Chapter 14: Health and Well Being

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Behavioral Foundations of Health

• 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

Stress and Well-Being

• 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

Resilience: Facing Down Adversity

• 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

Pain and Illness

• 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

Happiness

• 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

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