ALHT106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Time Preference, Conscientiousness, Health Promotion
Health Psychology
• Health: in historical context
o Modern humans now on average live twice as long as our genetically near-identical
ancestors who lived in traditional societies
o That number is somewhat inflated by the far higher infant mortality rates typically
found in pre-industrial area (skews TS downwards) but even median longevity is
decades apart
o While the differences between traditional societies and modern state societies are
many and varying, this enormous overall increase in longevity is primarily due to
improved access to food, safety and medical care
o Although our traditional society brethren are almost always noticeably tougher than
us, misfortune tends to be permanent
o The history of health
• Medicine is the crowning achievement of applied biological science, but it is
heir to a wide range of healing traditions from across the globe that seem
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embarrassingly ineffective in retrospect, due to their misunderstanding of
disease
▪ Spiritual and possession accounts - treated demons and sin residue
▪ Humoralism and hydraulic accounts - treated with blood-letting
▪ Vitalism and alchemy accounts - treated with narcotics and shocks
• As the progression of the healing arts discovered and embraced increasingly
scientific and biophysical approaches to bodily illness and disease, it allowed
for systematic accounts of uniquely mental afflictions, setting the stage for
the rise of psychological therapies
• Now that the medical model of health has begun to develop a more nuanced
and sophisticated account of how the body and mind interact, we've formed a
united Biophysical Model of Health
▪ Inspiringly effective, and has yielded an enormous wealth of life-saving
and quality-of-life improving interventions, that really is a relatively
recent trend in medicine
▪ We find it easy to laugh at the pre-medical health approaches just
mentioned, but right up until the 1850s seeing a doctor typically did
more harm than good (iatrogenic)
• Because we live in a safer and less volatile world than our ancestors, our
contemporary health profile looks radically different from theirs
• We tend to die for different reasons, in trends that can be tracked over
decades
• What we now die from
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o Healthier now
• We have socially conquered the primary sources of illness and death in
traditional societies
• We have increasing rates of deaths by cancers, coronary disease and
metabolic diseases
• The truly troubling comparison to be made, when comparing our health and
mortality profiles to those in traditional societies is that we seem to live
longer, but are in many ways less healthy every step of the way
• It's not that we dodge infections and injuries long enough to then die of
cancer, heart failure or metabolic sickness, but those illness skyrocket in
hunter gatherers who adopt our ways
• Health and human behaviour
o Health psychology
• While the clinical fields of Psychopathology are concerned with the health and
coordination of the mind itself, Health Psychology is the field of psychology
concerned with how our patterns of thought, belief and behaviour contribute
to (or undermine) our bodily health and specific diseases
• Since our minds are control systems for our bodies, health psychologists
investigate how our minds manage our health
o Health-affecting behaviour
• There are a wide range of behaviours that we either voluntarily or habitually
engage in which are now known to have long-term aversive effects on our
health
• e.g. alcoholism, smoking, narcotics, obesity, unprotected sex
• Health psychology models seek to help explain, predict and intervene on the
attitudes, beliefs and behavioural pressures that make us embrace harmful
lifestyles, even when we know better
• When we looked back at old-world vitalists and spiritualists, it was easy to
explain many intentional behaviours that had a negative impact on health as
being born of ignorance or mistaken belief (e.g. excessive blood-letting,
exorcism, etc.)
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