Behavioral Medicine in Psychology

This study was under siren to research behavioral medicament in psychology. In summary, this research examines the origins of behavioral music, reviews the psychosocial and behavioral mechanisms, and describes concrete and practical implementations of behavioral knowledge as they cast off been apply to medicine. The purpose of this recreate is to bulge out neckcloth main features of behavioral medicine and its utilization in psychology. Behavioral medicine is an interdisciplinary field of force of study integrating the behavioral, social, and medical sciences (Miley, 1999, p.10).It grew out of behaviorism in the early seventies and integrated psychology into physical illness. Schwartz and Weiss defined the term Behavioral medicine is the development and integration of biomedical, psychosocial and behavioral sciences knowledge and techniques relevant to health and illness and the application of this knowledge and these techniques to prevention, diagnosis, intervention, and r ehabilitation (1978, p. 249-51).The atomic number 18a of behavioral medicine includes behavior- transfer programs which operate different health-re advancedd activities (self-examination for early symptoms of disease, following special diets, exercising and taking medicine) (Pierce, 2004, p. 380). Some history should be given. Between the burst of enthusiasm for give lessonsing based therapies in the 1920s and their revival in the sixties a great deal of research lab research and refinement of learning theory was carried out by Clark Hull, B. F. Skinner, Neal Miller, and other(a)s.By the mid-fifties, efforts to apply much sophisticate learning theories to psychopathology became widespread. The early psychoanalytic approaches soon gave way to data-based studies aimed at identifying psychological factors believed to play a major utilization in the development of specific bodily complaints. These initial attempts to link personality types to specific disease evinces were ge nerally disappointing but nevertheless open a firm basis for interdisciplinary research in the virgin field of behavioral medicine.Rather than attempting to miscellanea problem behavior, however, these efforts mainly translated the clinical theory and lore of psychoanalysis into the language of learning theory. The most pushy of these translations was Personality and Psychotherapy, by John Dollard and Neal Miller (1950). Dedicating their book to Freud and Pavlov and their students, Dollard and Miller sought to combine the vitality of psychoanalysis, the hard knocks of the natural-science laboratory, and the facts of culture (p.3). They called psychotherapy a window to higher mental life and the dish up by which north is created (pp. 3, 5). Accepting psychoanalytic views of psychopathology and its treatment, Dollard and Miller mainly sought to state these views in more stern terms derived from laboratory research on learning. Despite the basic contrasts listed earlier, psych oanalytic and learning theories converged in several(prenominal) ways.They stated, both explained mental processes largely in terms of principles of association, whereby sequences of thoughts are governed by previous contiguities among ideas, similarity of content, and other shared features. This associationistic view of mental processes was the basis for the psychoanalytic technique of free association, as well as the psychoanalytic theory of mental symbols. Psychoanalytic theories and most learning theories postulated that reduction of organically based drives promoted the learning of important results, attitudes, and emotions.Psychoanalytic theory and learning theories blamed childhood experiences for most adult psychopathology but did not actually test the relationships that were assumed. Neal Miller began his career strongly influenced by his psychoanalytic training, so his earlier work reflects a more psychological approach to behavior. Impressed by his clinical observations of the effects of self-contradictory motivations, he searched for underlying mechanisms heterogeneous, which led to work in brain stimulation and control of autonomic responses utilizing biofeedback techniques.His research emphasizes the interrelationship between physiology, biochemistry, and pharmacology. Miller took his undergraduate training at the University of Washington, completed his masters degree at Stanford University, and received his Ph. D. from Yale University in 1935. Trained as a psychoanalyst, he combined clinical observation and a broad line of research that led to such important contributions as the frustration-agression hypothesis and social learning theory.Searching for the underlying ca put ons of conflicting motivation, he moved into the battleground of brain stimulation and then to an interesting and highly controversial series of studies involving the control of autonomic responses utilizing biofeedback techniques. After a distinguished career at Yale a nd the Institute of Human Relations, he moved to Rockefeller University in 1966 where he continues his interests