Chapter 6: Staying Healthy: Primary Prevention and Positive Psychology

What are health behaviors?

health-enhancing habits that occur on a continuum, impacting health positively or negatively.

Health behaviour may have?

long-term and short-term interactive effects

What distinguishes health habits from health behaviors?

Health habits are firmly established and automatically performed health behaviors.

What did the Alameda Health Study find?

the mortality of men who regularly practiced all 7 health habits was 28% of the mortality of those who had practiced 3 or fewer healthy behaviours

They found that women who practiced all 7 health behaviours had?

a 43% lower mortality than others

What were the 7 health behaviours?

sleeping seven to eight hours daily, never smoking, being at or near a healthy body weight, using alcohol in moderation, getting regular physical exercise, eating breakfast, and avoiding between-meal snacking

What are the four interacting factors in the Health Belief Model (HBM)?

Perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits and barriers to treatment, and cues to action.

Health psychologists have developed a number of theories to explain why people?

do or do not engage in healthful or unhealthful behaviours

What is the health belief model?

a commonsense theory proposing that people take action to ward off or control illness-inducing conditions

What does the Health Belief Model (HBM) propose about health behavior decisions?

decisions about health behaviour are based on four interacting factors that influence perceptions about health threat

What are these 4 interacting factors?

•They regard themselves as susceptible

•They believe the condition has serious personal consequences

•They perceive that the course of action will reduce either their susceptibility or the severity of the condition

•They believe that the benefits of the action outweigh the costs

Environmental influences are encouraging change

We will engage in a health behaviour if we believe?

that an available course of action will reduce our susceptibility to or the severity of the condition

The HBM has been subjected to extensive research, which includes 3 things.

intervention effects, focus on perceived risk vs. emotional responses, protection motivation theory adds self-efficacy

What is the Protection Motivation Theory?

adds self-efficacy as a separate component, focusing not only on how people appraise threats to their health, but also on their ability to manage these threats by acting more healthfully

What is the most accurate theory in predicting goal-oriented, rational behaviours?

theory of planned behaviour

What is the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB)?

TPB specifies relationships among attitudes and behaviors, suggesting that measuring behavioral intention predicts health behavior occurrence.

What are the three factors shaping behavioral intentions in the Theory of Planned Behavior?

Attitude toward behavior, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control.

What does the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) propose?

TTM proposes that people pass through five nonlinear stages in altering health behavior: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance.

What is an example of precontemplation?

"I have no plans to quit smoking"

What is an example of contemplation?

"I need to quit smoking"

What is an example of preparation?

"I've seen my doctor and told her I'm going to quit smoking. She wrote me a prescription to help reduce my craving for nicotine"

What is an example of action?

"I'mm actively cold turkey and it's week two. So far, so good"

What is an example of maintenance?

"I've been tobacco-free now for six-months"

What is this model also called?

the stages of change model

What have critics said about this model?

that the stages are not mutually exclusive, and people do not always move sequentially through discrete stages as they strive to change health behaviors.

What are the two phases of the Health Action Process Approach (HAPA)?

The motivational phase (goal-setting) and the volitional phase (goal-pursuit).

What is the motivational phase?

where a person forms the intention to change a health behaviour

What is the volitional phase?

where a plan to change the behaviour in question is created and then put into place

Growing body of research supports the fundamental principles of HAPA, especially?

the importance of planning in promoting successful behaviour change

What three types of intervention is undertaken before, during, and after a disease strikes?

primary prevention, secondary prevention, tertiary prevention

What is primary prevention?

health-enhancing efforts to prevent disease or injury from occurring

What are some examples of this?

Wearing seatbelts, practicing good nutrition, exercising, avoiding smoking, obtaining regular health screening

What is secondary prevention?

actions taken to identify and treat an illness or disability early in its occurrence

What are some examples of this?

Monitoring symptoms, taking medication, dietary changes, following treatment regimens

What is tertiary prevention?

action taken to contain damage once a disease or disability has progressed beyond its early stages

What are some examples of this?

radiation therapy, chemotherapy

Which prevention stage is the least cost-effective and least benefical?

tertiary prevention

What prevention stage is the most common form of healthcare?

tertiary prevention

What is the goal of compressing morbidity in health psychology?

To shorten the time people spend in morbidity.

Health psychologists seek to?

limit the time that a person spends ill or infirm

What is an example of this?

twins who carry the same disease vulnerabilities and life-span-limiting genetic clocks, the healthy lifestyle of one (b) keeps disease and disability at bay until primary aging is well advanced. In contrast, the unhealthy lifestyle of his brother (a) takes its toll at a much younger age.

Preventive health psychology research has increased focus on external systems that influence individual health, such as?

family behaviours, health system factors, and community influences

How do family behaviors influence health habits?

Health habits are often acquired from parents, siblings, and others who model health behaviours

Establishing good health habits before ______ is crucial.

adolescence

What certain family characteristics create a cascade of risk?

overt family conflict and deficient nurturing

Medicine tends to focus on ____ rather than ______; early warning signs go undetected.

treatment;prevention

What is the ACA?

Affordable Care Act

What are its main two promises?

decrease the number of uninsured Americans, use of federal subsides for qualified applicants

______ forces undermine health care workers' efforts to promote preventive measures.

economic

The majority of uninsured US residents ages?

