PSY 208 - Close Relationships and Physical Health Across the Lifespan

3 Credit(s)

This course examines how our relationships with close others impact our physical health (and vice versa) for better or worse. Drawing heavily from literature published in the last 10 years, the course will explore the social contagion of health-related behaviors such as balanced eating and regular exercise in addition to the role of close relationships in buffering or amplifying the effects of psychosocial risk on stress reactivity and immune function. The course will cover relationships between parents, friends and romantic partners through varied theoretical lenses such as attachment theory, the theory of planned behavior and the biological embedding model. We will also focus on how the context (age, race, culture, sexual orientation, etc.) of these relationships affects their impact. The course will culminate with students leading class discussion and writing an essay explaining how they can improve the health of close others in their own lives. This course serves as a psychology elective and a social science general education elective.
Prerequisite(s): PSY 105 and one of the following: PSY 204, PSY 211, or PSY 212.