HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY – LITERATURE EXAM
Lecture 1: Introduction
Health psychology = study of social, behavioral, cognitive and emotional factors that contribute to:
promote and maintain health & prevent and manage illness & identify psychological factor that add
to physical illness & improve health care system.
Psychological processes that contribute to health and illness
Primary (prevent disease), secondary (early detection) and tertiary (improve coping with disease and
thereby prevent worsening) prevention.
This course focuses on tertiary prevention.
Model for designing interventions: intervention mapping.
Tutorial 1 – Social Support
Social support has many definitions. Different types:
- Emotional support
o Reassurance, listening, expressing affection and concerns, sharing task etc.
- Instrumental support
o Providing resources, spending time with someone, assisting with problems etc.
- Informational support
o Providing information, advice, feedback, guidance etc.
- Appraisal support (form of informational support)
o Providing evaluative feedback, information useful for self-evaluation
Social support = function and quality of social relationships
Social integration = structure and quantity of social relationships
Social network = web of relationships encircling an individual, with network characteristics (range,
size, density, boundedness, homogeneity) – number and diversity
Social support influences recovery. Emotional support often has greater positive effects than
instrumental and information support mechanisms: physiological, behavioral and psychological.
Social support buffers negative impact of stressful events (stress-buffering theory)
Perceived available support = amount of support people expect to receive.
Actual received support = help provided within given time (received).
Perceived social support is a better predictor of wellbeing.
,Seminar 1: Hospitalization
Learning goals
Students are able to:
Explain the difference between the concepts of disease and illness and why there can be a delay
between feeling ill and seeking help
Recognize and apply the dimensions of illness cognition
Explain whether illness can be seen as a crisis
Describe the stressors of hospitalization and the effects of hospitalization and medical
procedures
Are able to suggest interventions to reduce stress during hospitalization and medical procedures
based on evidence-based methods or behavior change techniques
Hospitalization and stressful medical procedures (Book Chapter 18)
Reported hospital stressors: hospital environment, separated from families environment, lack of
control and autonomy, communication difficulties, lack of clear, understandable information.
Crisis theory of physical illness (Moos and Schaefer): challenges when patients are confronted with
an illness, injury, hospitalization or medical procedure. These challenges can be associated with
changes in identity, environment, role, social support and prospects for the future.
Patients need to handle: pain and other symptoms, hospital environment and treatments,
developing, maintaining adequate relationships with health-care staff, general tasks How patients
deal with this will affect many outcomes: psychological, health status, quality of life and specific
illness outcomes.
There are many interventions to help patients cope with stressful medical procedures; categorized
based on coping skills:
- Appraisal-focused coping: attempts to understand the illness and searching for meaning.
- Problem-focused coping: dealing with the problem and redefining or reconstructing it as
manageable.
- Emotion-focused coping: managing emotions and maintaining emotional equilibrium.
Providing information, social support, skills training are the most frequently applied and best
evaluated techniques.
Knowledge clips on hospitalization and stressful medical procedures
- Disease = biomedically defined pathology within the human system which may or may not be
apparent to the individual
- Illness = person’s subjective experience of their symptoms
Often delay between experiencing symptoms and seeking help by professionals.
Illness cognitions = a patient’s own common sense beliefs about their illness
Five dimensions:
1. Identity: diagnosis and symptoms
a. Sickle cell disease – most severe form
2. Perceived cause of illness: stress, virus, unhealthy lifestyle
a. Genetic cause
3. Timeline: acute or chronic
a. Chronic people can live long life
4. Consequences: physical and emotional
, a. Pain in any location of body
5. Cure and control
a. Medication to prevent admissions
b. Healthy lifestyle
c. Positive attitude: people can live healthy lives with sickle cell disease
d. Fluid intake important
Illness is a crisis because it’s a turning point in an individual’s life. Changes in identity, location, role,
social support, future.
Identity: patient instead of student/co-worker etc.
Role: becomes dependent on care of parents again
Social support: need support from parents (friends, family?)
Location: lot in the hospital for treatment, at home to rest
Future is uncertain because of severity of disease
Effects of hospitalization
Stressors by illness, treatment, recovery, hospital environment.
Effects: unpleasant, barrier for postoperative recovery, effect on post-operative mood and pain, for
children it interferes with normal cognitive and social emotional development
