Abstract
In this article the author describes a long-term comprehensive study of various forms of social and individual health representation in a youth (student) social group. A theoretical analysis of various approaches to understanding the phenomenon of health, developed in the framework of social medicine, clinical psychology, a psychosomatic school, behavioral and cognitive areas of psychology and psychotherapy, humanistic personality theories, is carried out. Different levels of conceptualization of the health phenomenon are considered (as a socio-cultural / semantic construct and as a significant aspect of an individual self-concept). The author analyzes the theoretical foundations and scientific specifics of the Health psychology, as an independent field of psychological knowledge. The author also analyzes the results of a comprehensive study of the “internal representation of health” that was formed among junior students of natural sciences and humanities departments at the Russian State University. Specific types of the internal representation of health are revealed and described.
Highlights
Researches on the social and individual representation of health are the priority area of modern health psychology
The representatives of the psychosomatic school formulated the task of revealing the psychological mechanisms of the personality influence on the disease, its occurrence
Psychologists of the behavioral school focused on the behavioral prerequisites of various disorders of the body and psyche healthy functioning
Summary
Researches on the social and individual representation of health are the priority area of modern health psychology. Summarizing the various areas of researches, we can distinguish a number of descriptive models in which health is defined as: 1) the essential property (attribute) of human nature; 2) an integrative personality trait, consisting of a number of biological, psychological, social and spiritual indicators; 3) one of the basic values of culture and value orientations of the individual; 4) the quality of human life, i.e. characteristic of an individual’s life path as a complex multi-stage process of self-realization, and, simultaneously, as a characteristic of society. Within the framework of psychological research, the health phenomenon can be represented at different levels of conceptualization: 1) as a conceptual (semantic) construct formed in certain socio-cultural conditions and a social representation which characterizes different social groups or communities; 2) as a significant aspect of the individual self-conception [13]. We consider the internal representation of health in a cognitive sense as a system of formed subject’s (in our study, student’s) ideas about the essence of health in general, as well as about the possibilities and necessary conditions of his own health, in particular
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