• Question: what made you choose health psychology?

    Asked by anon-180169 to Viren, Amy, Abby on 11 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Abby Hunter

      Abby Hunter answered on 11 Jun 2018:

      When I was at school/college I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I studied Psychology, History and English literature at A-Level. I really enjoyed my Psychology lessons and the teacher was fantastic which made me then want to study Psychology at University. I was (still am) very sporty and thought I might want to be a sports psychologist but this wasn’t really covered in my degree and it was the health psychology modules that I really enjoyed.

      I really enjoyed the health promotion and public health side of things, and how interventions and policies can be implemented to help prevent people taking up unhealthy behaviours (smoking, alcohol, drugs, gambling) and to encourage healthy behaviours (exercise, healthy eating, medication adherence). I find the whole subject fascinating, and now there is a lot of different things I can research in my job.

    • Photo: Viren Swami

      Viren Swami answered on 11 Jun 2018:

      I’m not really a health psychologist, although some of the research I do would definitely fall under the topic of health psychology. I actually trained as an evolutionary psychologist – in other words, trying to understand how evolution might have shaped how we behave now. I now consider myself a social psychologist who does a bit of work in health psychology. I basically try and understand how our social and cultural worlds influence our health-related behaviours, thoughts, and feelings.

    • Photo: Amy Warnock

      Amy Warnock answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      I’m actually not a psychologist at all but a neuroscientist, but as I’m interested in obesity and what factors can change what and how much we eat I suppose I’m definitely interested in the health field! I chose to study neuroscience as it was a combination of all of my favourite subjects at school and meant I’d be able to study a bit of everything: biology, chemistry and psychology! I think the reason that I chose this field is that I think that obesity is such as huge problem and we actually still know very little about it. Often it’s assumed that people who are obese might just be lazy, eat too much and not do enough exercise but this isn’t the case at all! I’m really passionate about changing peoples perception on obesity and also learning as much as possible about the mechanisms behind how we choose what and how much to eat so that we can hopefully develop more preventative measures to help combat the obesity crisis.

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