Psy 210

Psychology and Health Problems

Axia College

PSY 210

Janaya Hoskins

August 30, 2011

In today’s society health and illness is an important factor that is talked about. Dealing with health psychology, there is a multifactorial model that uses different factors, analyzing health and illnesses to see how it affects the human health. The multifactorial model that comprises that a healthy individual comes from a result of multiple factors working together. The multifactor model is used as an essential tool to gain an understanding of a person’s health, including psychologically and physically. The main factor that can be used with the multifactor model is genetics. With genetics you can find different things like disabilities, birth defects, and so on. For example, in many African American people through genetics it’s a known factor to have a risk of high blood pressure. A lot of African Americans tend to eat greasier, salty foods, smoke and have high levels of stress daily, which causes high blood pressure. I know this from experience and having family members face this problem.

The multifactor model can also be used to determine psychological disorders, incorporating factors that are biological, environmental and sociocultural. These different factors play a great role, just like our personality traits, everyday stressors and behavioral patterns. When a person tend to stress the first sign of health problems starts with a headache. Having a headache does so much damage to one’s body. The more common types of headaches are migraines and tension headaches. Tension headaches are caused by General Adaption Syndrome (GAS). General Adaption Syndrome causes an individual s muscles to contract when one is stressing too much, and it continues to contract more which causes a tension headache. Tension headaches tends to affect women more than men, although there is no proven fact but women tend to be more emotional and stress is more prominent in women than men and...