Towards an Ideology-Free, Truly Mechanistic Health Psychology

Abstract

Efficient transfer of concepts and mechanistic insights from the cognitive to the health sciences and back requires a clear, objective description of the problem that this transfer ought to solve. Unfortunately, however, the actual descriptions are commonly penetrated with, and sometimes even motivated by, cultural norms and preferences, a problem that has colored scientific theorizing about behavioral control—the key concept for many psychological health interventions. We argue that ideologies have clouded our scientific thinking about mental health in two ways: by considering the societal utility of individuals and their behavior a key criterion for distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy people, and by dividing what actually seem to be continuous functions relating psychological and neurocognitive underpinnings to human behavior into binary, discrete categories that are then taken to define clinical phenomena. We suggest letting both traditions go and establish a health psychology that restrains from imposing societal values onto individuals, and then taking the fit between behavior and values to conceptualize unhealthiness. Instead, we promote a health psychology that reconstructs behavior that is considered to be problematic from well-understood mechanistic underpinnings of human behavior.

Restoration of Attention by Rest in a Multitasking World: Theory, Methodology, and Empirical Evidence

“…We are currently living in a world characterized by acceleration on many fronts, which yields ever-growing task and performance demands, often requiring the execution of multiple tasks at around the same time (Engelmann et al, 2011;Wörle et al, 2021). In this context, it appears essential for corresponding research fields to focus on ways which render life in a multitasking world more bearable (Colzato et al, 2021;Hoffmann et al, 2021;Hommel and Beste, 2021;Kärtner et al, 2021), and the study of rest as a means to foster both performance and well-being represents a core endeavor that should clearly be explored further, but ideally on a maximally advanced level with respect to both theory building and methodology. The present paper was written with this objective in mind.…”

A Metacontrol Perspective on Neurocognitive Atypicality: From Unipolar to Bipolar Accounts

“…Clinicians and psychiatrists usually follow what can be characterized as a unipolar logic, which focuses on “typical” or “normal” conditions that refer to average or optimal performance and behavior in everyday life, while other (“atypical” or “deviant”) conditions are defined by the absence of behavioral or performance-related “normality.” According to this unipolar logic, those whose mental performance or overt behavior digress from what is considered average humans are considered “abnormal” or “deviant” and thus in need of treatment—with the goal of reducing the gap between their behavior and that of the average population. This view is consolidated in our society notwithstanding the fact that the degree of deviation from average mental performance is often not clear and justified objectively, but rather reflects present cultural and societal norms and expectations ( 1 , 2 ). Several other disciplines share this unipolar logic as well, including linguistics, pedagogy, and the social sciences, which commonly characterize atypical individuals in terms of the difficulties and challenges they face in trying to comply with societal norms and criteria, and to meet societal expectations, in terms of the deficiencies they have, and the limitations they possess ( 3 – 6 ).…”

Overcoming the phenomenological Perpetuum mobile in clinical cognitive neuroscience for the benefit of replicability in research and the societal view on mental disorders

“…Through more theory-based cognitive neuroscience research, categorial boundaries between “ill” and “normal” become increasingly fleeting and less distinguishable. As opposed to the current strategy to first categorize individuals into normal and abnormal based on diagnostic procedures that are subject to considerable variation (see above), a so-called “synthetic approach” ( Hommel and Beste, 2021 ; Colzato et al, 2022a , b ) for cognitive neuroscience research may be more promising. This approach can be contrasted with the so-called “analytical approach” ( Braitenberg, 1986 ; Hommel and Colzato, 2015 ).…”