CLP4314: Health Psychology

Course Description

CLP4314, Health Psychology, studies the relationship between psychological processes and physical health. Its organising commitment is the biopsychosocial model: that health and illness are produced jointly by biological, psychological and social factors, and that a purely biomedical account is incomplete for most of what actually makes people ill and keeps them well.

The University of West Florida describes "a survey of the discipline of psychology that focuses on the promotion and maintenance of health and prevention and treatment of illness, including the application of the biopsychosocial model to health." Florida Gulf Coast University frames it more clinically as a "review of application of clinical psychology in behavioral medicine context," with "emphasis on rehabilitation and prevention."

The case for the field is empirical rather than ideological. The leading causes of death in the United States are substantially behavioural in origin — tobacco use, diet, physical inactivity, alcohol, and adherence or non-adherence to treatment. Stress has documented physiological effects through neuroendocrine and immune pathways. Psychological factors predict recovery, pain experience and mortality after controlling for disease severity. A discipline that can change health behaviour is therefore addressing a large share of preventable illness, and that is what health psychology attempts.

The CLP prefix places the course in clinical psychology, which is worth noticing: this is applied psychology aimed at practice settings, and it is a natural pairing for students heading toward medicine, nursing, physician assistant study, public health or clinical psychology.

CLP4314 is offered at approximately 9 Florida institutions and carries 3 credits with roughly 45 contact hours. It is a 4000-level course taken in the junior or senior year, normally as an elective in the psychology major.

⚠ Prerequisites diverge sharply — check before you plan on this course

• University of West Florida: none listed for CLP4314.
• Florida Gulf Coast University: PSY2012 and (PSY3213 or PSY3017) and (STA2122 or PSY3205) — general psychology, research methods and statistics.

That is a substantial difference. FGCU's chain means the course is effectively restricted to psychology majors well into the degree, while UWF's version is open. The practical consequences: a student from outside the major may be able to take it at one institution and not another, and a section with the full prerequisite chain will assume students can read primary research and interpret statistical results — which changes how the material is taught. Check both the prerequisite and any major restriction before building a schedule around this course.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Define health psychology, distinguish it from behavioural medicine, medical psychology and clinical health psychology, and describe the field's development.
• Explain the biopsychosocial model and contrast it with the biomedical model, identifying what each explains and what each omits.
• Describe the research methods used in health psychology — experimental, longitudinal, epidemiological and clinical trial designs — and explain the difficulty of establishing causation between psychological factors and physical outcomes.
• Explain the physiology relevant to the field: the nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular and immune systems, and the pathways through which psychological states affect them.
• Define stress and describe the major theoretical models, including the general adaptation syndrome, the transactional model of appraisal and coping, and allostatic load.
• Explain the physiological consequences of acute and chronic stress, including HPA axis activation and its effects, and summarise the psychoneuroimmunology evidence.
• Describe coping strategies and social support, and evaluate the evidence on which forms are effective for which stressors.
• Apply health behaviour change theories — the health belief model, the theory of planned behaviour, the transtheoretical model, social cognitive theory and self-determination theory — and evaluate their empirical support.
• Explain the psychology of health-enhancing behaviours: physical activity, nutrition, sleep, and preventive screening.
• Explain the psychology of health-compromising behaviours: tobacco use, alcohol and substance use, risky sexual behaviour, and the models of addiction and relapse.
• Explain pain: the gate control and neuromatrix theories, acute and chronic pain, pain assessment, and psychological approaches to pain management.
• Explain treatment adherence, describe its measured prevalence, identify the factors that predict it, and evaluate interventions to improve it.
• Describe patient-provider communication, its documented failures, and its consequences for outcomes.
• Explain the psychological dimensions of chronic and terminal illness: adjustment, quality of life, caregiver burden and end-of-life issues.
• Analyse the psychological aspects of specific conditions — cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, HIV, obesity — including risk, adjustment and behavioural management.
• Explain health disparities and the social determinants of health, and describe the psychological and structural mechanisms that produce them.
• Evaluate health psychology research critically and communicate findings accurately.

