ABSTRACT
Perceived self-efficacy operates as an important psychological mechanism linking psychosocial influences to health functioning. Perceived self-efficacy affects a wide range of biological processes that mediate human health and disease. Many of these biological effects arise in the context of coping with acute and chronic Stressors. Exposure to Stressors with a sense of efficacy to control them has no adverse effects. But exposure to the same Stressors with perceived in-efficacy to control them activates autonomic, catecholamine, and opioid systems and impairs the functioning of the immune system. Depending on their nature, lifestyle habits enhance or impair health status. This enables people to exercise some control over their vitality, quality of health, and rate of aging. Self-efficacy beliefs affect every phase of personal change—whether people even consider changing their health habits; whether they can enlist the motivation and perserverance needed to succeed should they choose to do so; and how well they maintain the changes they have achieved. Health outcomes are related to predictive factors in complex, multidetermined and probabilistic ways. Prognostic judgments, therefore, involve some degree of uncertainty. Because prognostications can alter self-efficacy beliefs, such judgments have a self-validating potential by influencing the course of health outcomes.