0-64 are in families with one or more full-time worker

People are more likely to adopt health-enhancing behaviours that are promoted by?

community organization

Some environments promote health-compromising behaviour, others?

can exert powerful negative influence

Most peer-inspired, health-related risk taking is?

short-lived before irreversible, long-term consequences arise

What was especially obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic?

community influences on behaviors that affected the spread of the virus, notably mask-wearing mandates and local laws restricting social gatherings

What is the role of health education in community health?

Health education involves planned interventions that promote learning of healthier behaviors through communication.

How is this executed?

Through educational campaigns in advertisements, on public transportation, in magazines and newspapers, and on television, radio, and Web sites

What is an example of this?

Promotores de salud

What does Promotores de salud day?

OMH initiative/ACA estimates that 9 million Latinos have/will have health insurances

Promotores provide education in?

culturally competent and linguistically appropriate way

What is the Precede/Proceed Model?

A model that identifies health problems in a community and analyzes factors contributing to targeted behaviors for implementing health education programs.

What campaigns are typically ineffective?

campaigns that merely inform people of the hazards of certain behaviours

What is an example of this?

antismoking messages

What are generally more effective than "single-shot" campaigns?

multifaceted campaigns that present information on several fonts

What is message framing?

health messages generally are framed in terms of the benefits associated with a particular preventative action or the costs of failing to take preventative action

What are gain-framed messages?

focuses on attaining positive outcomes or avoiding undesirable ones by adopting a health-promoting behaviour

What are gain-framed messages effective in?

the prevention of behaviour promotion

What are loss-framed messages?

focuses on the negative outcome from failing to perform a health-promoting behaviour

What are loss-framed messages effective in?

illness detection promotion

What are tailored messages?

customized to individual characteristics of recipients

Do scare tactics that arouse fear work?

they may backfire and decrease a person's likelihood of changing his or her beliefs and behaviour

What is a key factor in determining the effectiveness of threatening health messages?

the person's perceived self-efficacy regarding the behaviour

What are cognitive-behavioral interventions focused on?

They focus on conditions that elicit health behaviors and factors that maintain and reinforce them.

What 5 things do cognitive-behavioural interventions contain?

self-monitoring, discriminative stimuli, stimulus-control interventions, relapse prevention, contingency contracting

What is self-monitoring?

people keeping track of their own target behaviour that is to be modified, including the stimuli associated with it and the consequences that follow it

What is discriminative stimuli?

environmental signals that certain behaviours will be followed by reinforcement

What is an example of this?

the sights and smells of a batch of cookies in the oven can serve as discriminative stimuli for overeating

What is stimulus-control interventions?

aimed at modifying a health behavior involve two strategies

What are the two strategies?

removing discriminative stimuli for the behavior from the environment, and establishing new discriminative stimuli signaling the availability of reinforcement for healthier response choices

What is relapse prevention?

training in coping skills and other techniques intended to help people resist falling back into old health habits following a successful behavioural intervention

What is contingency contracting?

a formal agreement between a person attempting to change a health behaviour and another individual, such as a therapist, regarding the consequences of target behaviours

What do Occupational health psychologists do?

leading the way in designing healthy workplaces

What are the 4 dimensions of healthy work?

stress, work-family members, violence prevention, relationships at work

What are behavioural crossover effects?

observing the effects between a worker's experiences of job stress and the well-being of other family members

What does this include?

negative emotion spillover and social withdrawal

What is negative emotion spillover?

occurs when work-related frustrations contribute to greater irritability, impatience, or other negative behaviors at home.

What is social withdrawal?

occurs when one or more working adult parents or caregivers withdraw behaviorally and emotionally from family life following especially stressful days at work.

In recent decades, there has been a significant shift in the perception of?

work-family life relationship

Between the 1960s and 2000, the workforce participation rates of women ______ steadily, leading to an explosion of research on the issue of worklife balance.

increased

What is the significance of work-site wellness programs?

They promote health by providing convenience, social support, and feedback, making disease prevention easier and more desirable.

Large companies provide workers the oppourtunity and financial incentive to?

to complete a health risk assessment and biometric screening of their body

What is positive psychology?

The study of optimal human functioning and the interplay between individuals and their environments, focusing on strengths and preventive approaches.

What was included in APA mission statement in 2001?

positive psychology

What is a paradoxical outcome in which adversity somehow leads people to greater psychological and/or physical well-being?

thriving

Carver noted that when we experience physical or psychological adversity, there are at least four possible outcomes, what are they?

1) a continued downward slide, 2) survival with diminished capacity or impairment, 3) a gradual or rapid return to the preadversity level of function, and 4) the emergence of a quality that makes the person somehow better off than before.

The strongest predictors of high psychological well-being during the COVID pandemic were?

agency and social connectedness

What is agency?

a feeling of being in the driver's seat when it comes to actions and their consequences

What is social connectedness?

feeling connected and close to others

When the brain perceives a impending threat or challenge, anabolic metabolism is converted into its opposite?

catabolism

What does catabolism do?

cellular activities that break down tissues to provide energy

What does anabolic metabolism do?

counters arousal and promotes relaxation, energy storage, and healing processes