Optional Outcomes

• Apply mindfulness-based and acceptance-based interventions to health outcomes.
• Explain the placebo and nocebo effects and their implications for trial design and clinical practice.
• Analyse occupational health psychology, workplace stress and burnout.
• Analyse health communication and public health campaign design, including fear appeals and message framing.
• Analyse digital health: mobile health applications, wearables, telehealth and behavioural intervention technologies.
• Analyse the psychology of eating and weight, including weight stigma and its health consequences.
• Analyse women's health, men's health, or paediatric health psychology as specialised areas.
• Analyse psychological aspects of ageing and health — of substantial relevance in Florida.
• Analyse complementary and integrative health approaches and the evidence for them.
• Design a health behaviour change intervention and evaluate a self-change project.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Introduction: the scope of health psychology, its history, and the shift from infectious to chronic disease as the dominant health problem
• The biopsychosocial model; the mind-body problem in health; the limits of the biomedical model
• Research methods: correlational and experimental designs, longitudinal and prospective studies, epidemiology, randomised trials, meta-analysis; the causation problem
• Body systems relevant to health psychology: nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive and immune
• Stress: definitions, the general adaptation syndrome, the transactional model, appraisal, allostasis and allostatic load
• Stress physiology: sympathetic activation, the HPA axis, cortisol, and downstream health effects
• Psychoneuroimmunology: the evidence linking psychological state to immune function and disease susceptibility
• Coping: problem-focused and emotion-focused coping, avoidance, resilience, and individual differences
• Social support: types, mechanisms (buffering and direct effects), and the evidence on social isolation as a health risk
• Health behaviour theories: health belief model, theory of planned behaviour, transtheoretical (stages of change) model, social cognitive theory, self-determination theory
• Health-enhancing behaviour: exercise, nutrition, sleep, screening and vaccination
• Health-compromising behaviour: smoking and cessation, alcohol and substance use, risky sexual behaviour; models of addiction and relapse prevention
• Symptom perception, illness cognition and health care utilisation; the sick role and illness behaviour
• Patient-provider interaction: communication failures, shared decision making, health literacy
• Treatment adherence: measurement, predictors, and evidence-based interventions
• Pain: mechanisms, gate control and neuromatrix theories, acute versus chronic pain, assessment, and psychological management including CBT and biofeedback
• Chronic illness: adjustment, quality of life, self-management, caregiver burden
• Terminal illness and end of life: psychological responses, hospice and palliative care, bereavement
• Specific conditions: cardiovascular disease and the Type A/hostility literature, cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, obesity
• Health disparities: socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, rurality, access, and the mechanisms linking them to outcomes
• Health promotion and prevention: primary, secondary and tertiary; individual, community and policy-level intervention

Optional Topics

• Mindfulness-based stress reduction and acceptance-based approaches
• Placebo and nocebo effects
• Occupational health psychology, workplace stress and burnout
• Health communication and campaign design
• Digital health: apps, wearables, telehealth, and the evidence on their effectiveness
• Psychology of eating, weight and weight stigma
• Paediatric, women's or men's health psychology
• Ageing and health psychology
• Complementary and integrative health
• Health policy and behavioural economics applied to health
• Self-change project or intervention design

Resources & Tools

• Health Psychology (Shelley Taylor, McGraw-Hill) is the field's standard undergraduate text and the most widely adopted in Florida; Taylor is one of the discipline's founding figures and the book defines the standard syllabus.
• Health Psychology: An Introduction to Behavior and Health (Brannon, Feist & Updegraff, Cengage) is the other major adoption and is notably strong on evaluating evidence.
• Health Psychology: Biopsychosocial Interactions (Sarafino & Smith) and An Introduction to Health Psychology (Morrison & Bennett) are common alternatives.
• Widely assigned supplementary reading: Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers (Robert Sapolsky) — the standard accessible account of stress physiology, and the book students most often report reading beyond the assignment.
• Data and evidence sources: the CDC, including the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and the National Health Interview Survey; the National Institutes of Health, particularly NHLBI, NCI and NIDDK; Healthy People 2030 for national objectives; the Cochrane Library for intervention evidence; and PsycINFO and PubMed for the literature.
• Professional context: the American Psychological Association Division 38 (Society for Health Psychology); the Society of Behavioral Medicine; and the American Board of Clinical Health Psychology for the specialist credential.
• Florida-specific: the Florida Department of Health, whose county health departments run behaviour-change programming and publish county-level health data through FLHealthCHARTS — an excellent free source for a course project; the Florida Board of Psychology for licensure requirements; and the state's academic medical centres, several of which house behavioural medicine programmes.

Career Pathways

• Graduate study in clinical or health psychology — SOC 19-3033 and 19-3039. ⚠ The title "psychologist" and independent practice require a doctorate and Florida licensure through the Board of Psychology; a bachelor's degree does not qualify anyone to practise. Clinical health psychology is a recognised board specialty.
• Medicine, Physician Assistant and Nursing — SOC 29-1210, 29-1071 and 29-1141. This is one of the more useful psychology electives for pre-health students, because adherence, communication and behaviour change are daily clinical realities that biomedical training covers thinly.
• Public Health Practitioner and Health Education Specialist — SOC 21-1091. The CHES and MCHES credentials (NCHEC) are the professional standards, and the behaviour-change theory in this course maps directly onto their content outline.
• Behavioral Health Care Manager and Integrated Care Team Member — SOC 21-1022 and 11-9111. Integrated behavioural health in primary care is a growing model and employs at the master's level.
• Health Coach and Wellness Program Coordinator — SOC 21-1091 and 11-9111, in employer wellness programmes, health plans and clinical settings.
• Clinical Research Coordinator — SOC 11-9121 and 19-1042. Behavioural intervention trials need coordinators who understand the design.
• Social Worker and Mental Health Counselor — SOC 21-1021 and 21-1014, requiring graduate study and Florida licensure through the Board of Clinical Social Work, Marriage and Family Therapy and Mental Health Counseling.
• Rehabilitation Counselor — SOC 21-1015. FGCU's framing of the course around rehabilitation points here directly.
• Health Communication and Social Marketing Specialist — SOC 27-3031 and 21-1091.
• Florida employers of note: the Florida Department of Health and its 67 county health departments; the health systems with behavioural medicine and integrated care programmes — AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, Baptist Health, Tampa General, UF Health, Moffitt Cancer Center, Nemours Children's Health and Mayo Clinic Florida; the Veterans Health Administration facilities, which are among the largest employers of health psychologists in the country and have a strong presence in Tampa, Gainesville, Miami and Orlando; health plans running wellness and care management programmes; and the state's very large ageing-services sector.

