Chapter 14: Health and Well Being

Health Psychology: addresses factors that influence well-being and illness, as well as measures that can be taken to promote health and prevent illness.
Aerobic Exercise: is sustained activity, such as jogging, swimming, and bicycling, that elevates the heart rate and increases the body’s need for oxygen.
Type A Behavior Pattern: who tend to live under great pressure and demand much of themselves and others
Multimodal Treatments: often combine biological measures (e.g., the use of nicotine patches to help smokers quit) with psychological measures
- Aversion Therapy
- Relaxation and Stress-Management Training
- Self-Monitoring Procedures
- Coping and Social-Skills
- Marital and Family Counseling
- Positive-Reinforcement
Harm Reduction: is a prevention strategy that is designed not to eliminate a problem behavior but rather to reduce the harmful effects of that behavior when it occurs.
Transtheoretical Model: identified six major stages in the change process
- Precontemplation
- Contemplation
- Preparation
- Action
- Maintenence
- Termination
Relapse Prevention: designed to reduce the risk of relapse
Abstinence Violation Effect: in which the person becomes upset and self-blaming over the lapse and views it as proof that he or she will never be strong enough to resist temptation

Stressors: demanding or threatening situations
Stress: a pattern of cognitive appraisals, physiological responses, and behavioral tendencies that occurs in response to a perceived imbalance between situational demands and the resources needed to cope with them
Life Event Scales: quantify the amount of life stress that a person has experienced over a given period of time
Stress Response: has cognitive, physiological, and behavioral components.
General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS): consists of three phases: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion

Problem-Focused Coping: strategies attempt to confront and directly deal with the demands of the situation or to change the situation so that it is no longer stressful
Emotion-Focused Coping: strategies attempt to manage the emotional responses that result from it
Seeking Social Support: turning to others for assistance and emotional support in times of stress.
Posttraumatic Growth (PTG): experience of major positive change following a crisis

Placebo: physiologically inert substances that have no medicinal value but are thought by the patient to be helpful
Endorphins: opiate substances in the brain that reduce pain

Subjective well-being: people’s emotional responses and their degree of satisfaction with various aspects of their life
Hedonic Treadmill: our capacity to adapt to both good and bad
Downward Comparison: seeing ourselves as better off than the standard for comparison
Upward Comparison: when we view ourselves as worse off than the standard for comparison