in physiology, biochemistry, and pharmacology. Professor Miller served as president of the Ameri grass mental Association in 1969.In 1969 Neal Miller, in an article in Science, summarized a series of studies in which, by the procedure of Skinnerian reinforcement strategies, he and his associates had trained animals to bring a number of internal bodily functions evidently under self-control. The bodily functions thus trained included blood pressure, urine formation, mettle rate, ashes temperature, and gut distensions. Together with other demonstrations of a similar kind, often with human subjects, this work led to a reinvigorated form of therapy called biofeedback.Using sophisticated equipment for monitoring and displaying to the patient the moment to moment fluctuations in blood pressure, skin temperature, heart rate, muscle tension, blood volume, or brain waves, a host of investigations began to report the success in treatment by biofeedback and other self-conditioning methods of headache, muscle tension, high blood pressure, nervousness, Raynauds disease (in which ones finger tips and toes become so icy that they lose all blood circulation and bring on excruciating pain), tics, bedwetting, and a host of comparable disorders.A brisk subspecialty in medical psychology and medicine was being born. The name given to it was behavioral medicine. As this field has developed its scope has expanded. It now includes the helping of patients who want to quit smoking, give up drugs, lose weight, take their insulin or follow the prescribed treatments for other conditions where therapy fails for lack of compliance to a regimen that is known to be effective. It also includes indivi twofolds who are healthy and want to persist in so by jogging, eating low cholesterin and other more healthful foods, abstain from alcohol, and so on.A brief historical revie w of the developments in medicine and in psychology which led to the emergence of behavioral medicine and behavioral health as viable, interdisciplinary specialties is available elsewhere (Matarazzo, 1980, 1982). The emergence of health psychology as a vigorous new go over is a natural outcome of scientific and technological advances within psychology. Experimental and physiological psychology have contributed greatly to this evolution, beginning with Pavlovs early work with dogs at the turn of the century. His concept of conditioned reflex provided the basis for much of classical learning theory.In the 1920s, Walter Cannon introduced the concepts of homeostasis and fight versus flight. Neal Miller applied aspects of these earlier theories to an understanding of the role of conditioning in psychophysiological change and how certain aspects of the autonomic nervous system could be controlled. The modern employment of biofeedback treatment to teach an individual how to control mus cle tensions, blood pressure, and other physiological processes developed out of these earlier efforts. Psychophysiology made contributions to behavioral medicine.Psychophysiological applications to behavioral medicine typically involve the monitoring of physiological functions in relation to concurrent emotional and behavioral states. Originally, psychophysiological studies were confined to the laboratory or clinic, and explored the cardiovascular and neuroendocrine responses to stressors, individual differences in reaction patterns, or changes in physiological function with behavioral interventions. Laboratory studies remain the mainstay of psychophysiology, but the development of ambulatory methods has increasingly led to investigations under allday or representational conditions.Describing psychophysiology as a method of studying relationships between physical responses and ongoing behavior places no limits on the nature of the physiological processes being monitored. Indeed, one of the characteristics of psychophysiology has been the development of technology to assess more and more sophisticated and precise aspects of cardiovascular function. In the behavioral epidemiological study, physiological measures are typically collected under office or clinic conditions on one or a few occasions, whereas psychophysiologists are predominantly concerned with dynamic interrelations between behavior and physiology.Psychophysiological research in early behavioral medicine was dominated by studies of biofeedback and the voluntary control of blood pressure and heart rate (Beatty & Legewie, 1977). Over the stand up years, mental stress testing in the laboratory has become the major research paradigm (Steptoe & Vogele, 1991). It has involved studies of many clinic and high-risk groups, and assessments of a wide range of physiological processes in response to a cast of conditions, such as problem solving, stress interviews, and information-processing tasks.The methodo logy of mental stress testing in the laboratory has been thoroughly reviewed in various texts (Matthews, Weiss & Detre, 1986). Reservations concerning the reliability of laboratory assessments have largely been allayed by a new generation of