Health Psychology Flashcards
Health Pyshcology:
- bidirectional relationship between psychology and health
- psychological aspects of how and why illness develops, how to stay healthy, the impact of illness, management of illness
History of health
- Hippocrates Humoral Theory of Illnes: equilibrium of fluids in your body,
- Plato: body separate from mind
- Galen: localisation of illness in the body - many autopsies
- Renaissance: descartes’ breakthroughs (body is a machine, mind and body communicate through brain, life ends with death)
Biomedical model
Physical or biological causes and aspects of diseases
The biomedical model (frameworks that help us to understand problems and help with treating problems) has been very dominant in medical science = very much focussed on physical / biological causes of ill health
Defining health
- the absence of sickness
- illlness-wellness continuum: health is a more positive state - the neutral point isn’t necessarily ‘well’
Stress
- stress response: tension, discomfort, symptoms that arise from experiencing a stressor
- stressor: situation / stimilus that strains coping abilities
stress as a stimulus, response, process
Yerkes Dodson Law - stress
Performance on the Y axis, Arousal on the X axis
Mapping simple vs difficult tasks
Appraisal
- interpretation or evaluation of a situation
- primary appraisal: relevance/salience and valence
- secondary appraisal: coping
challenge vs threat appraisals
dispositional similarities and situational differences
major life events vs hassles
Coping
behaviours and thoughts an individual engages in to deal with a stressful situation
- reappraisal
- acceptance
- distraction
- rumination
problem focused vs emotion-focused coping
- practical/active vs avoidant coping
- adaptive vs maladaptive coping
- flexible coping
How does stress affect health>
Physiologically:
- increases blood pressure
- changes blood composition
- release of stress hormones
- suppression of immune system
Behaviourally:
- less sleep/rest
- less exercise
- less healthy food eaten
- increased physical tension
- less social support
what is pain?
- sensory and emotional discomfort
- usually associated with tissue damage
- psychological phenomenon
Pain doesn’t exist in your body, but instead in your mind
Process of pain
- (noxious) stimulation at local tissue site
- chemicals released –> inflammation and activation of nerve endings, nerves transmit signals to spinal cord then to brain
- information is processed by different parts of the brain
Pain is psychological
the same nociceptive input can be manipulated to create more or less pain
negative mood causes same input to be more painful and positive mood can buffer
pain can be generated without nocioceptive input (rubber hand illusion)
placebo effect
- positive effect results not from any active treatment, but purely from patient’s belief in or expectations of treatment
- fundamental to clinical trials (typically for the control group treatment)
mechanisms of placebo
works due to expectancy theory and conditioning
- if you have a certain lens on the world, you will experience this
- conditioning: if you’ve had an illness, you take a pill, you no longer have negative symptoms (conditioned association)
how does it work:
- endogenous opiods and neurotransmitters (dopamine and seratonin)
brain gut connections
The enteric nervous system is a direct line of communication between the stomach and the brain.
Associated with creating 50% of the body’s dopamine, and 90% serotonin production.
