Suchergebnisse

Humans are social animals; consequently, a lack of social ties affects individuals' health negatively. However, the desire to belong differs between individuals, raising the question of whether individual differences in the need to belong moderate the impact of perceived social isolation on health. In the present study, 77 first-year university students rated their loneliness and health every 6 weeks for 18 weeks. Individual differences in the need to belong were found to moderate the relationship between loneliness and current health state. Specifically, lonely students with a high need to belong reported more days of illness than those with a low need to belong. In contrast, the strength of the need to belong had no effect on students who did not feel lonely. Thus, people who have a strong need to belong appear to suffer from loneliness and become ill more often, whereas people with a weak need to belong appear to stand loneliness better and are comparatively healthy. The study implies that social isolation does not impact all individuals identically; instead, the fit between the social situation and an individual's need appears to be crucial for an individual's functioning.

Abstract. At a broad level, the Konstanz Health Psychology research group aims at understanding the judgment and decision making processes underlying health-relevant behaviors. Towards this goal, several more specific research agendas are addressed. A primary aim is to understand the transition from knowing about risks to personally feeling at risk. In particular, we study the reception of relevant personalised health feedback such as feedback on cholesterol levels or blood pressure. Contrary to the dominant models of biased reasoning, our results on feedback reception suggest that people respond adaptively to health risk feedback. Furthermore, we study changes in the perception of health risk across time and their associated effects on the onset, maintenance, and cessation of health-relevant behaviors. In current research, we try to utilize methods from affective neuroscience for assessing affective and intuitive processes relevant to personal feelings of risk. These efforts are motivated by the broader goal of developing theoretical frameworks that can be applied across a range of behavioral domains.