Health and Wellness: Evidence, Mindset, Early Life Inputs, and Neuroplasticity

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering mental health global disparities, growth versus fixed mindsets, scientific evidence and Bradford Hill criteria, early life inputs and epigenetics, and the mechanisms of neuroplasticity.

Mental Health

A state of emotional, psychological, and social well-being that enables an individual to cope with the stresses of life and function productively in society.

Mental Illness

Health conditions characterized by disturbances in thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that are severe enough to impair day-to-day functioning.

WHO Optimal Mix of Services Pyramid

A health service organization model demonstrating that the largest volume of care needed should consist of low-cost self-care and informal community care, while specialized services and long-stay facilities represent the highest cost and smallest volume of need.

Task Shifting

A strategy of training lay community workers to deliver targeted health and psychosocial interventions, thereby increasing access to care in hard-to-reach and marginalized populations.

Friendship Bench Project

An evidence-based mental health intervention in Zimbabwe where trained female lay health workers, known as Ambuya utano (grandmother health providers), deliver problem-solving therapy outside primary health centres.

TACTS (Technology-Assisted Cascaded Training and Supervision system)

A digital training and remote supervision platform evaluated in Swat, Pakistan, that enables lady health workers to deliver the Thinking Healthy Programme for perinatal depression with outcomes non-inferior to face-to-face supervision.

Positive Psychology

A scientific branch of psychology founded by Martin Seligman aimed at catalyzing a change from solely repairing pathologies to actively building positive qualities, strengths, and optimal well-being.

Learned Helplessness

A psychological state resulting from repeated exposure to inescapable aversive events, leading an organism to believe that outcomes are uncontrollable and cease trying to effect change.

Attribution Theory

A psychological framework that explores how individuals interpret and explain the causes of their behaviors, successes, failures, and environmental challenges.

Growth Mindset

The belief that intelligence, skills, and basic abilities can be cultivated and developed through effort, dedicated practice, effective strategies, and learning.

Fixed Mindset

The belief that fundamental attributes, such as intelligence and talent, are static, predetermined traits that cannot be meaningfully changed.

Process Praise

Feedback focused on effort, strategies, and persistence (such as "You tried really hard"), which promotes resilience, mastery-oriented mindsets, and performance recovery after setbacks.

Person Praise

Feedback emphasizing fixed innate traits or intelligence (such as "You must be smart at this"), which correlates with fixed mindsets and decreased performance following failure.

False Growth Mindset

The misconception that adopting a growth mindset merely involves praising sheer effort alone, without guiding individuals toward new strategies, mentorship, and critical adaptation.

Bradford Hill Criteria

A group of nine epidemiological principles—Strength, Consistency, Specificity, Temporality, Biological Gradient, Plausibility, Coherence, Experiment, and Analogy—used to assess evidence for a causal relationship between an exposure and an outcome.

Temporality (Bradford Hill)

The non-negotiable Bradford Hill criterion requiring that the suspected exposure strictly occurs prior to the onset of the outcome or disease.

Biological Gradient

A Bradford Hill criterion, also known as a dose-response relationship, indicating that higher levels or durations of exposure correspond to increased risk or effect severity.

Specificity (Bradford Hill)

The weakest of the Bradford Hill criteria, which posits that causation is more plausible if an exposure is tied to a single specific outcome, site, or population without rival explanations.

Science Literacy

The capacity to comprehend, critically evaluate, and practically apply scientific concepts, principles, and empirical evidence to make informed personal, clinical, and policy decisions.

Dunning-Kruger Effect

A cognitive bias wherein individuals with low competence in a subject substantially overestimate their knowledge, passing through the Peak of Mount Stupid before experiencing the Valley of Despair and gradually climbing the Slope of Enlightenment.

Confirmation Bias

The psychological tendency to favor, seek out, and interpret information in ways that reinforce preexisting beliefs while dismissing contradictory empirical evidence.

Critical Window

A rigidly defined developmental timeframe in which specific environmental inputs or biological events must occur for normal neural wiring and maturation; missing it causes permanent developmental deficits.

Sensitive Window

A flexible period of heightened developmental plasticity and susceptibility to experiential influences, where absence of input represents a missed opportunity for optimal growth rather than absolute deficit.

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)

Ten defined categories of childhood maltreatment and household challenges occurring before age $18$ that correlate in a dose-dependent manner with chronic illness, mental health disorders, and early mortality.

Toxic Stress

Prolonged, intense physiological activation of the body's stress response systems triggered by childhood adversity in the absence of protective, supportive relationships.

Fetal Programming Hypothesis

The principle that gestational stressors, nutrient deficiencies, or environmental exposures induce adaptive biological alterations in the fetus that elevate susceptibility to adult cardiometabolic diseases.

Epigenetics

The study of heritable and environmental changes in gene expression or cellular phenotype caused by chemical tags like DNA methylation and histone modification without altering the underlying DNA sequence.

Dutch Hunger Winter

A wartime famine in the Netherlands from $1944$ to $1945$ that acted as a natural experiment revealing that prenatal maternal starvation programs intergenerational metabolic and cardiovascular disease risks in offspring.

Bucharest Early Intervention Project

A randomized controlled trial investigating Romanian orphans which proved that severe institutional deprivation causes profound developmental delays, while early placement in high-quality foster care fosters cognitive and emotional recovery.

Neuroplasticity

The nervous system's capacity to dynamically reorganize its structure, neural connections, and functions in response to learning, experiences, environmental factors, or damage.

Neurological Nihilism

The outdated scientific doctrine assuming that the adult human brain is a hardwired, immutable machine that cannot replace destroyed neurons or functionally recover following severe damage.

Structural Plasticity

The form of neuroplasticity whereby experiential inputs, cognitive challenges, or memories cause physical anatomical modifications in synaptic density, dendritic branching, and gray matter volume.

Functional Plasticity

The brain's ability to shift, remap, or transfer damaged neurological functions from an injured area to intact, undamaged regions of the cerebral cortex.

Hebbian Principle

The rule postulated by Donald Hebb stating that 'neurons that fire together, wire together,' establishing that simultaneous activation of interconnected neurons strengthens their synaptic transmission.

Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy (CIMT)

A rehabilitation intervention for stroke survivors that immobilizes the unimpaired limb to compel repetitive, intensive functional use of the paretic limb, driving adaptive cortical remapping.

Phantom Limb Pain

A form of maladaptive neuroplasticity affecting $60\text{--}80\%$ of amputees, where persistent sensory impressions and pain arise because cortical limb maps remain active and are erroneously triggered.

Mirror Therapy

A neuroplastic therapeutic technique using visual reflection of an intact limb to deceive the brain into perceiving movement in a phantom limb, helping resolve sensorimotor mismatches and alleviate pain.

HEAL Framework

A four-step self-directed neuroplasticity practice developed by Dr. Rick Hanson—Have a beneficial experience, Enrich it, Absorb it, and Link it—to convert positive mental states into lasting neural traits.