Biopsychosocial Model

Definition

The term biopsychosocial model refers to a type of theory in which biological, psychological, and social psychological processes are combined or integrated to explain behaviors in ways that account for how these different types of processes combine or influence a type of behavior.

Background

Beginning in the 1990s, Jim Blascovich and colleagues developed and expanded a biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat motivational processes. In motivated performance situations, ones that are important to the individual, challenge or threat may occur. Challenge results when the individual assesses, consciously or unconsciously, that his or her resources (e.g., abilities, social support) meet or exceed the demands of the situation (e.g., required effort, danger), and threat results when the individual assesses that the demands of the situation exceed his or her resources.

To measure challenge and threat, Blascovich and colleagues use cardiovascular (i.e., heart-related) responses, including how hard a person's heart is beating (specifically, how strongly the main pumping chambers are contracting); how much a person's arteries are opening or closing; and how much blood is being pumped by the heart through the arteries to the body. In several studies, these investigators determined that when subjects were challenged by a task, their hearts would beat harder, their arteries would dilate, and more blood would be pumped by the heart throughout the body.

The biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat has proven useful in at least two major ways. First, within basic research, the model allows examination of many different social psychological phenomena via their motivational implications. Second, within applied social psychological research, the model has proven valuable for predicting future performance of various activities in which individuals are motivated to engage.

Basic Research

The rationale for using the biopsychosocial model and its associated cardiovascular measures is based on a simple idea. Specifically, if a challenge or threat prediction can be hypothesized or deduced from a specific social psychological theory, then challenge and threat measures (i.e., the cardiovascular patterns associated with challenge and threat) can be used to test the specific social psychological theory. Quite a variety of social psychological theories have been tested in this way.

For example, many attitude theories suggest that having an attitude (e.g., a like or dislike for something) helps people make decisions in everyday life, such as what to buy in a grocery store. In other words, attitudes are functional. If these theories are correct, then individuals with relevant attitudes should find decision making more challenging than would individuals without relevant attitudes. In one study, investigators induced research participants' attitudes toward abstract paintings by having them say out loud how much they liked or disliked each of a set of 15 abstract paintings they had never seen before that was repeatedly shown to them. Later, investigators asked these same participants to decide quickly which of two paintings they liked more in each of many slides of randomly paired abstract paintings. For half the participants, the paintings were drawn from the ones that they had expressed their attitudes toward in the first part of the experiment. For the other half, the participants had never seen the paintings before. All the while, their cardiovascular response patterns associated with challenge and threat were recorded. In line with both attitude functionality theory and the biopsychosocial model, participants in the first condition exhibited the challenge pattern of cardiovascular responses, and participants in the second condition exhibited the threat pattern.

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