Health Psychology
8th edition
Shelley E. Taylor
Chapter One:
What Is Health Psychology?
McGraw-Hill/Irwin
© 2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Health Psychology
Health Psychology:
- exciting and relatively new field devoted to
understanding psychological influences on
how people stay healthy, why people
become ill and how they respond when
they do get ill
1-2
© 2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Health Psychology (cont.)
Health Psychologists focus on:
- health promotion and maintenance
- prevention and treatment of illness
- etiology and correlates of health, illness and
dysfunction
- the health care system and the formulation of
health policy
1-3
© 2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Mind-Body Relationship: A
Brief History
Disease was believed to be:
- evil spirits entering the body
- the result of the imbalance of blood, black bile,
yellow bile and phlegm
- God’s punishment for evil-doing
Advances in science looked to bodily factors rather
than the mind as bases for health and illness
1-4
© 2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Mind-Body Relationship: A
Brief History (cont.)
Psychoanalytic Contributions:
- Freud’s early work on conversion hysteria:
- unconscious conflicts produce physical
disturbances such as “glove anesthesia”
(sudden loss of speech, hearing, or sight),
tremors, muscular paralysis, possible eating
disorders
1-5
© 2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Mind-Body Relationship: A
Brief History (cont.)
Psychosomatic Medicine:
- Dunbar and Alexander:
- linked patterns of personality to specific illnesses
- helped shape belief that bodily disorders are
caused by emotional conflicts
- criticisms:
- methodological problems
- conflict and personality not sufficient to produce illness
- restricted the range of medical problems caused by
psychological and social factors
1-6
© 2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Mind-Body Relationship:
Current Perspectives
- Increased attention to traditional East Asian medical
philosophies and practices
- The field of neuroscience has developed powerful
new practices that help answer questions like:
- - How do placebos work?
- - Why are many people felled by functional disorders that
seem to have no underlying biological causes?
- - Why is chronic pain so intractable to treatment?
1-7
© 2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Biopsychosocial Model in
Health Psychology
Biopsychosocial model:
- health and illness are consequences of the
interplay of biological, psychological and
social factors
Biomedical model:
- all illness can be explained on the basis of
aberrant somatic bodily processes;
psychological and social processes are
irrelevant to disease process
1-8
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The Biopsychosocial Model in
Health Psychology (cont.)
Advantages of the Biopsychosocial Model:
- macrolevel processes and microlevel processes
interact to produce a state of health or illness
- the mind and body cannot be distinguished in
matters of health and illness
- researchers have adopted a systems theory
approach to health and illness
1-9
© 2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Biopsychosocial Model in
Health Psychology (cont).
Clinical implications:
- diagnosis should always consider biological,
psychological and social factors in assessing an
individual’s health or illness
- recommendations for treatment must examine all
three sets of factors
- the relationship between the patient and the
practitioner is significant
1-10
© 2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Biopsychosocial Model in
Health Psychology (cont.)
Nightmare Deaths:
- unexpected nocturnal deaths to Southeast Asian refugee
males
- rare, genetically-based malfunction in the heart’s
pacemaker
- men who were successfully resuscitated said they had
been having severe night terror
- biological, psychological and cultural factors were
involved in the deaths
1-11
© 2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Why is the Field of Health
Psychology Needed?
- changing patterns of illness
- advances in technology and research:
- role of Epidemiology in Health Psychology
- morbidity and mortality
- expanded health care services
- health care is the largest service industry in
the U.S.
1-12
© 2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Why is the Field of Health
Psychology Needed (cont.)?
- increased medical acceptance
- health psychology research:
- the role of theory
- experiments
- correlational studies
- prospective designs
- retrospective research
1-13
© 2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Why train in Health Psychology?
Careers in practice:
- physicians, nurses and allied health professionals
Careers in research:
- conduct research in public health, psychology
and medicine
1-14
© 2012 McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.