Why Are We Interested In Health Behaviors
As psychologists, we are interested in health behavior for a number of reasons, the main one being that we believe that behavior patterns are modifiable and thus there is potential to intervene to change behavior and thus modify health outcomes. As such, we are interested in all sorts of health behaviors. What distinguishes the person who engages in
health enhancing behaviors from those who do not? Who will perform health protective behavior and who will not and who is at risk of engaging in health harming behaviors? Once we have identified the health behaviors we can start to address such questions, but before we can do that we need to identify the factors that influence the engagement in or
avoidance of specific behaviors – these we refer to as the ‘antecedents of behavior’ (this will be explored in the next unit)
