Health Psychology (W1 6/12)

Question 1

LO’s

Answer 1

Describe the role of health psychology approaches in understanding a patients experience of health and illness.

Question 2

What is health psychology?

Answer 2

How psychological, behavioral, and cultural factors contribute to physical health and illness.

Question 3

What are health behaviours?

Answer 3

Behaviour that impacts your health. They can be:

◦health-impairing habits, called ‘behavioural pathogens’ (e.g. smoking, eating a high fat diet)

◦health protective behaviours, defined as ‘behavioural immunogens’ (e.g. attending a health check)

Question 4

What is the health belief model?

Answer 4

• The Health Belief Model (HBM) was developed to understand the failure of people to adopt disease prevention strategies or screening tests for the early detection of disease.
• It says that our beliefs about the threat (severity, likelihood of developing disease) and cost/benefits of the illness influence our motivation. For example someone thinking about smoking may judge it as likely to cause lung cancer, and cancer being a severe illness. Then the may decide it will save them money, but make the irritable.

Criticisms:

1. Focus on the conscious processing of information: emotions not conscious.
2. Some behaviour is automatic, like tooth-brushing
3. Emphasis on the individual, what abou social influences?
4. Other factors: individual may have low self-efficacy

Question 5

What is social cognitive theory?

Answer 5

• Tries to explain how we learn behaviour.
• It includes:

1. Outcome expectancion: what they think the behaviour will cause: EG make me irritable
2. Self Efficacy: unless people believe they can produce desired effects by their actions, they have little incentive to act or to persevere in the face of difficulties and setbacks.
3. Socio-structural factors: if people lack awareness of how their lifestyle habits affect their health, they have little reason to put themselves through the misery of changing the bad habits they enjoy.

• See https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Bandura/Bandura1998PH.pdf

Question 6

What is the Theory of Planned Behaviour?

Answer 6

• Three things influence intention:
  
  1. Attitude: this behaviour is bad
  2. Subjective Norms: what other think of their behaviour. EG they don’t like me smoking
  3. Perceived behavioural control: self- efficacy. EG can I stop?

Question 7

What is the self-regulatory model?

Answer 7

• Explains how people develop a mental representation of health threat/diagnosis.
• Stage 1 is interpretation. They interpret their symptoms into diagnosis and identify it as a deviation from the norm.
• Stage 2: then they try to respond to the health threat. Either by avoiding it or approaching it. This is influenced by their representation of their illness (whether it can be cures, is it chronic, how long will it last) and their emotions, like anxiety, fear and depression.
• Stage 3: appraisal, they think about whether their response was correct.

Question 8

How do people cope with a diagnosis?

Answer 8

1. Shock: most people go into a state of shock following a diagnosis of a serious illness - stunned and bewildered, behaving in an automatic fashion and having feelings of detachment from the situation.
2. Encounter reaction: disorganized thinking and feelings of loss, grief, helplessness and despair.
3. Retreat: denial of the problem and its implications and a retreat into the self.

Question 9

Interventions to change behaviour?

Answer 9

• Be specific about the behaviour that needs to change: exercise three/week at home for a year
• Identify patient’s health beliefs and challange.
• Goal setting:

1. •Waist circumference targets
2. •Weekly calorific intake
3. •Weekly fibre and fat intake
4. •Weekly exercise

• Self- monitoring: keep food diary.
• Yearly monitoring with consultant
• Support groups/ apps

Question 10

What is the cycle of change?

Answer 10

1. Pre-contemplation
2. Contemplation
3. Preparation
4. Action
5. Maintainance/ Relapse Prevention