Social Psychology in Action 1

1. Social Psychology in Action1 Social Psychology and Health

2. Chapter Outline I. Stress and Human Health

3. Stress and Human Health • Stress can affect the body in dramatic ways.

4. Stress and Human Health • Effects of Negative Life Events Research finds that the amount of stress in a person’s life correlates with anxiety and illness; however, this is correlational research, and variables not measured by the researchers may account for the findings.

5. Stress and Human Health • Perceived Stress and Health Another problem with the method of trying to quantify stress in terms of life change units is that it ignores subjective interpretations of events.

6. Stress and Human Health • Perceived Stress and Health According to Lazarus (1966, 1993, 2000), it is subjective and not objective stress that causes problems.

7. Stress and Human Health • Perceived Stress and Health In this model, stress can be defined as the negative feelings and beliefs that occur whenever people feel they cannot cope with demands from their environment.

8. Stress and Human Health • Perceived Stress and Health Cohen, Tyrrell, and Smith (1991, 1993) demonstrated that subjective levels of stress predict who will catch the common cold.

9. Stress and Human Health • Feeling in Charge: The Importance of Perceived Control One of the things that determines whether or not people interpret a situation as stressful is how much control they feel they have over events.

10. Stress and Human Health • Feeling in Charge: The Importance of Perceived Control Perceived control, or the belief that we can influence our environment in ways that determine whether we experience positive or negative outcomes, is important independent of the degree of actual control that we have.

11. Stress and Human Health • Feeling in Charge: The Importance of Perceived Control Perceived control generally is associated with better health and adjustment to illness. However, when control is emphasized too much, people can blame themselves for their illness or the inability to regain their health, which adds to the tragedy.

12. Stress and Human Health • Feeling in Charge: The Importance of Perceived Control Langer and Rodin’s (1977) nursing home study emphasizes the value of boosting people’s feelings of control. Increasing the control felt by nursing home residents resulted in better health and lower mortality rates compared to those in a comparison condition.

13. Stress and Human Health • Feeling in Charge: The Importance of Perceived Control However, the results of Schulz and Hanusa’s (1978) study underscore that temporary increases in perceived control can be more harmful than good. Increasing the amount of control nursing home residents felt and then taking their control away resulted in worse health and higher mortality rates compared to those in a comparison condition.

14. Stress and Human Health • Feeling in Charge: The Importance of Perceived Control The relationship between perceived control and health may be stronger for members of Western cultures than for members of Asian cultures.

15. Stress and Human Health • Feeling in Charge: The Importance of Perceived Control Although exaggerating the sense of perceived control can be dangerous, Thompson and colleagues (1993) report that it is better to perceive control over something, even if it is not the disease itself.

16. Stress and Human Health • Knowing You Can Do It: Self-Efficacy Self-efficacy is the belief in one’s ability to carry out specific actions that produce desired outcomes. Self-efficacy increases the likelihood that people will behave in healthier ways by increasing people’s persistence at a task and by influencing their bodies’ reactions while working toward goals. People with high self-efficacy experience less anxiety and their immune system functions optimally when working on difficult tasks.

17. Stress and Human Health • Explaining Negative Events: Learned Helplessness Another important determinant of how much stress people will subjectively experience from negative life events is how they explain the event to themselves.

18. Stress and Human Health • Explaining Negative Events: Learned Helplessness Those people who explain negative events as resulting from stable, internal, and global factors will likely experience the pessimism of learned helplessness.

19. Stress and Human Health • Explaining Negative Events: Learned Helplessness A stable attribution is the belief that the cause of an event is due to factors that will not change over time, as opposed to unstable factors, that will change.

20. Stress and Human Health • Explaining Negative Events: Learned Helplessness An internal attribution is the belief that the cause of an event is due to things about you, as opposed to factors that are external to you.

21. Stress and Human Health • Explaining Negative Events: Learned Helplessness A global attribution is the belief that the cause of an event is due to factors that apply in a large number of situations, as opposed to the belief that the cause is specific and applies in only a limited number of situations.

22. Stress and Human Health • Explaining Negative Events: Learned Helplessness Learned helplessness causes depression, reduced effort, and difficulty in learning new material.

