...Psychology of Health in the Workplace Psychology of Health in the Workplace To understand the relationship between psychology and health we must first understand what each term means. Psychology can be defined as the science or study of the mind and behavior. (“Webster, 2014) And according to “Webster” (2014) health can be defined as “the overall condition of someone’s body or mind. So how do these two relate? I believe the mind is a very powerful tool and can have a major effect on the body and how one feels. When researched the definition of “health psychology I found this definition, “Health psychology is a specialty area that focuses on how biology, behavior and social factors influence health and illness. (About Education”, 2014) This idea was very interesting to me, the fact that contagious and hereditary illnesses are not the only factors to our overall health. We now have to take into consideration our behavior, lifestyle choices, our surroundings and our mind when thinking about staying healthy. So what are some types of behavior or lifestyle choices that are bad for you? This may seem like a no brainer, but hygiene is a very important habit to create. Washing hands, body and brushing teeth daily help to fight off infectious diseases and help to keep the body strong and healthy. This is especially important when outside the home. At work, at the grocery store or even just pumping gas, germs are all around you. Washing your hands routinely is your best defense against...
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...Cultural barriers affecting the mental health of Indigenous people Cultural barriers certainly have a crucial impact in affecting the mental health of Indigenous people. This is evident as Indigenous people tend to have considerably high levels of stress and anxiety in their lives stemming from the consequences of trauma and grief of stolen generation and dispossession which is intricately linked to mental health and disorder (Craven, 2006).This common pattern of loss of culture, land, voice, family and dignity resulted in poor mental wellbeing for many Indigenous generations over the past century (Brown, 2001). However, problems still continue due to the inadequate research in the mental health of indigenous people. This results in mental illnesses being undiagnosed, undetected for Indigenous people, which makes them disadvantaged with from the rest of the population (Vukic, Gregory, Misener & Etowa, 2001). In addition, if they are diagnosed, they are assessed using Western mainstream methods, such as the DSM-IVclassification system, which does not suit their cultural differences and is culturally inappropriate (Craven, 2006).Also, being treated in the mainstream, it is evident that that their treatment will not be from an Indigenous perspective or worldview, and thus their underlying concerns will be ignored and overlooked (Valmae, Stephen, Melissa, Komla, 2007). There needs to be an understanding of Indigenous culture by healthcare professionals in the mainstream services...
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...Psychology and Health Problems James Hasty Axia College of University of Phoenix PSY 210 Introduction to Psychology Alshondrea Denton March 22, 2009 There are many health problems that can be associated to an individual’s reaction to life changes and stressors that can be experienced every day or a little at a time. This paper will summarize the multifactorial model and describe how it relates to the diagnosis of illnesses and it will explain what role psychology has played in understanding and managing two health problems discussed in the text. My hope is that this paper will help reinforce the ways that we can overcome the stresses we experience every day and live a healthier lifestyle, so that we can give our children an example to follow in order to improve their quality of life. According to our text, the multifactorial model is the belief that health and illnesses are a function of multiple factors involving biology, psychological, and cultural domains, and their interactions (Nevid & Rathus, 2005). The way that the multifactorial model works is by identifying factors that can affect our health and susceptibility to illness so that we can, in turn, control them and prevent them from affecting us further. The multifactorial model breaks the factors into six different categories; these categories are biological, sociocultural, environmental, personality, behavior, and stressors. Biological factors are the most obvious causes of illness. Things such as a family...
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...Psychology and Health Problems Psy210 12/12/2010 Psychology and Health Problems Summarizing the multifactorial model between health and illness, physicians and psychologist have determined a correlation between life experiences, history of family’s disease, and a person’s abilities to handle situations that directly affect their health in a negative or positive outcome. Cultural diversity plays a role in whether a person is able to receive better health care in relation to social economic factors than the country in which they live. Even though the United States and Canada have the advance health care than other European countries there is still the factor of lack of insurance and lower status of social economics that many lack the source of good health care (Nevid & Rathus, 2005). Psychological, environmental, biological and sociocultural factors affect a person’s health whether female or male. Two health problems that are first discussed in the text are premenstrual syndrome and headaches. Headaches are accountable in 20% of people who suffer from the two most common severe types of migraine and muscle tension headaches. GAS or general adaptation syndrome in the first two stages forces the muscles to contract in the forehead, shoulders, neck and persistent stress can lead to the constant constriction of those muscles. Tension headaches are described as a feeling of a viselike pressure throughout the head. Another major headache known as migraines is seen in about...
