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Summary

Health
1. Health psychology examines the biological, psychological, and social influences on how people stay healthy, why they become ill, and how they respond when they do get ill.
2. Although the field has taken off only in the last two decades, it has a rich heritage in the fields of medicine and philosophy. This history began with the early theorists and the practice of trephination, continued through the humoral theory of illness, and the Renaissance, and received one of its major boosts from Freud and the field of psychosomatic medicine.
3. A number of theories have been created to explain why people engage in positive or negative health habits. Among the most prominent of these are the health belief model, the protection motivation theory of health, the theory of reasoned action, and the theory of planned behavior.
4. Obesity is second only to nicotine as the primary health threat. Assessments using body mass index indicate that over half of Americans are overweight or obese. Obesity extracts a sizable physical and psychological toll, and it does not have a quick fix. The origins of obesity lie in both genetic and environmental influences.
5. Cigarette smoking is the most preventable cause of illness today. As with obesity, underlying causes are both genetic (e.g., personality variables) and environmental, although the emphasis is on environmental facilitators of smoking.
6. People do and don’t do a lot of health-related behaviors because of concerns with the impressions other people are forming of them, a process termed self-presentation. Most people who do not wear condoms, who tan excessively, and who use alcohol or other drugs, do so, in part, for self-presentational reasons.
7. Alcoholism and problem drinking are major problems in society today. A number of genetic and environmental variables contribute to the development of alcohol abuse. Some alcoholics enter spontaneous remission whereas others require more formalized methods of treatment, such as aversion therapy.
8. Over 20 sexually transmitted diseases have been identified, most notably HIV/AIDS. Given that behavior is clearly involved in the transmission of STDs, they are a frequent focus area for health psychologists.
9. Four broad barriers to health promotion have been identified: individual barriers, family barriers, health system barriers, and community barriers.

Stress
1. Stress refers to a challenge to a person’s capacity to adapt to inner and outer demands, which may be physiologically arousing and emotionally taxing and call for cognitive and behavioral responses. Stress is a psychobiological process that entails a transaction between a person and her environment. Selye proposed that the body responds to stressful conditions with a general adaptation syndrome consisting of three stages: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion.
2. From a psychological standpoint, stress entails a person’s perception that demands of the environment tax or exceed his available psychosocial resources. Stress, in this view, depends on the meaning of an event to the individual. Lazarus’s model identifies two stages in the process of stress and coping: primary appraisal, in which the person decides whether the situation is benign, stressful, or irrelevant, and secondary appraisal, in which the person evaluates the options and decides how to respond.
3. Events that often lead to stress are called stressors. Stressors include life events, catastrophes, and daily hassles.
4. Stress has a considerable impact on health and mortality, particularly through its effects on the immune system. Whether a person under stress remains healthy or becomes ill also depends in part on the person’s enduring personality dispositions. Type A behavior pattern, and particularly its hostility component, has been linked to heart disease. Neuroticism (the tendency to experience negative affective states) and optimism/pessimism are other personality traits linked to stress and health.

Coping
1. The ways people deal with stressful situations are known as strategies for coping; these coping mechanisms are in part culturally patterned. People cope by trying to change the situation directly, changing their perception of it, or changing the emotions it elicits.
2. A major resource for coping with stress is social support, which is related to health and mortality.

Summary

Perspectives on Motivation
1. Motivation refers to the moving force that energizes behavior. It includes two components: what people want to do (the direction in which activity is motivated) and how strongly they want to do it (the strength of the motivation). Although some motives (e.g., eating and sex) are more clearly biologically based and others (e.g., relatedness to others and achievement) are more psychogenic or psychosocial, both types of motives have roots in biology and are shaped by culture and experience.
2. Evolutionary psychologists argue that basic human motives derive from the tasks of survival and reproduction. They have expanded the concept of reproductive success to include inclusive fitness, which means that natural selection favors organisms that survive, reproduce, and foster the survival and reproduction of their kin. Natural selection has endowed humans and other animals with motivational mechanisms that lead them to maximize their inclusive fitness.
3. Freud believed that humans, like other animals, are motivated by internal tension states, or drives, for sex and aggression. Contemporary psychodynamic theorists focus less on drives than on wishes and fears. They emphasize motives for relatedness and self-esteem, as well as sex and aggression, and contend that many human motives are unconscious.
4. Behavioral theorists use the term drive to refer to motivation activated by a need state (such as hunger). According to drive-reduction theories, deprivation of basic needs creates an unpleasant state of tension that leads the animal to act. If an action happens to reduce the tension, the behavior is reinforced. Innate drives such as hunger, thirst, and sex are primary drives; with secondary drives, an originally neutral stimulus comes to be associated with drive reduction and hence itself becomes a motivator.
5. Cognitive theorists often speak of goals, valued outcomes established through social learning. Expectancy–value theories assert that motivation is a joint function of the value people place on an outcome and the extent to which they believe they can attain it. Goal-setting theory proposes that conscious goals regulate much of human action, particularly in work tasks. Self-determination theory suggests that people are most likely to develop intrinsic motivation (i.e., a genuine interest in the activity for its own sake) in a task or domain when learning is accompanied by feelings of competence, autonomy (i.e., control over their own actions, rather than control by others), and relatedness to others (i.e., a supportive, noncontrolling interpersonal environment). Recently, cognitive researchers have begun to apply experimental methods to study implicit motives, which occur outside awareness.
6. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, basic needs must be met before higher level needs become active. Maslow’s hierarchy includes physiological, safety, belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization needs.

