What are health psychologists? What do they do and how can I become one?
Health psychology deals with psychological factors that influence good and bad health, and the psychological consequences of bad health.
It can be applied to community-wide prevention, individual counseling, or management of chronically or terminally ill patients. Health psychologists can work with health caregivers to develop ways to help patients modify their habits or prepare them for stressful medical procedures and illnesses. They can also perform research on different interventions to see which are the most effective, for example, to help a patient quit smoking. They can also work in the public health sector, to encourage healthy habits and preventive care (such as breast self-examination and mammograms) in the general public.
Source: Health Psychology, Shelley E. Taylor, 5th ed.
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I took a course in Health Psychology in my senior year of undergrad, and the book is my old textbook. It was a really interesting class, although it was more of a broad overview of the field than anything in-depth. Still, I learned a lot about habit modification and other health issues, such as the Transtheoretical Model of behavior change, or the Protection-Motivation Model. And my favorite was an article by Philip Brickman (”Models of helping and coping.” American Psychologist. Vol 37(4), Apr 1982, pp. 368-384), that verbalized and provided a model for what I had long felt about religion. I’ll save this for its own post.
Realize that at the same time I was also taking Social Psychology (with Lee Ross, who coined the term “Fundamental Attribution Error”), and Sex and Marriage in Anthropology. It was amazing — it was like every class I took related back to the issues I wanted to know about, and had interesting things to say about human nature.
That’s what I want to do with my life, basically. Have a career where I am continually learning about and applying principles of human nature and behavior, and understanding our constraints and inner drives the best that I can. Does this mean I do work in the community, developing programs for improving eating habits among school-age kids? Does this mean I do research in neuroscience and psychology, tackling a subject like the molecular basis of memory formation? Should I pursue a career in psychiatry? Thoughts, anyone?
April 19, 2007 at 5:37 am
[...] previously promised, here is the model, by Brickman et al. It gives four basic ways people approach solving problems in [...]