Health Behavior and Society

sensation and perception are 2 different stages in processing of information in humans (vision, auditory senses)

• Sensation: made of two parts Distal Stimulus and Proximal Stimulus
• Distal Stimulus: objects/people in environment
• Proximal Stimulus: patterns produced at eye, ear, etc

• Interpretation
• Action

• A relatively durable change in behavior or knowledge that is due to experience
• Knowledge, skills, personal habits, emotional responses, preferences

A type of learning in which a stimulus acquires the capacity to evoke a response that was originally evoked by another stimulus

A form of learning in which voluntary responses come to be controlled by their consequences

• Aimed at preventing disease
• Any activity undertaken by a person believing himself to be healthy for the purpose of preventing disease or detecting it at an asymptomatic stage

• health damaging behaviors or habits
• smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, fatty diet

• Health protective behaviors or habits
• exercise, low fat diet

• proposes that health behavior is a result of a set of beliefs about the below
• susceptibility to illness: (my chances of getting lung cancer are high)
• severity of illness: (lung cancer is a serious illness)
• benefits of health behaviors: (if i quit smoking, i will feel very irritable)
• costs of health behaviors: (if i quit smoking i will save a lot of money)
• cues to action: (ext: the TV show on health risks of smoking worried me - int: I feel breathless when walking fast, that worries me)
• health motivation: {effectiveness of action} (it is important to me to maintain my health)

• Strength: easy to apply
• Limitations: neglects social factors, too broad

• Predicts that health behavior results from behavioral intention which is in turn influenced by personal attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control.
• Attitude -> intention -> behavior
• Subjective norm -> intention -> behavior
• Perceived behavioral control -> intention -> behavior
• Perceived behavioral control -> behavior

• Situation: Adherence and Asthma
• Action: "taking my inhaler could prevent asthma attacks...It's important to look after my health"
• Subjective Norm: "My family and friends believe I should take my inhaler...Their opinioins are important to me"
• PBC: If I wanted I could take my inhaler every day"
• Intention: "I intend to take my inhaler every day"
• Behavior: Adherence

• Strength:
• Limitations:

• Based on concept that our beliefs change over time: made of 5 stages that an individual goes through when moving toward a change in behavior
• Precontemplation: individual has not even acknowledged problem
• Contemplation: Individual acknowledges problem, but not ready or sure of wanting to change
• Preparation: Individual plans ahead and gets ready for change
• Action: Individual changes their behavior
• Maintenance or Relapse: Individual maintains their behavior or relapses to previous lifestyle

• Situation: Stop smoking
• Precontemplation: "I believe there is no link between my smoking and my health. I believe my health is fine"
• Contemplation: I perceive a link between the number of cigarettes I smoke and my poor health
• Preparation: I prepare to stop smoking
• Action: I stop smoking
• Maintenance/relapse: I continue to smoke or go back

• Strengths:
• Limitations:

• Encoding
• Storage
• Retrieval

• Forming memory code
• ATTENTION is critical for encoding
• Encoding with use of example and picture = encoding at deeper level = semantic encoding
• Deeper levels = better recall

• Made of three parts:
• Sensory, short-term, and long-term memory

• Sensory memory:
• lasts for fraction of second
• acoustic and visual encoding

• Short-term memory:
• limited space, lasts only 20 seconds
• forgetting due to displacement or interference

• Long-term memory:
• unlimited capacity, information lasts indefinitely
• encoding based on meaning
• forgetting due to decay
• Organized into: Declarative memory (facts) and Procedural memory (actions)
• Declarative memory organized into: semantic memory (general) and episodic memory (personal)

Information at beginning and end is recalled better than the information in the middle

Getting information back out of memory

• Recall: purest form
• Recognition: 'hint' brings back information
• Reconstruction: need multiple hints
• Re-learning savings: can't recall, but takes less time to re-learn

• 1. Ineffective encoding
• - info may not have been encoded properly, because of lack of attention
• 2. Decay
• - memories decay with time
• 3. Interference
• - competition from other information
• 4. Retrieval Failure
• - retrieval often best when context is similar to encoding context
• 5. Motivative Forgetting
• - Freud - people bury unpleasant, painful, or embarrassing memories deep in unconscious mind - REPRESSION