Eating
1. Many motives, particularly biological motives related to survival, involve homeostasis, the body’s tendency to maintain a relatively constant state, or internal equilibrium, that permits cells to live and function. Homeostatic systems such as hunger and thirst share a number of common features, including a set point (a biologically optimal level the system strives to maintain); feedback mechanisms (which provide the system with information regarding the state of the system with respect to the variables being regulated) and corrective mechanisms (mechanisms that restore the system to its set point when needed).
2. Metabolism refers to the processes by which the body transforms food into energy. It includes an absorptive phase, in which the body is absorbing nutrients; and a fasting phase, in which the body is converting short- and long-term fuel stores into energy useful for the brain and body.
3. Eating is regulated both by hunger and by satiety mechanisms (mechanisms for turning off eating). Hunger increases as glucose (and, to some extent, lipid) levels fall in the bloodstream. These falling levels signal the brain that short- and long-term fuels stores are diminishing. Hunger also reflects external cues, such as the palatability of food, learned meal times, and the presence of other people. The body relies on multiple mechanisms to signal satiety (fullness), although the most important are receptors in the intestines that let the body know that the “fuel tanks” will soon be full.
4. Obesity is a condition characterized by a body weight over 15 percent above the ideal for one’s height and age. Genetic factors and dietary fat intake are strong predictors of body fat.

Sexual Motivation
1. Sexual motivation is driven by both fantasies and hormones and is shaped by culture. Hormones control sexual behavior in humans and other animals through organizational effects (influencing the structure of neural circuitry) and activational effects (activating physiological changes that depend on this circuitry).
2. Sexual orientation refers to the direction of a person’s enduring sexual attraction—to members of the same sex, the opposite sex, or both. Accumulating evidence on homosexuality suggests a substantial biological influence in both men and women.

Psychosocial Motives
1. Psychosocial needs are personal and interpersonal motives for such ends as mastery, achievement, power, self-esteem, affiliation, and intimacy. Across cultures, the two major clusters of motives are agency (self-oriented goals, such as mastery or power) and relatedness (interpersonal motives for connection, or communion, with others).
2. The need for achievement refers to a motive to succeed and to avoid failure, which is heavily influenced by cultural and economic conditions. Underlying achievement motivation are performance goals (to approach or achieve a socially visible standard) or mastery goals (to master the skill).
3. Even for needs undeniably rooted in biology, such as hunger and sex, the strength of a motive depends in part on whether appropriate stimuli impinge on the organism. Motives also often reflect a subtle blend of innate factors (nature) and learning and culture (nurture). Motivation usually requires both cognition (representations that provide the direction of motivation) and emotional energy or arousal (providing the “fuel,” or strength, of motivation).

