El Modelo de Creencias de Salud: Revisión Teórica,Consideración Crítica y Propuesta Alternativa.I: Hacia un Análisis Funcional de las Creencias en Salud

Since its origin in the 1950s decade, the Health Belief Model has become one of the most used theoretic frames in Health Psychology to explain health and preventive behaviors. It is a cognitive inspired model which considers those behaviors being the result of the set of beliefs and internal valuations the individual provides to a particular situation. Notwithstanding the important amount of investigations this model generates nowadays, certain contradictory results question its explicative validity, underlining the lack of correspondence between the individual’s beliefs and his/her health-related behavior. This paper presents a historic review of the model, points out its principal components and dimensions, checks the critics that have been formulated to it, and, finally, the paper introduces an alternative explanation, in terms of the functional analysis of verbal behavior, trying to overcome those contradictory results.