PSYC 2301 Chapter Notes -Chronic Condition
11 Oct 2012
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Document Summary
Health psychology: tries to understand the psychological influences on how people stay healthy, why they get sick and what they do if they get sick. Health psychologists: promote things to help people stay healthy or get better. Also focus on origins or causes of illness and what correlated with health, illness and dysfunction, also interested in behavioural and social factors that contribute to health/illness. Try to improve the health care system and heal policies. Advantages of pbiopsychosocial model: maintains that biological, psychological and social factors are all important to determine health and illness. Stating macrolevels (existence/social support) and microlevel (cell disorders) interact to produce health/illness. Systems theory: keeps all levels of organization in any entity linked to each other hierarchically and change in one level results in changes in the other levels. Most important factor that has given rise to healthy psychology is the change in illness patterns over time.