23. Stress and Human Health • Explaining Negative Events: Learned Helplessness The culture in which people grow up can be very powerful in determining whether people explain their setbacks in a pessimistic or optimistic way.

24. Chapter Outline II. Coping With Stress

25. Coping With Stress • Coping styles are the ways in which people react to stressful events.

26. Coping With Stress • Gender Differences in Coping with Stress Two responses to stress are the fight-or-flight response, responding to stress by either attacking the source of the stress or fleeing from it and the tend-and-befriend response, responding to stress with nurturant activities designed to protect oneself and one’s offspring and creating social networks that provide protection from threats.

27. Coping With Stress • Gender Differences in Coping with Stress Taylor and colleagues (2000) argue that though males may be more likely than females are to respond to stress with the fight-or-flight response, females are more likely than males are to respond to stress with the tend-and-befriend response.

28. Coping With Stress • Social Support: Getting Help from Others Social support is the perception that others are responsive and receptive to one’s needs. This is an important aid when dealing with stress.

29. Coping With Stress • Social Support: Getting Help from Others The buffering hypothesis states that we need social support only when we are under stress because it protects us against the detrimental effects of this stress.

30. Coping With Stress • Personality and Coping Styles Type A versus Type B personality is a personality typology based on how people typically confront challenges in their lives.

31. Coping With Stress • Personality and Coping Styles The Type A person is typically competitive, impatient, hostile, and control oriented; whereas the Type B person is typically more patient, relaxed, and noncompetitive.

32. Coping With Stress • Personality and Coping Styles Numerous studies show that Type A people are in some ways more successful in life but also are more prone to coronary heart disease than are Type B people. The factor implicated in the poorer health of Type A people is their hostility.

33. Coping With Stress • Opening Up: Confiding in Others Pennebaker (1990) has conducted many studies that validate the cultural wisdom that it is best to open up about stress. Trying to suppress negative thoughts can lead to an obsession with those very thoughts and can add to one’s stress.

34. Coping With Stress • Opening Up: Confiding in Others Writing about or confiding in others about a negative event may help people get a better understanding of the event and thus help to put it behind them.

35. Chapter Outline III. Prevention: Improving Health Habits

36. Prevention: Improving Health Habits • Another area emphasized by social psychologists working in the area of health is the issue of compliance, or getting people to change their health habits for the better.

37. Prevention: Improving Health Habits • Message Framing: Stressing Gains versus Losses The way in which a message is framed can make a difference. A loss frame focuses people’s attention on the possibility that they might have a problem that can be dealt with by performing detection behaviors. A gain frame focuses people’s attention on the fact that they are in a good state of health, and that to stay that way, it is best to perform preventive behaviors.

38. Prevention: Improving Health Habits • Changing Health-Relevant Behaviors Using Dissonance Theory Aronson and colleagues (1991) found that an effective way to change people’s behavior is to change their interpretation of themselves and the social situation. Participants in their study who felt dissonance and hypocritical engaged in healthier behaviors compared to participants who were not made to feel dissonance.

39. Study Questions What are definitions of stress? What are the Social Readjustment Rating Scale and “life change units” and their relationship to stress?

40. Study Questions What are the consequences of subjective stress for one’s health?

41. Study Questions How important is perceived control over events in one’s life for reducing the perception and detrimental effects of stress?

42. Study Questions What is self-efficacy? How does the perception of it affect one’s health?

43. Study Questions How do findings from studies conducted in nursing homes confirm the importance of perceived control for reducing stress?

44. Study Questions How and why are attributions an important determinant of stress? What are the three aspects of a pessimistic attribution? What are the consequences of making pessimistic attributions?

45. Study Questions What is learned helplessness, how does it develop, and what are its consequences?

46. Study Questions How are learned helplessness, attribution style, and achievement related? What can be done to reduce learned helplessness in first-year college students? What influences the development of attribution styles?

47. Study Questions What are gender differences in coping styles? What is the stress response fight-or-flight? What is the stress response tend-and-befriend?

48. Study Questions Why is the availability and use of social support a successful way to deal with stress? What benefits exist in collectivist cultures regarding the availability of social support?

49. Study Questions What is the relationship between coping styles, personality and health? What are the characteristics of a Type A and a Type B personality?

50. Study Questions What is the main aspect of a Type A personality that is related to health problems?