PSYC105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Fear Conditioning, Nocebo, Endocrine System
1 Jun 2018
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Health Psychology – Week 12
What is health?
• Bidirectional relationship between psychology (thoughts, feelings, attitudes,
beliefs, motivations) and health
• Psychological aspects of:
o How and why illness develops
o How to stay healthy (avoid illness/maximize health and wellness)
o The impact of illness
o Management of illness
o Treatment of illness
• Health psych is an applied psychology – encapsulates other areas of
psychology = personality, social psych, cognition, perception,
neuropsychology etc.
History of health:
• Hippocrates’ Humoral Theory of Illness
o Theory that there are 4 different fluids that exist in the body – the level
of these determine your level of health and temperament
o Optimal health = balance in all 4 bodily fluids
• Plato (and other Greek philosophers): the body is separate from mind
(independent processes which did not affect each other)
• Galen (2nd century AD): thought about different areas of the body →
localization of illness in the body
• Middle Ages: church exercised control over medicine – no scientific progress
• Renaissance: Descartes’ breakthroughs
o Body is a machine – different processes/areas of body work together to
bring about illnesses and health and wellness
o Mind and body can communicate through the brain (they are
connected)
o Life ends at death
• 18th and 19th centuries: great advances in technology, science, physiology e.g.
pencilin and other medicine
• Pain pathways (Descartes, 1664)
o The picture: man standing next to fire, the foot is in the fire, the fire
affects his foot – the pain sensation travels up his body into his brain
and up into the pain processing areas of his brain (this was a major
discovery at the time)
Biomedical model:
• Physical or biological causes and aspects of disease
• Idea that disease happens as a result of a deregulation/breakdown in physical
processes – illness happens in the body and because of the body
• E.g. heart disease as a result of something wrong in your heart
• The way to treat disease is to target specific part of the body that originated
that disease and then to intervene at that stage e.g. medication that opens
things in the heart
• No real acknowledge of psychological/mental processes in these kind of
diseases
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
• Health is defined as the ‘absence of disease’ according to this model
Illness-Wellness Continuum (John Travis):
• This looks at both absence of diseases and also being healthy
• The absence of disease is not enough for wellness and health, you need
something more
• Suggested that you need some kind of purpose, spirituality or personal growth
that contributes to higher level of wellness
• This brought around the biopsychosocial model
Biopsychosocial model:
• Relationship between biology, psychology and social factors
• Biology
o Genetics
o Immune system
o Endocrine system
o Neurochemistry – what is happening in your brain
• Psychology
o Perception
o Cognition, memory, attitudes
o Emotions, appraisal
o Coping styles
• Social
o Social support
o Family relationships
o Culture
o Socio-economic status
• More holistic framework for understanding health and wellness
• In understanding why disease comes about, we need to understand the
contributions of all three of these areas – to fully understand the development
of diseases, addressing all three areas also for treatment
• All of them do not work in isolation – social setting will affect psychology,
biology will affect psychology etc.
Stress and coping:
• Stress response → tension, discomfort, symptoms that arise following
experience of a stressor (physiological arousal = increased heart rate, blood
pressure, shaking etc.)
• Stressor → situation/stimulus that strains our coping abilities e.g. exam – for it
to be a stressor, you need to individually recognize it as a stressor; thus it can
vary depending on the person
• Stress can be a stimulus (stressor)
• Stress can be a response
• Stress can also be a process or as a transaction (how we relate to our stressful
situations, how we cope)
• Yerkes-Dodson Law (1908)
o There is not a linear relationship between stress arousal and
performance
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Biomedical model: physical or biological causes and aspects of disease. In understanding why disease comes about, we need to understand the contributions of all three of these areas to fully understand the development of diseases, addressing all three areas also for treatment. All of them do not work in isolation social setting will affect psychology, biology will affect psychology etc. Idea of thinking about how people interpret or evaluate situations. Interpretation or evaluation of a situation (lazarus and folkman) Stress and illness (stress and coping): how does stress affect health, physiologically mechanisms (more direct effects on health) Increased physical tension: example: religiosity and health. Importance of good research methods: compared to non-religious people, religious people have: We do not understand the mechanism for the example: restriction of risky health behaviours, religion strict values unprotected sex, drinking, smoking etc. If you believe in a reason for an event, you engage in more adaptive behaviours more likely to deal with the situation.
