Health Psychology
What is Health Psychology?
Health Psychology is an exciting and relatively new field devoted to understanding psychological influences on how people stay healthy, why they become ill, and how they respond when they do get ill. Health psychologists both study such issues and develop interventions to help people stay well or recover from illness. - Shelley Taylor, 2014
In addition to being its own sub-area in psychology, psychologists from a variety of sub-areas (e.g., social psychology, clinical psychology, developmental psychology etc.) are health psychologists.

Study Topics
- how sleep is related to health
- health-related decision making
- how stress affects health and biological functioning in humans
- how stress affects pregnancy
- how to communicate health information
- drinking behaviors and treating problem drinking
- eating disorders
- suicidal thoughts and behavior
- health-related self-regulation
- associations between nostalgia and health
- promoting health

Our Programs
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Major | Minor
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Doctoral
Health Psychology Faculty and Research
Katherine Duggan, Ph.D. - Research Interests: Personality, sleep, cardiovascular disease, lifespan development, healthy aging, statistics/methods
Anna Finley, Ph.D. - Research Interests: Social and affective neuroscience, emotion regulation, self-regulation, well-being, healthy aging, loneliness
Jeremy Hamm, Ph.D. - Research Interests: Motivation, emotion, self-regulation, life transitions, healthy aging
Clayton Hilmert, Ph.D. - Research Interests: Stress, psychophysiology, and health
Leah Irish, Ph.D. - Research Interests: Sleep, stress, health behaviors
Michael D. Robinson, Ph.D. - Research Interests: Personality, emotion, cognition, self-regulation