investigations, indicating that, provided care is taken with physiological measurement and administration of behavioral stimuli, reliable and consistent response patterns are observed. The psychophysiological treatment par excellence is biofeedback. Biofeedback is a research-based empirical approach, with greater emphasis on counterpunch of results and cautious examination of evidence.Yet biofeedback pursues the same goal as other body therapies, that of using individual cognizance and control over the body to enhance personal potential, health, and growth. It brings together humanistic conceptions of mind and body with sophisticated electronic technology to produce powerful strategies for self-control over consciousness, emotion, and physiolo gy. The area of volitional control of physiological activity has contributed significantly to the growing field of behavioral medicine and health psychology. The beginnings of biofeedback go back to the late 1960s.Kenneth Gaarder points out that biofeedback was not so much a discovery as it was an awareness which emerged from the Zeitgeist (Gaarder & Montgomery, 1979). Many researchers of the 1950s and 1960s can be cited as independent founders of biofeedback. For example, Hefferline conceptualized biofeedback as a powerful tool, perhaps more powerful than Gestalt awareness exercises, to expand body awareness and self-awareness (Knapp, 1986). As with other so-called departures in psychology, in that location were earlier examples. The primary training method developed and utilized in this learning process has been labeled biofeedback.Its theory grounded on the concept introduced by Elmer Green Every change in the physiological state is accompanied by an appropriate change in the me ntal emotional state, conscious or unconscious, and conversely, every change in the mental emotional state, conscious or unconscious, is accompanied by an appropriate change in the physiological state. (Green, Green, & Walters, 1970, p. 3) This initial research activity began to stimulate more interest, among both the scientific partnership and the general public, in the area of biofeedback because of its many potentially important clinical and medical applications.For example, it would be therapeutically valuable if it was possible to teach patients with hypertension how to lower their blood pressure, or to teach patients with headaches how to control the vasodilation process involved in the pain phenomenon. Indeed, Birk (1973) was the individual who coined the term behavioral medicine to describe the application of a behavioral treatment technique (biofeedback) that could be applied to medicine or medical problems (e. g. , headache pain).Each school of body therapy or body work p resents a different manifestation of the fundamental psychophysiological principle that we can intervene somatically and produce changes in emotion and relationship, and inversely, that we can intervene psychologically, with somatic consequences. Each of the body-therapy approaches emphasizes a dual psychological and somatic intervention, and each emphasizes breathing, muscular rigidity, and the physical blocking of memories and affective experiencing. In turn, each body therapy seeks to release the individual from physical inhibitions and to restore a full psychophysiological selfregulation.The work of Alexander Graham campana ( 1847-1922), the inventor of the telephone, with the deaf, and his interest in using the visible display of speech sound, either by government agency of manometric flames or by an early form of kymograph, in order to help the deaf to reproduce remunerate sounds, would seem to utilize feedback principles ( Bruce, 1973). However, it needed a dramatic event to focus attention on the area of feedback control. This event took place at the 1967 annual meeting of the Pavlovian Society of North America in the form of a report by Neal Miller (1968).He introduced a technique that his colleague, Jay Towill, had first devised. This involved immobilizing animals with D-tubo curarine, artificially respirating them, and with electrodes placed in the so-called pleasure centers in the brain, operantly conditioning various physiological systems. For example, it was inform that the animal could learn, through operant conditioning, to increase or lower blood pressure, increase or fall down heart-rate, kidney flow, and so on. The reward was, in each case, a brief electric pulse delivered to the pleasure centres.The use of D-tubo curarine to produce paralysis of skeletal muscles was an attempt to avoid the possibility that the animal was modifying its autonomic responses via voluntary activities, such as changes in muscle tension or breathing pattern or rate. Research document soon followed, and in a series of studies carried out with Leo DiCara on the curarized rat, the instrumental conditioning of heart-rate, blood-pressure, and renal blood-flow andin collaboration with A. Banuazizicontraction of the intestines, appeared to be demonstrated. Reports from other laboratories seemed to support Millers findings.