individuals delay seeking health advice
Appraisal delay - the time taken interpreting whether symptoms are in fact an illness
Illness delay - the time between recognising you have an illness and seeking medical attention.
Utilisation delay - the time between deciding to seek medical attention and actually taking action (e.g. booking doctor appointment, going to the hospital. If this is out of the individuals control it is called scheduling delay (e.g. waiting list)
Many factors influence the impact of stress on health. Describe how factors attributed to a persons personality can affect stress responses and outcomes
Personality may be associated with unhealthy behaviours that predict disease (e.g. smoking, drinking)
General aspects of personality such as dispositional optimism or pessimism may influence the manner through which an individual copes with stressful events
Personality may predict disease onset. e.g. psychosomatic medicine
Certain clusters of personality traits are predisposing factors for certain illness directly through physiological activation and indirectly through appraisal and coping responses.
Discuss the three general approaches that have been successfully applied to reducing distress during serious illness
Information provision - includes providing info about the nature of the treatment of the disease, coping with the disease/treatment and the potential for behaviour change to reduce the risk of disease progression
Stress management training - includes teaching strategies such as cognitive restructuring, problem solving and relaxation
Enhancing Social support - facilitated by creating professional-led groups where patients can get support from others with similar health conditions.
describe how implementation intentions operate on health behaviour decisions making
one reason for why people don’t always translate their intentions to action is that they do not make adequate plans to do so. This involves making specific plans or implementation intentions around engaging in thebehaviour. A goal intention such as “I intend to quit smoking” is motivational and apart of the TPB. Whereas an implementation intention such as “I intend to quit smoking tomorrow at 5pm using nicotine gum” refers to a specific plan for implementation, which is not part of the TPB. Implementation intentions have been widely found to increase a person’s likelihood to make abehaviouralchange, however more recent research (e.g.,Mullan& Wong, 2010) have found that this is not always the case.
The transactional psychological model of stress highlighted the crucial role of appraisal and the importance of considering the individual in the stress experience. Discuss Lazarus’s transactional model of stress (Lazarus & Launier, 1978), its limitations, and the factors that influence stress appraisal.
stress is a result of an interaction between an individual’s characteristics and appraisals (personality), the external or internal event (stressor) environment, and the internal or external resources (ability to cope) that a person has available to them.
primary appraisal - appraisal of event. e.g. harmful, threaten, challenge
secondary appraisals: assessment of abilities to cope, internal and external (social)
limitations:
