All questions of Psychology and Life for Humanities/Arts Exam

Her thinking about coughing and stopping smoking reflects the stage of contemplation based on this stage of change model.

In the health psychology model, the individual is no longer simply seen as a passive victim of some external force, such as a virus. Acknowledging the role of behaviours such as smoking, diet and alcohol, for example, means that the individual may be held responsible for their health and illness. According to health psychology, the whole person should be treated, not just the physical changes that occur due to ill health. Health psychology encompasses behaviour change, encouraging changes in beliefs and coping strategies, and compliance with medical recommendations. Because the whole person is treated, the patient becomes partly responsible for their treatment. For example, she may have a responsibility to take medication, and to change beliefs and behaviour. No longer is the patient seen as a victim.

More recent models of stress allow for active interaction between the individual and external stressors, rather than passive response. This approach provides a role for psychological state. It is epitomized by Lazarus’s transactional model of stress and his theory of appraisal: In the 1970s, Lazarus introduced the psychological dimension into our understanding of the stress response (1975; Lazarus & Cohen, 1973, 1977). He argued that stress involves a transaction between an individual and his or her external world, and that a stress response is elicited if the individual appraises an event as stressful. Lazarus defined two forms of appraisal:

The negative emotional experience resulting from a mismatch between the individual’s appraisal of a stressor and the individual’s ability to cope with the stressor is a common definition for stress.

The belief that parents’ health is the sole determinant of our health problems is not one of the cognitive factors related to unrealistic optimism according to Weinstein whereas the other four factors are associated with unrealistic optimism about health issues.

Psychology has a role to play at all stages of illnesses like CHD:

The five components are:• severity – ‘Bowel cancer is a serious illness’;

All of these risk factors are associated with coronary heart disease except for hormones.

Contemporary definitions of stress regard the external environment as a potential stressor (e.g. problems at work), the response to the stressor as stress or distress (e.g. the feeling of tension), and the concept of stress as something that involves biochemical, physiological, behavioural and psychological changes.
Researchers have also differentiated between stress that is harmful and damaging (‘distress’) and stress that is positive and beneficial (‘eustress’). The most common definition of stress was developed by Lazarus and Launier (1978), who regarded it as a transaction between people and the environment. Within this definition, stress involves an interaction between the stressor (‘My job is difficult’) and distress (‘I feel stressed by it’). So a stressful response might be the feeling of stress that results from a mismatch between (i) a situation that is appraised as stressful and (ii) the individual’s self-perceived ability to cope and therefore reduce the stress.

The beliefs of the important people in your life represent the subjective norms related to the behaviour, therefore personal attitude toward the behaviour and perceived control over the behaviour are the two additional factors necessary to evoke behavioural change.

Alarm, resistance and exhaustion refer to the three stages of Selye’s model that describes the stress process from onset of the stressor to the effects of chronic stress. Life events theory is another stress model that examines stress and stress-related changes as a response to life change.
The self-regulatory model describes the relationship between people’s illness beliefs and their subsequent coping mechanisms. Protection motivation theory is an extension of the health belief model, and both attempt to explain changes in health-related behaviours.

The original core beliefs are the individual’s perception of:

Improved immune function, reduced alcohol use and reduced number of doctor’s visits have been associated with expressive writing and talking. CHD has not been explicitly associated with expressive writing techniques.

Research indicates that the following beliefs influence the development of a health professional’s original diagnosis:

Leventhal et al.’s five dimensions of illness beliefs are:

These statements are examples of illness beliefs; specifically, the former is an example of beliefs about illness curability and controllability and the latter is an example of beliefs about the cause of illness. Self-efficacy and susceptibility refer to two of the five components of the protection motivation theory of health behaviour, and are not represented by both of the statements above. Behavioural intentions refer to how a person plans to act in the future and adherence refers to the extent to which a patient follows recommendations.

Appraisal of the stressor and how to best cope with it plays a key role in the experience of stress and its link to illness. Coping and sympathetic activation occur subsequent to the primary appraisal of the stressor as stressful or not. Degree of fear experienced and the role of prior experience are not primary components of the stress-illness link.

As health behaviours seem to be important in predicting mortality and longevity, health psychologists have attempted to increase our understanding of health-related behaviours. In particular, based on the premise that people behave in line with the way they think, health psychologists have turned to the study of health beliefs as potential predictors of behaviour

The stages of change model (also known as the trans-theoretical model of behaviour) was originally developed by Prochaska and DiClemente (1982) as a synthesis of 18 therapies describing the processes involved in behavioural change. These researchers suggested a new model of change which has been applied to several health-related behaviours, such as smoking, alcohol use, exercise, and personal screening behaviour such as going for a cervical smear or attending for a mammograph (e.g. DiClemente et al., 1991; Marcus, Rakowski & Rossi, 1992).
The model describes behaviour change as dynamic, rather than being ‘all or nothing’, so the five stages do not always occur in a linear fashion. For example, an individual may move to the preparation stage and then back to the contemplation stage several times before progressing to the action stage. Even when an individual has reached the maintenance stage, they may slip back to the contemplation stage over time. The model also examines how we weigh up the costs and benefits of a particular behaviour. In particular, individuals at different stages of change will differentially focus on either the costs of a behaviour (‘Giving up smoking will make me anxious in company’) or the benefits (‘Giving up smoking will improve my health’).

All of the above have been identified as beliefs of health professionals that can bias and/or affect the information used by professionals to make their initial diagnoses.