Health Consciousness and Disease Avoidance

Material Information

Title:
Health Consciousness and Disease Avoidance
Creator:
Zachary Carapetyan,
Publication Date:

Subjects

Subjects / Keywords:
Health Conciousness, Disease Avoidance

Notes

Abstract:
Humans have a built-in disease avoidance mechanism, which is displayed in many contexts including during pregnancy, when people are hungry, when they are exposed to a stimulus that is associated with a disease, when they have high health-related anxiety and more. In this study, we asked whether or not different levels of health consciousness would be correlated with the variance of disease avoidant behavior. The dependent variable was facial ratings. Subjects were shown faces which were images manipulated to be perfectly symmetrical and were also shown faces that were almost blatantly asymmetrical. After each face, they were to answer a series of five questions to get a sense of their impression of the person they saw these questions ask about approachability, cleanliness, friendliness, and attitude and physical contact. Based on those answers, which were on a scale of 1 to 7 we could measure their disease avoidance response to symmetrical and asymmetrical faces. We then issued a questionnaire to determine what level of health consciousness they had. We expect that the higher a participant scores on the health consciousness scale, the more negatively they would react to asymmetrical faces, and the more they would show a preference for symmetrical faces. Data collection is ongoing: partial data will be reported.
Acquisition:
Collected for SUNY Oswego Institutional Repository by the online self-submittal tool. Submitted by Zachary Carapetyan.

Record Information

Source Institution:
SUNY Oswego Institutional Repository
Holding Location:
SUNY Oswego Institution
Rights Management:
All applicable rights reserved by the source institution and holding location.