Special Information

Position in the curriculum

CLP4314 is a 4000-level elective, taken in the junior or senior year. In most Florida psychology majors it satisfies a distribution requirement within the major — typically the clinical or applied domain — and it follows General Psychology and, where required, research methods and statistics. It is a common elective for students on pre-medical, pre-physician-assistant, nursing, public health and exercise science tracks, and those students are often a substantial fraction of the room.

Prerequisites narrative

See the divergence above. UWF lists none; FGCU requires general psychology plus research methods plus statistics. Junior or senior standing is a practical requirement given the 4000-level number, and some departments restrict enrolment to psychology majors. Students from health professions programmes wanting this course should check the restriction as much as the prerequisite — it is the restriction that more often blocks them.

Where research methods and statistics are prerequisites, expect the course to assign primary research articles and to require competent reading of results sections. Where they are not, the course is typically taught more descriptively.

Course format and workload

Three credits, approximately 45 contact hours, no laboratory. Online and hybrid sections are widely available. Assessment typically combines examinations with an application paper, a research critique, or a self-change project — a structured attempt to modify one of the student's own health behaviours using a theory from the course, with data collection and analysis. That assignment is common, it is the one students most often report as valuable, and it works because it makes the gap between knowing a behaviour-change theory and successfully changing a behaviour immediate.

Content note

The course deals directly with serious illness, chronic pain, addiction, terminal illness, bereavement and the psychological consequences of each, using clinical case material. Instructors generally handle this professionally, but students should know the territory in advance — particularly students with recent personal or family experience of the conditions covered, for whom the material can land differently than the syllabus suggests.

Support is available and using it is ordinary. Every Florida public institution operates a counselling centre. Statewide and national resources: the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988); the SAMHSA National Helpline, 1-800-662-4357, for substance use and mental health treatment referral; and the Florida Department of Health quitline, 1-877-822-6669 (Tobacco Free Florida), which the course's smoking-cessation unit typically references.

⚠ Evidence quality — a caution the course should teach and this guide will state

Health psychology carries a body of widely repeated claims of varying quality, and a student should leave the course able to tell them apart. The Type A personality literature is the standard example: the original construct did not hold up, and the component that predicts cardiovascular outcomes is hostility rather than time urgency or competitiveness. Claims that psychological state causes or cures cancer are not supported by the evidence and have real costs, since they imply patients are responsible for their disease. Much of the older psychoneuroimmunology literature has effect sizes smaller than early reporting suggested, and health psychology has been affected by the same replication problems as the rest of the field.

None of this undermines the discipline — the behavioural contribution to chronic disease is large and well established, and behaviour-change interventions work. But it means specific claims need checking against current evidence rather than against a textbook chapter, and a good section will say so.

Florida context

Several features make this course locally relevant. Florida's age structure — the highest proportion of residents over 65 of any state — puts chronic disease management, caregiver burden, end-of-life care and ageing-related health psychology at the centre rather than the margin. The state's health disparities are substantial and geographically patterned, with rural counties showing markedly different outcomes from urban ones. Florida has not expanded Medicaid, which produces access barriers that interact with every behaviour-change intervention the course discusses. And the state's outdoor climate and year-round activity opportunity sit alongside above-average obesity and diabetes prevalence — a useful illustration that opportunity alone does not produce behaviour.

Transfer and articulation

CLP4314 is a 4000-level SCNS course: the number is recognised statewide, but upper-division credit is not covered by the A.A. transfer guarantee and applicability inside a major is the receiving department's decision. Since it normally satisfies a distribution requirement rather than a core one, it transfers with relatively little friction. It is not available before transfer from a Florida College System A.A.; the lower-division psychology preparation is PSY2012 and STA2023.

Course-code variations across Florida

The CLP prefix is clinical psychology. CLP4314 is health psychology; adjacent numbers include CLP4143 (abnormal psychology at some institutions), CLP4414 (behaviour modification), CLP4420 (human neuropsychology), CLP4390 (forensic psychology) and CLP4934-range seminars. Related content sits under PSY (general and research), DEP (developmental — ageing and health), SOP (social psychology — social support and attitude change overlap substantially), PCB or PSB (biological psychology), and HSC or PHC (health sciences and public health). ⚠ Note that HSC- and PHC-prefixed health behaviour courses are not equivalent to CLP4314 for a psychology major's requirement — they approach the same territory from a public health rather than a psychological standpoint, and the departments do not usually accept substitution in either direction.