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...Psychology and Health Problems Course: PSY/210 September 02, 2010 Instructor: Deb Maison Psychology and Health Problems Psychology has played an excellent role in understanding and managing of health problems by conducting research and recognizing that the interaction between different group factors may cause health problems. The multifactorial model is used to make connection between life experiences, family medical history, genetics, and a person’s ability to handle situations that directly affect an individual’s health in a negative or positive way. It also allows doctors to consider other diagnoses that may be involved when someone is coughing rather than just assuming he or she has a common cold. Medical professional also benefit by treating patients’ efficiently if he or she is aware of their medical condition. In addition, to ease the diagnosis break down of illness the multifactorial model has divided these factors into six categories: biological factors, environmental factors, behavioral, stressors, personality, and sociocultural factors. Biological factors include genetic components, family medical history, gender, and age. Generally, people think that just because their families’ medical history consists of high-risk medical conditions that he or she will be diagnosed with them too. In most instances, individuals do not consider that age and gender also play high role in health. For example, diabetes is a hard disease to detect according to the American...
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...Psychology and Health Problems Tammy Salter PSY/210 August 9, 2011 We ask ourselves these questions everyday like: What are Germs and why does one become ill? Do viruses play a part or do Poor lifestyle choices play a large role? The Multi-factorial Model explains this; there are many reasons that an individual’s health may suffer. One’s environment, biology, socioeconomic status, sources of stress, and even personality all help to determine if someone will fall ill. Physicians and mental health professionals, as well as their patients, can benefit from this information. When an individual knows what is causing his or her health problems, he or she is better prepared to take steps to cure or prevent these problems. Maybe, like the old wives tale, it is believed that being outside with a wet head caused that persistent cold? Most of the listed reasons do play a role in whether or not an individual will become ill, but there are others issues that are contributed as well. One of the causes of health problems in individuals is environmental factors. How does one’s environment makes him or her sick? Consideration must be given to an individual’s environment. Is there clean drinking water available? Can an individual venture outside without fear of what toxic chemicals may be taken the human body when breathing the air? Some people worry about illness with every drink of water and breathe of air they take in. The World Health Organization (2008) stated that “Thirteen million...
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...Psychology of Health in the Workplace Elaina Tanner HCA/250 7/8/12 University of Phoenix Psychology of Health in the Workplace The relationship of health and psychology can be complex. Health is a positive state of physical, mental, and social well-being. Psychology is the way you deal with life, or situations that you come across. If you have a positive attitude and a positive state of mind you may be healthier and feel better. Your state of mind can affect your health greatly. If you are always in a bad mood you can cause your body to be unhealthy because of stress and just a bad attitude in general. Stress can cause a lot of health problems such as obesity, migraines, cardiovascular problems, stroke, and depression. Some people that get stressed can choose unhealthy ways of dealing with it such as smoking or eating fatty or unhealthy foods. Smoking can cause cancer, heart disease, and stroke. It can also lead to respiratory disorder that cannot be reversed. Eating fatty foods and unhealthy foods can lead to obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and cardiovascular disease. Good ways of dealing with stress are walking, working out, yoga, reading, getting a massage, and talking or writing about it. Doing all of this can reduce your stress along with your blood pressure. They can also put you into a better state of mental, physical and social state. Stress is a common issue in the workplace. In the workplace a person runs in the large workloads and not enough...
