PS285 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Sympathetic Nervous System, Medically Unexplained Physical Symptoms, Confounding
Document Summary
Is there any connection between illness and personality: 2 approaches: physicalist and personality/psychological. Physicalist: physical illnesses have physical causes and need physical treatment, even psychological issues (biochemical imbalances, genetics) Personality: your personality makes you susceptible to certain diseases, caused by underlying psychological disturbances. Manageability- i have what it takes to do this. Overall our biomedical model tends to take a physicalist approach and devalues the psychological. Evolution of terms: hysteria-> psychosomatic-> medically unexplained symptoms, psychosomatic not received well- it argued that the symptoms and the condition were not real. Problems of interpretation: direction of causality- knowing the correlation does not mean that you know the causation. Does personality cause the disorder or does the disorder cause the personality ex moodiness and depression: background variables. 3rd confounding factor: self-reporting of illness. Ex neurotic person tends to report more frequently. Psychological distress associated with somatic complaints: dimensions of personality. Overlapping items: physiological mechanisms vs health behaviours.
