Health psych review:
1. What is health?
State of complete physical, psychological, and social well being and not merely the absence
of disease or infirmity
2. What is health psychology?
Application of psychological principles and research to the enhancement of health and
prevention and treatment of illness.
3. Society for health psychology:
Advance contributions of psychology, promote education and services, inform the
psychological and biomedical community.
4. Goals of healthy people 2030:
Improving access to health services, eliminate health disparities, reducing chronic diseases.
5. Health disparities
Preventable differences in populations – nutrition, environment.
6. Trephination
drilling holes in the skull to treat mental illness.
7. Ayurveda
Natural medicine
8. Humoral theory
Hippocrates – if we are in balance, we have health
9. William Harvey
Biological causes of disease.
10. Biomedical approach
Decartes- Reductionism – disease is result of a pathogen.
11. Renaissance
Decartes: mind and body are separate.
Harvey: emotions affect the heart.
12. Germ theory
Microorganism cause disease
13. Franz alexander
Nuclear conflict model
14. Psychosomatic disease
Freud- our unconscious can cause physical diseases.
15. Etiology
Cause/ origin
16. Biopsychosocial model
Biological, psychological, and social aspects play a role in our health.
Biological context: every thought, mood, urge is a biological event made possible because of
biological structure of a persons body.
 Evolutionary perspective: Adaptation and reproductive success drive trait and
behaviour development
 Biology and behavior don’t occur in a vacuum, they constantly interact
 Life course perspective: Age related effects on health
 Genomics: the genetic or epigenetic sequence information of organisms
Psychological context: health and illness subject to psychological influences.
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Stress response is the same in chronic conditions
Positive psychology: many studies of the importance of subjective wellbeing and
sense of satisfaction with life
Social context: ways people think about, influence, and relate to one another and the environment
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Birth cohort: group of people born at the same time who experience similar historical and
social conditions
Sociocultural perspective: how social and cultural factors contribute to health and disease
17. Epigenetic
How the environment affects our genes
18. Acute disorders vs chronic illnesses
Short term vs long term
19. Ecological systems approach
Well-being is best understood as a hierarchy of systems in which each system is composed of
smaller subsystems and at the same time is part of larger, more encompassing systems
20. Health literacy
The extend to which people have the ability to find, understand and use information to make health
related decisions for themselves and others.
21. Subjective well-being
How people experience and evaluate their lives
22. Multifactorial theory
Many factors ( environmental, behavioural, psychological) can cause a specific behaviour