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Experimental Approaches to Social Interaction for the Behavioral Medicine Toolbox
Book chapter

Experimental Approaches to Social Interaction for the Behavioral Medicine Toolbox

Jerry Suls and M. Bryant Howren
Handbook of Behavioral Medicine, pp.211-223
Springer
2010
DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-09488-5_16

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Abstract

This chapter provides a selective review of the use of experimental social psychological methods to test hypotheses and predictions in health psychology/behavioral medicine. Although such methods have limited ecological validity, they have the virtue of tight controls and being able to test causal relationships. Thus, they provide a complementary and supplementary approach to descriptive-correlational methodologies. Five research paradigms using experimental social psychological methods are described: the Thioamine Acetylase (TAA) paradigm for studying illness cognition, the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) paradigm for assessing psychophysiological responses to stress, mental harassment in the context of hostility and cardiovascular risk, social support in the context of behavioral stress, and research on advanced directives. In each section, we describe how the experimental paradigms can refine and bolster findings based on non-experimental, observational methods.
Psychiatry Psychology Social Sciences Behavioral Sciences Life Sciences & Biomedicine Psychology, Clinical Science & Technology

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