Promoting Health
Mental stress a person feels when their behavior does not align with their values or beliefs. We attempt to create consonance by changing our behaviour, or changing our attitudes to align with our behaviour. Health promotion attempts to activate this in order to promote health behaviours.
What is cognitive dissonance?
Social and physical environmental circumstances that challenge the adaptive capabilities and resources of an organism. These circumstances represent an extremely wide and varied array of different situations that possess both common and specific psychological and physical attributes. The challenge for theory, research, and practice is to abstract and understand the specific qualities and characteristics of environmental exposures that most strongly elicit noxious psychological and biological responses, which in turn can lead to serious mental and physical health problems over the life course.
What are psychological stressors?
Examines how biological, social and psychological factors influence health and illness, and uses psychological science to promote health, prevent illness and improve health care systems.
What is health psychology?
The percentage of individuals in the population (in a given time period) who are experiencing a disease or a health problem.
What is prevalence?
One approach to health promotion that uses a certain approach to activate cognitive dissonance is effective under certain conditions. The support for this type of appeal, however, requires that the severity of a perceived threat needs to be mediated by high-efficacy messages, as exemplified in meta-analyses, e.g. Witte and Allen (2000) and Tannenbaum et al. (2015).
What are fear appeals?
The Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) is a list of 43 life events of varying severity collected from analysis of data from 5000 patient records. Marriage received a score of 50, and a sample of 394 participants rated all events on the list against marriage for how upending it was. Events that were twice as stressful received a score of 100, and so on. The more events one experienced the more stress and greater likelihood for illness. A score below 150 did not correlate with suffering from stress. A score of over 200 resulted in severe stress and stress-related illness.
What is the Major Life Events theory by Holmes and Rahe (1967)?
An approach to understanding mental and physical health through a multi-systems lens, understanding the influence of biology, psychology, and social environment.
What is the biopsychosocial model?
The development of new cases of a disease during a specified period of time in previously healthy individuals.
What is incidence?
An approach to viewing health promotion that focuses on the fact that health problems are biopsychosocial problems, and can't be addressed through simple behaiour change. According to this approach, health problems must be adressed holisitically, on the individual, interpersonal, organizational, community and public policy levels.
What is the ecological model of health promotion?
Suggests that stress is the result of the cognitive evaluation of the nature and significance of a phenomenon or event, known as an appraisal. According to the model, developed by Richard Lazarus, potentially stressful events go through primary appraisal, where they are considered irrelevant, positive, stressful and threatening, or stressful and challenging. Secondary appraisal involves an evaluation of our resources for coping with the event, and then we enter subsequent reappraisal.
What is the transactional stress model?
Investigated the effectiveness of a treatment program for weight loss that was based on the BPS model. Retrospective review of 142 patients, ages 18-75 at an outpatient clinic showed a 10.8% decrease in weight on average. This is evidence for a holistic approach to weight loss, using the BPS model, may be more effective than traditional programs for overweight and obesity.
What is Nguyen et al 2016?
The presence of additional diseases co-occuring with the primary disease.
What is comorbidity?
In this 12-session mentorship program in urban USA each session had a “challenge” to a certaint health behaviour. The sessions included education, setting a personal goal, HBM-based discussion, and cooking and eating healthy food. Sessions were home visits and trips in local environments. Mentors were college-enrolled & gender/race-matched (SCT). Effectiveness was measured 11-, and 24-months post intervention. Overweight/obese status declined by 5.3% among intervention adolescents, and increased by 11.3% among control adolescents.
What is the effectiveness of Challenge! by Black et al (2010)?
Found that stress has a direct effect on the immune system by suppressing NK (a type of white blood cell that fights disease) activity. In the study participants were given the SRRS (social readjustment rating scale) to measure stressful life changes, one month prior to exams. As a result of this test, the participants were divided into two groups: a high-stress and a low-stress group. Levels of loneliness were also measured and the participants were also divided into two groups: high loneliness and low loneliness. It was also found that participants in the "high-stress" group were more likely to have lower levels of NK than those in the "low-stress" group, and participants in the "high loneliness" group had lower levels of NK than those in the "low loneliness" group.
What is Kiecolt-Glaser et al. 1984?
Researchers examined cross-sectional associations between the five personality traits and obesity in a sample of 78,931 men and women, mean age 50 using logistic regression. The researchers concluded that "conscientiousness" was associated with lower obesity, and reversion to “non-obese” in initially obese individuals.
What is Jokela et al. 2013?
Using data from an annual telephone survey in the U.S. researchers tracked the incidence of obesity, for more than 400,000 US adults, from 2008-2009. They found an incidence of 4%, with lower incidence among college graduates, and higher incidence among younger age groups.
What is Pan et al 2011?
“The overall purpose is to create schools that constantly strengthen their capacity to function as a healthy environment. The framework is a holistic approach that involves multiple stakeholders in the process of gradual transformation… The framework has been shown to be generally effective at increasing physical activity and fruit and vegetable intake in school students.” Its three focus areas are: Health education classes in the school curriculum, Changing the school’s physical environment, and Working with families and the wider community.
What is the Health Promoting Schools framework?
Participants recruited from The Dow Chemical Company were selected and randomly assigned to an online mindfulness intervention or wait-list control. Participants completed the Perceived Stress Scale, the Five Facets of Mindfulness Questionnaire, the Connor-Davidson Resiliency Scale, and the Shirom Vigor Scale at pre- and postintervention and 6-month follow-up. The online mindfulness intervention seems to be both practical and effective in decreasing employee stress, while improving resiliency, vigor, and work engagement, thereby enhancing overall employee well-being.
What is Aikens et al. 2014?
Developed in 1950s by social psychologists at the Public Health Services to explain why some individuals didn’t participate in prevention programs. This model predicts that a specific health behavior is more or less likely based on an individual's perceptions of disease severity and personal susceptibility to the disease combined with perceived benefits and barriers to that behavior.
What is the Health Belief Model?
Conducted a review of epidemiological data on obesity in the United States. They found that the prevalence of obesity in the U.S. has increased dramatically since 1980 in both adults and children, with evidence of possible recent stabilization, according to data from 2003–2004 to 2005–2006 for both children and adults in the U.S. Obesity is affected by a complex interaction between the environment, genetic predisposition, and human behavior. It is associated with an increased risk of numerous chronic diseases, from diabetes and cancers to many digestive diseases.
What is Nguyen and El-Seraq 2010?