Emotion
1. Emotion, or affect, is an evaluative response (a positive or negative feeling state) that typically includes subjective experience, physiological arousal, and behavioral expression.
2. The James–Lange theory asserts that the subjective experience of emotion results from bodily experience induced by an emotion-eliciting stimulus. According to this theory, we do not run because we are afraid; we become afraid because we run (and our hearts pound). In contrast, the Cannon–Bard theory proposes that emotion-inducing stimuli simultaneously elicit both emotional experience and bodily responses. Although both theories have their strengths and limitations, recent research suggests that different emotions are, as James believed, associated with distinct, innate patterns of autonomic nervous system arousal.
3. Emotional expression refers to facial and other outward indications of emotion, such as body language and tone of voice. Many aspects of emotional expression, particularly facial expression, are innate and cross-culturally universal. Culturally variable patterns of regulating and displaying emotion are called display rules.
4. Psychologists have attempted to produce a list of basic emotions, emotions common to the human species from which all other emotions and emotional blends can be derived. Anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and disgust are listed by all theorists as basic. An even more fundamental distinction is that between positive affect and negative affect.
5. Emotions are controlled by neural pathways distributed throughout the nervous system. The hypothalamus activates sympathetic and endocrine responses related to emotion. The limbic system, and particularly the amygdala, is part of an emotional circuit that includes the hypothalamus. The cortex plays several roles with respect to emotion, particularly in the appraisal of events.
6. The behaviorist perspective on emotion points to approach and avoidance systems associated with positive and negative affect, respectively. According to the psychodynamic perspective, people can be unconscious of their own emotional reactions, which can nonetheless influence thought, behavior, and health.
7. From a cognitive perspective, the way people respond emotionally depends on the attributions they make—that is, their inferences about causes of the emotion and their own bodily sensations. According to the Schachter–Singer theory, emotion involves two factors: physiological arousal and cognitive interpretation of the arousal. Emotion and mood (relatively extended emotional states that, unlike emotions, typically do not disrupt ongoing activities) have an impact on encoding, retrieval, judgment, and decision making.
8. The evolutionary perspective on emotion derives from Charles Darwin’s view that emotions serve an adaptive purpose. Emotion has both communicative and motivational functions.

The Nature of Consciousness
1. Consciousness refers to the subjective awareness of percepts, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. It performs two functions: monitoring the self and environment and controlling thought and behavior. Attention is the process of focusing awareness, providing heightened sensitivity to a limited range of experience requiring more extensive information processing. Divided attention means splitting attention between two or more stimuli or tasks.

Perspectives on Consciousness
1. Freud distinguished among conscious, preconscious, and unconscious processes. Conscious mental processes are at the center of subjective awareness. Preconscious mental processes are not presently conscious but could be readily brought to consciousness. Dynamically unconscious processes—or the system of mental processes Freud called the unconscious—are thoughts, feelings, and memories that are inaccessible to consciousness because they have been kept from awareness because they are threatening thoughts or behaviors. Motivational processes can also be unconscious or implicit.
2. The cognitive unconscious refers to information-processing mechanisms that occur outside of awareness, notably unconscious procedures or skills and preconscious associational processes such as those that occur in priming experiments. Cognitive theorists have argued that consciousness is a mechanism for flexibly bringing together quasi-independent processing modules that normally operate in relative isolation and for solving problems that automatic processes cannot optimally solve.
3. Hindbrain and midbrain structures, notably the RAS, play a key role in regulating states of wakefulness and arousal. Like most psychological functions, consciousness appears to be distributed across a number of neural pathways, involving a circuit running from the RAS through the thalamus, from the thalamus to the cortex (particularly the prefrontal cortex), and back down to the thalamus and midbrain regions of the RAS.

Sleep and Dreaming
1. The sleep–wake cycle is a circadian rhythm, a cyclical biological process that evolved around the daily cycles of light and dark. Sleep proceeds through a series of stages that cycle throughout the night. Most dreaming occurs during REM sleep, named for the bursts of darting eye movements.
2. Freud distinguished between the manifest content, or story line, and the latent content, or underlying meaning, of dreams. Freud believed the latent content is always an unconscious wish, although most contemporary psychodynamic psychologists believe that wishes, fears, and current concerns can underlie dreams. Cognitive theorists suggest that dreams express thoughts and current concerns in a distinct language with its own rules of transformation. Some biological theorists contend that dreams have no meaning; in this view, dreams are cortical interpretations of random neural impulses generated in the midbrain. Others focus on the role of sleep and dreaming in memory consolidation. These three approaches to dreaming are not necessarily incompatible.

Altered States of Consciousness
1. In altered states of consciousness, the usual conscious ways of perceiving, thinking, and feeling are changed. Meditation is an altered state in which the person narrows consciousness to a single thought or expands consciousness to focus on stimuli that are usually at the periphery of awareness. Hypnosis, characterized by deep relaxation and suggestibility, appears to be an altered state, but many hypnotic phenomena can be produced under other conditions.
2. Psychoactive substances are drugs that operate on the nervous system to alter patterns of perception, thought, feeling, and behavior. Depressants, the most widely used of which is alcohol, slow down the nervous system. Stimulants (such as nicotine, caffeine, amphetamines, and cocaine) increase alertness, energy, and autonomic reactivity. Hallucinogens create hallucinations, in which sensations and perceptions occur in the absence of any external stimulation. Marijuana leads to a state of being high—euphoric, giddy, unself-conscious, or contemplative. Psychoactive substances alter consciousness biologically, by facilitating or inhibiting neural transmission at the synapse, and psychologically, through expectations shaped by cultural beliefs.