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...Psychology of Health in the Workplace The relationship between health and psychology has become more established in recent years. Past and continuing studies, and research, is providing insight into how an individual’s entire feeling of well being should be considered when trying to balance or maintain the status of their overall health. They are discovering that many biological, mental, and environmental factors can all work together to add to people’s health issues. Finding the correct balance of treatment choices is now including other alternative influences and circumstances as possible elements that may be adding to the causes of physical health issues. An example of a specific lifestyle choice that can affect health and psychology in the workplace is poor eating habits. For an individual who may choose to skip breakfast in the morning, he or she can become irritable, have a difficult time concentrating, or develop physical symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, or headache. Irritability can lead to poor communication with co-workers and loss of production on everyone’s schedule. Loss of energy from low blood sugar may lead to feeling tired and unable to concentrate which again can lead to misunderstandings and poor communication in order to resolve work related issues. One poor choice can develop problems for a person that can last the entire day, or possibly ruin relationships at work, especially if this poor choice is made continually. A person, who repeatedly...
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...Psychology and Health Problems Cheryl Colwell PSY/210 5/15/2011 Mekel, Harris The multifactorial model helps us to see that a person’s health and even illnesses can be caused by many different elements including, but not limited to, environment, biology, behavior, and stress. The first step is to figure out what is causing the person to be sick before any physical or mental problems can be treated. When a person knows what is causing his or her health problems, they are better prepared to take the steps that are needed to cure or prevent the problem. The physician is more able to treat the patients conditions if they are more aware of all the illnesses causes. This also helps the doctors to treat their patients based on the specifics of their illnesses. The multifactorial module uses sociocultural factors that are connected with health and illness, as reflected in human diversity. These factors include ethnicity, gender, level of education, and socioeconomic status. Psychology also plays a big part in keeping a person healthy by teaching the mind how to deal with stressors that can affect a person’s health. CHD, or Coronary Heart Disease, is one of the major causes of death in the United States. This disease can cause heart attacks and strokes due to stress and unhealthy habits that can be caused by stress such as smoking cigarettes, overeating, or not eating healthy (U.S. Department of Human Services, www.hhs.org). Other elements that can lead to Coronary Heart...
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...Psychology and Health Problems Psychology and Health Problems Summarizing the multifactorial model between health and illness, physicians and psychologist have determined a correlation between life experiences, history of family’s disease, and a person’s abilities to handle situations that directly affect their health in a negative or positive outcome. Cultural diversity plays a role in whether a person is able to receive better health care in relation to social economic factors than the country in which they live. Even though the United States and Canada have the advance health care than other European countries there is still the factor of lack of insurance and lower status of social economics that many lack the source of good health care (Nevid & Rathus, 2005). Psychological, environmental, biological and sociocultural factors affect a person’s health whether female or male. Two health problems that are first discussed in the text are premenstrual syndrome and headaches. Headaches are accountable in 20% of people who suffer from the two most common severe types of migraine and muscle tension headaches. GAS or general adaptation syndrome in the first two stages forces the muscles to contract in the forehead, shoulders, neck and persistent stress can lead to the constant constriction of those muscles. Tension headaches are described as a feeling of a viselike pressure throughout the head. Another major headache known as migraines is seen in about 28 million people...
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...Abstract Psychology and health problems go hand in hand. There are several diseases that can be caused when a person does not control the level of stress they have in their life. An unhealthy lifestyle consists of stress, depression, eating high fat foods, and not exercising enough. The more a person knows about how to control their stress levels will help them to deal with some of the diseases that they might get and will also help them to live healthy to control the risk of getting any unhealthy diseases. In this paper I will strive to describe what the multifactorial model is and how it relates to the diagnosis of illnesses. I have also selected two health problems which I will explain what role psychology has played in understanding and managing these problems. The health problems that I have selected are coronary heart disease and menstrual problems. The multifactorial model is described as the belief that health and illnesses are a function of several factors that involve biological, psychological, and cultural domains, and how they interact with each other (Nevid & Rathus, 2005). People might wonder how some people become ill easily and some don’t, or maybe why some people are affected by health problems while others are not. According to the multifactorial model there isn’t one answer to why this happens. There are many factors that include genetics and lifestyle choices. Genes play a role in a person having a chance of getting certain diseases, but they do not...
