PS285 Lecture 2: PS285 - Lecture Notes - 05.04.16
Document Summary
Health psychology: exciting and relatively new field devoted to understanding psychological influences on how people stay healthy, why people become ill, etc. Etiology (origins) and correlates of health, illness and dysfunction. The health care system and the formulation of health policy. Descartes influence is heavy in the field of medicine since that discovering i think therefore i am": mind and body are separate the two shall never meet. 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: text suggests this but this is not the mind just a note. Psychoanalytic contribution (freud): freud"s early work on conversion hysteria (hysterectomy womb = crazy): Unconscious conflicts produce physical disturbances such as glove anaesthesia (sudden loss of speech, hearing, or sight), tremors, muscular paralysis, possible eating disorders.
