| acute disorders | Illnesses or other medical problems that occur over a short period of time, are usually the result of an infectious process, and are reversible.
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| biomedical model | The viewpoint that illness can be explained on the basis of aberrant somatic processes and that psychological and social processes are largely independent of the disease process; the dominant model in medical practice until recently.
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| biopsychosocial model | The view that biological, psychological, and social factors are all involved in any given state of health or illness.
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| chronic illnesses | Illnesses that are long lasting and usually irreversible.
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| conversion hysteria | Viewpoint originally advanced by Freud that specific unconscious conflicts can produce physical disturbances symbolic of the repressed conflict; no longer a dominant viewpoint in health psychology.
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| correlational research | Measuring two variables and determining whether they are associated with each other. Studies relating smoking to lung cancer are correlational, for example.
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| epidemiology | The study of the frequency, distribution, and causes of infectious and noninfectious disease in a population, based on an investigation of the physical and social environment. Thus, for example, epidemiologists not only study who has what kind of cancer, but also address questions such as why certain cancers are more prevalent in particular geographic areas than other cancers are.
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| etiology | The origins and causes of illness.
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| experiment | A type of research in which a researcher randomly assigns people to two or more conditions, varies the treatments that people in each condition are given, and then measures the effect on some response.
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| health | The absence of disease or infirmity, coupled with a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being; health psychologists recognize health to be a state that is actively achieved rather than the mere absence of illness.
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| health psychology | The subarea within psychology devoted to understanding psychological influences on health, illness, and responses to those states, as well as the psychological origins and impacts of health policy and health interventions.
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| longitudinal research | The repeated observation and measurement of the same individuals over a period of time.
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| mind-body relationship | The philosophical position regarding whether the mind and body operate indistinguishably as a single system or whether they act as two separate systems; the view guiding health psychology is that the mind and body are indistinguishable.
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| morbidity | The number of cases of a disease that exist at some given point in time; it may be expressed as the number of new cases (incidence) or as the total number of existing cases (prevalence).
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| mortality | The number of deaths due to particular causes.
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| prospective research | A research strategy in which people are followed forward in time to examine the relationship between one set of variables and later occurrences. For example, prospective research can enable researchers to identify risk factors for diseases that develop at a later point in time.
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| psychosomatic medicine | A field within psychiatry related to health psychology that developed in the early 1900s to study and treat particular diseases believed to be caused by emotional conflicts, such as ulcers, hypertension, and asthma. The term is now used more broadly to mean an approach to health-related problems and diseases that examines psychological as well as somatic origins.
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| retrospective research | A research strategy whereby people are studied for the relationship of past variables or conditions to current ones. Interviewing people with a particular disease and asking them about their childhood health behaviors or exposure to risks can identify conditions leading to an adult disease, for example.
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| systems theory | The viewpoint that all levels of an organization in any entity are linked to each other hierarchically and that change in any level will bring about change in other levels.
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2003 McGraw-Hill Higher Education