Welcome to week 4

Hi everyone, and welcome to the last week of the course. In the previous weeks, we consider big topics in health psychology and I hope that by this time you have realized how big it is the field and [how] wide. Because its range is from Social Psychology to Clinical Psychology, from behavioral medicine to influencing policy makers and stakeholders in order to foster and to promote health. As I have said, this is why the course is [called] Introduction to Psychology. It was a way to make with you familiar with all these different contents. And if possible, choose the topic that are more interesting for you.

In this final week, however, I’d like to cover a few more topics that are, let’s say, emerging ones and complete, at least I hope they complete their area of interest of health psychology. These of course, are emerging and trending topics, for me, it’s a choice, but I think, and I hope you will find these selection interesting for you as well. Among others of these topics, you will learn what positive psychology is, and if it is effective or not.

Furthermore, we will work on a topic that is very interesting to me, which is the possibility of using technology to improve health, the so-called he eHealth domain, so, the use of apps, the use of digital monitoring, remote monitoring to, for instance, to give tips for improving health to patients, to monitoring patients conditions and so on. Finally, we will conclude the course with two major problems of these strange days. The first one is the applicability and the range of intervention of health psychology in emerging countries and the role of health psychology in these areas.

Because the while in industrialized countries, for instance, a good health psychology program is to prevent obesity or to reduce the risk of hypertension or of cardiac diseases, this is not an important topic in emerging countries where infant mortality, where malnutrition, where infectious diseases, are the most prominent issues and aspects. So we cannot think [about] health psychologies in these countries with the same schemes that we use for the industrialized countries because the problems are different. Speaking of infectious diseases, the other major topic in these days is the Pandemic. I’ve decided to introduce a section, an activity in which we’ll consider how health psychology and behavioral medicine can make some difference in pandemics.

How to foster, to improve the use of mask or a social distancing? How to make more typical and more often people washing their hands and so on. This is something which is completely in the area of expertise, in an area of interest of health psychology.

I hope you have held the line until now, and therefore, this is the last effort, last week. I hope you will enjoy this final series of activities.