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Health Psychology Book Cover
Health Psychology, 5/e
Shelley Taylor, University of California, Los Angeles

Using Health Services

Glossary


appraisal delay   The time between recognizing that a symptom exists and deciding that it is serious.
behavioral delay   The time between deciding to seek treatment and actually doing so.
control-enhancing interventions   Interventions with patients who are awaiting treatment for the purpose of enhancing their perceptions of control over those treatments.
delay behavior   The act of delaying seeking treatment for recognized symptoms.
diagnostic-related groups (DRGs)   A patient classification scheme that specifies the nature and length of treatment for particular disorders; used by some third-party reimbursement systems to determine the amount of reimbursement.
disease prototypes   Organized concepts of specific diseases based on their origins, duration, symptoms, and treatment; believed to guide the interpretation of symptoms.
illness delay  The time between recognizing that a symptom implies an illness and the decision to seek treatment.
illness representation (or schema)  An organized set of beliefs about an illness or type of illness, including its nature, cause, duration, and consequences.
lay referral network   An informal network of family and friends who help an individual interpret and treat a disorder before the individual seeks formal medical treatment.
medical delay   Delay in treating symptoms that results from problems within the medical system, such as faulty diagnoses, lost test results, and the like.
medical students’ disease   The relabeling of symptoms of fatigue and exhaustion as a particular illness resulting from learning about that illness; called medical students’ disease because overworked medical students are vulnerable to this labeling effect.
monitoring/blunting   The degree to which people deal with threat by scanning the environment for threat-relevant information (monitoring) or by ignoring threat-relevant information (blunting).
preferred provider organization (PPO)   A network of affiliated practitioners that has agreed to charge preestablished rates for particular medical services.
psychological control   The perception that one has at one’s disposal a response that will reduce, minimize, eliminate, or offset the adverse effects of some unpleasant event, such as a medical procedure.
repression  A psychological defense by which individuals unable to deal with their own anxiety because of threatening events push these impulses into the unconscious; as a coping style, repression involves ignoring or not dealing fully with threatening events.
secondary gains   Benefits of being treated for illness, including the ability to rest, to be freed from unpleasant tasks, and to be taken care of by others.
separation anxiety  Feelings of fear or extreme distress that result from separation from someone important, usually the mother.
somaticizers  People who express distress and conflict through bodily symptoms.
worried well  Individuals free from illness who are nonetheless concerned about their physical state and frequently and inappropriately use medical services.