Health Psychology; advanced course

This course is primarily intended for Research Master students. There is only a limited number of spots available for PhD students

Building on the course “Health Psychology”, this course focuses on three important themes in the field of health psychology, namely:

a.     Etiology of illness and survival;
b.     Psychological interventions for patients with a somatic illness;
c.     Dyadic coping with somatic disease.

The aim is to provide knowledge and insight into recent developments in psychological and medical-sociological theories, relevant for theory-driven research in medical settings, as well as for evaluating the effects of psychosocial interventions among patients with a somatic disease. 

Each topic will be addressed in two meetings (2 hours each).

• Meeting 1: Students will receive a reading assignment that they have to prepare before the meeting. Specifically, they are asked to read a number of selected papers and answer questions. During the interactive meeting, we will discuss the papers and questions.
• Meeting 2: Before the meeting, students will perform a writing assignment (± 750 words). The assignment is based on the papers discussed during meeting 1 and they may need to search an additional empirical paper. The format differs between the themes (e.g., “commentary on a scientific paper” or “write a newspaper article based on the literature”). During the interactive meeting, students will receive feedback from fellow-students and the teacher.

The course will be completed with a final assignment. Students have to write an essay with respect to one of the three research themes and search for additional literature (total 1750 words). One of the teachers will be available for providing feedback on this process, during one individual meeting

Material 

• Compulsory for meeting 1 & 2: Selected papers (links will be referenced in the assignments) + additional papers for the writing assignments.
• For the personal assignment an explorative literature search concerning 15 relevant articles should be performed (and added to the assignment as ‘background literature), of which 7 articles should be used as references in the final assignment.

Assessment / Grading
The reading and writing assignments (meetings 1 & 2) will be graded by pass/fail. To pass the course all assessments have to be completed with a pass.

The final assignment will be evaluated with a final grade 0-10. Both the teacher and the coordinator will evaluate the final paper. To pass the course this grade has to be 5.5 or higher.

For this course basic knowledge of Health Psychology is required.