Wais and General Ability

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Example:

If you fall and injure your leg, your internal systems would be automatically mobilised to help protect the body from further damage. In addition, the discomfort and disability you might experience afterwards might affect your social relations with family and community. As systems, they are entities that are constantly changing. [pic 3]

Biopsychosocial Model and an overweight individual:

Inherit a genetic factor that affects weight (a strong likening of sweet food; biological) – parents maintain fictions misconception that a “chubby baby is a healthy baby” (social) – family would eat meals containing high levels of fats, sugars, salts etc. (social) – being fat, the individual is less agile and is tired more, therefore holds a preference to engage in sedate activities/behaviours (psychological) – individual would snack on high kilojoule foods while engaged in sedate activity (watching TV while eating processed foods) = weight gain. Being fat will lead to other psychological and social interactions in the future (e.g. being tease/bullied for being fat etc.)

Biopsychosocial Model Findings into Improving Health

Reduce anxiety via psychological methods (CBT, Motivational Interviewing etc.) enables individuals to recover more quickly.

Biofeedback (the monitoring of a normally automatic bodily function to train someone to acquire voluntary control of that function; used to reduce chronic pain etc.

Life-Span and Gender Perspectives

Throughout an individual’s life, health, illness and the role of different biopsychosocial systems change. Gender plays a role such as in the health-related behaviours people perform and the illnesses they develop.

Life-Span Perspective: characteristics of a person are considered with respect to their prior development in the future.

Example: the kinds of illness people tend to have change with age; older people are more likely to suffer from chronic disease compared to younger people.

Changing roles of the biopsychosocial model during development?

Biological

All systems of the body grow, strength and efficiency during childhood and decline in old age.

Psychological

Cognitive processes: child knowledge and thinking ability are limited during early years, grow rapidly during later childhood, understand implications of own behaviour etc.

Social

Usually progressions of education at different levels, career - becoming parents and grandparents - retiring. A child’s health is early on the responsibility of the adult caregivers – teenage years become more independent. Age-mates in the community have influence, and the need to be accepted can lead teens towards unhealthy behaviour (e.g. smoking, drinking, neglecting medication due to not wanting to be different)

Gender Perspective: males and females differ in their biological functioning; their health-related behaviours and social relationships.

- Australian Health Stats; Epidemiology; Useful Measures

Health Epidemiology

To have a comprehensive understanding of health psychology, it is important to know the context in which health and illness exist. Epidemiology – the scientific study of the distribution and frequency of disease and injury. Its aim is to determine the occurrence of illness in a given population and organise the data in terms of when the disease or injury occurred, where, and to which age, gender, racial or cultural groups and attempts to discover why specific illnesses are distributed as they are.

Useful Measures

Five Terms:

- Mortality – death, generally on a large scale (e.g. decrease in mortality from heart disease among women)

- Morbidity – illness, injury, or disability (any detectable departure from wellness)

- Prevalence – the number of cases (a diseased person infected or at risk, both continuing [previously reported] and new cases at a given moment in time. E.g. the number of new tuberculosis cases in the previous years). Prevalence depends upon incidence rate and duration.

- Incidence – number of new cases, of illness, infection, or disability, reported during a period of time (e.g. the number of new cases of tuberculosis in the previous year). Cumulative Incidence – Incidence density (incidence rate)

- Epidemic – the situation in which the incidence, generally of an infectious disease, has increased rapidly.

Ratio, Proportions and Rates

- Ratio: a value by dividing one quantity by another (numerator/denominator)

- E.g. number of still births per 1000 live births.

- Proportions: a special ratio in which the numerator is actually included in the denominator.

- E.g. the proportion of total deaths due to heart disease

- Rate: the frequency with which an event is occurring within a defined population over a specified period of time – allows for more meaningful comparisons.

- e.g. rates of glandular fever:

Town A 65/21, 000/year

309/100,000/year

Town B 29/7,000/year

414/100,000/year

Australian Health Statistics

Australians are living longer. Life expectancy is one of the most commonly used measures of the overall health of a population. It can be defined as how long, on average, a male of female at a given age can expect to live, based on current death rates.

Life expectancy at birth in Australia has climbed steadily over time, and is now more than 30 years longer than it was in the late 1800’s. For example:

2014

Life Expectancy

Males