particular state of health might possibly serve as a positively valent
region that would pull a person toward it. It is still not known whether
the improvement of health in an already healthy person does have
some motivating force in influencing action. This grows out of the
difficulty of giving positive health any operational meaning. Surely,
the exercise and dietary mania observed over the last decade represent
behaviors that could be regarded as striving toward improved health,.
but it is just as easy to explain them (insofar as they are health related
at all) as behavior undertaken to avoid a deleterious situation. Again,
there are individuals who exercise and engage in other actions having
health implications but who do so for reasons quite unrelated to
health, perhaps for aesthetic reasons or for the sheer exhileration felt
by many by the performance of physical work. Again, the question of
whether the avoidance orientation in the Health Belief Model is
adequate to account for the so-called positive health actions taken by
people remains unresolved.