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...Unit 9 Final Project Case Study Nicole Sanchez PS370: Health Psychology Professor Elizabeth Smith Clark Kaplan University October 2, 2012 Health psychology consists of the mind and body working together to contribute to the wellbeing of a person. In choosing case study number one I: John, I will be discussing the effects of stress and alcoholism to a person’s wellbeing as well as different support and therapeutic techniques that can help with stress and treat alcoholism. Case Study: John John is suffering from alcoholic hepatitis due to excessive drinking. He is having severe stomach problems and has been exhibiting moodiness, sleep deprivation, weight loss and lack of energy. Along with alcoholism, John is suffering from stress due to the possibility of his wife leaving him and his job being on the line. Evaluation of models behavior According to the case study John has multiple health issues that the doctor cannot explain from a physical point of view. His medical problems can be explored by understanding what psychosomatic medicine (the mind body relationship) is. According to Friedman (2002) “a significant proportion of patient complaints (at least 25 percent) made to physicians are psychological in nature and have no significant physical counterpart.”(pg. 80) Patients, like John, exhibit symptoms from tension (caused by an unhappy marriage) such as headaches, pain, or weakness and no physical explanation can be found because the problems are somatization...
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...Psychology G544 Revision Notes Psychology G544 Section A Revision Notes Hypothesis Experimental hypothesis – predicts the effect of the IV on the DV. Operationalised hypothesis – shows how variables are going to be tested, by describing them. Null hypothesis – states that there will be no effect of the IV on the DV. One tailed hypothesis – predicts the direction in which results are expected to occur (directional) ie, revision improves exam performance. Two tailed hypothesis – states there is some kind of difference between two events (non-directional) ie, revision will affect exam performance. Experiments Independent variable – the variable that you manipulate (cause) Dependent variable – the variable that you measure (effect) Experimental design |Design |Repeated measures |Independent measures |Matched pairs | |Explanation |Performance of participants in one condition |Performance of participants in one condition |Participants in each condition matched to eac| | |compared with performance of the same |compared with performance of different |other on variables, such as age, sex, IQ, etc| | |participants in another condition |participants in another condition |(so it’s like they are the same person in | | ...
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...Psychology of Health in the Workplace Kristin Haimowitz HCA/250 January 22, 2012 Wakita R. Bradford Psychology of Health in the Workplace A good attitude can go a long way in making the place where you work a more tolerable place to be. Having a healthy lifestyle can make it easier to deal with the smaller problems that seem to happen on a day to day basis. Health psychology is concerned with understanding how biological, psychological, environmental, and cultural factors are involved in physical health and the prevention of illness. Due to recent advances in psychological, medical, and physiological research, it had lead to new ways of thinking about health and illness. This conceptualization, which has been labeled the biopsychosocial model, views health and illness as the product of a combination of factors including biological characteristics (e.g., genetic predisposition), behavioral factors (e.g., lifestyle, stress, health beliefs, and social conditions (e.g., cultural influences, family relationships, social support) (Marks, 2011). People have developed a field of health psychology that helps people deal with stressors that they are involved with at their workplace. Many experts perform research to help them solidify their findings. Occupational Health Psychology (OHP) has developed from these studies, and does research so that they can better understand the needs of people in their work settings. Also, OHP looks to understand how psychosocial characteristics...
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...There are many doctors that would agree that there is a connection between physical health and psychological health. When you are getting stressed out over your job because you may be overworked or there are financial problems within your family. All of this could cause you to have some form of physical reaction. We are going to look at how these two things if they are really connected with one another. Physical Health and Psychology Your physical health can be affected by all of the things that you are doing, by the way that we gather and process information, your career choices that you make, family, troubles as also the environment in which you live in. It is to be believed that illness and wellness both exist on a continuum. Like for an example if we know someone who may be feeling fine and their liver is getting damaged from all of the drinking that they have been doing for many years. We wouldn’t say that they are dying or sick. What we would probably stay that they are less healthy than they would be if they wasn’t doing the unhealthy thing. Medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky (1979, 1987) has suggested that we consider these concepts as ends of a continuum, noting that ‘‘We are all terminal cases. And we all are, so long as there is a breath of life in us, in some measure healthy’’ (1987,p. 3). There are times when you may feel sick, tired, or just run down. This doesn’t always have to be a response from a virus or even bacteria that has invaded the body. It could...
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