Stress, Coping, and Well-Being: Understanding Health Psychology

1. Chapter 11: Health, Stress, and Coping

2. Health Psychology and Behavioral Risk Factors • Health Psychology: Uses behavioral principles to prevent illness and promote health • Behavioral Medicine: Applies psychology to manage medical problems • Lifestyle Diseases: Diseases related to health-damaging personal habits • Behavioral Risk Factors: Behaviors that increase the chances of disease, injury, or premature death

3. Disease-Prone Personality • Personality type associated with poor health; person tends to be chronically depressed, anxious, and hostile

5. Ways to Promote Health • Refusal Skills Training: Program that teaches young people how to resist pressures to begin smoking • Life Skills Training: Teaches stress reduction, self-protection, decision making, self-control, and social skills

6. Wellness • Positive state of good health and well-being; more than the absence of disease

9. Stress • Mental and physical condition that occurs when a person must adjust or adapt to the environment • Includes marital and financial problems • Eustress: Good stress (e.g., travel, dating) • Stress Reaction: Physical response to stress; Autonomic Nervous System is aroused

10. General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) • Series of bodily reactions to prolonged stress; occurs in three stages Pg. 436

11. Alarm Reaction • Body resources are mobilized to cope with added stress

12. Stage of Resistance • Body adjusts to stress but at a high physical cost; resistance to other stressors is lowered

13. Stage of Exhaustion • Body’s resources are drained and stress hormones are depleted, possibly resulting in: • Psychosomatic disease • Loss of health • Complete collapse

14. Immunity • Immune System: Mobilizes bodily defenses like white blood cells against invading microbes and other diseases • Psychoneuroimmunology: Study of connections among behavior, stress, disease, and immune system

15. Stressor • Condition or event that challenges or threatens the person • Pressure: When a person must meet urgent external demands or expectations

16. Burnout • Job-related condition (usually in helping professions) of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. Has three aspects: • Emotional Exhaustion: Feel “used up” and “empty” • Cynicism or detachment from others • Feeling of reduced personal accomplishment

17. Appraising Stressors • Primary Appraisal: Deciding if a situation is relevant or irrelevant, positive or threatening • Secondary Appraisal: Deciding how to cope with a threat or challenge Perceived lack of control is just as threatening as an actual lack of control

19. Threats • Emotion-Focused Coping: Trying to control one’s emotional reactions to the stressful situation • Problem-Focused Coping: Managing or remedying the distressing situation

20. Frustration • Negative emotional state that occurs when one is prevented from reaching desired goals • External Frustration: Based on external conditions that impede progress toward a goal • Personal Frustration: Caused by personal characteristics that impede progress toward a goal

21. Reactions to Frustration • Aggression: Any response made with the intention of doing harm • Displaced Aggression: Redirecting aggression to a target other than the source of one’s frustration • Scapegoating: Blaming a person or group for conditions they did not create; the scapegoat is a habitual target of displaced aggression • Escape: May mean actually leaving a source of frustration (dropping out of school) or psychologically escaping (apathy)

23. Conflicts • A stressful condition that occurs when a person must choose between contradictory needs, desires, motives, or demands

25. Approach-Approach Conflicts • Choosing between two desirable, or positive, alternatives

26. Avoidance-Avoidance Conflicts • Being forced to choose between two negative or undesirable alternatives (e.g., choosing between going to the doctor or contracting cancer) • NOT choosing may be impossible or undesirable

27. Approach-Avoidance Conflicts • Being attracted (drawn to) and repelled by the same goal or activity; attraction keeps person in the situation, but negative aspects can cause distress • Ambivalence: Mixed positive and negative feelings; central characteristic of approach-avoidance conflicts

28. Multiple Conflicts • Double Approach-Avoidance Conflicts: Each of two alternatives has both positive and negative qualities • Vacillation: When one is attracted to both choices; seeing the positives and negatives of both choices and going “back and forth” before deciding, if deciding at all! • Multiple Approach-Avoidance Conflicts: When several alternatives have positive and negative features

31. Anxiety • Feelings of tension, uneasiness, apprehension, worry, and vulnerability • We are motivated to avoid experiencing anxiety

32. Freudian Defense Mechanisms • Defense Mechanisms: Habitual and unconscious (in most cases) psychological processes designed to reduce anxiety

33. More on Defense Mechanisms • Work by avoiding, denying, or distorting sources of threat or anxiety • If used short term, can help us get through everyday situations • If used long term, we may end up not living in reality • Protect idealized self-image so we can live with ourselves

34. Freudian Defense Mechanisms: Some Examples • Denial: Most primitive; denying reality; usually occurs with death and illness • Repression: When painful memories, anxieties, and so on are held out of our awareness • Reaction Formation: Impulses are repressed and the opposite behavior is exaggerated

35. More Defense Mechanisms • Projection: When one’s own feelings, shortcomings, or unacceptable traits and impulses are seen in others; exaggerating negative traits in others lowers anxiety • Rationalization: Justifying personal actions by giving “rational” but false reasons for them

36. Pg. 447-449

37. Learned Helplessness (Seligman) • Acquired (learned) inability to overcome obstacles and avoid aversive stimuli; learned passivity and inaction to aversive stimuli • Occurs when events appear to be uncontrollable • May feel helpless if failure is attributed to lasting, general factors

39. Depression • State of feeling despondent defined by feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness • One of the most common mental problems in the world • Some symptoms: Loss of appetite or sex drive, decreased activity, sleeping too much

40. Mastery Training • Responses are reinforced that lead to mastery of a threat or control over one’s environment • One method to combat learned helplessness and depression

41. How to Recognize Depression (Beck) • You have a consistently negative opinion of yourself • You engage in frequent self-criticism and self-blame • You place negative interpretations on events that usually would not bother you • The future looks grim • You can’t handle your responsibilities and feel overwhelmed

42. Stress and Health • Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS): Rates the impact of various life events on the likelihood of contracting illness • Not a foolproof method of rating stress • Are positive life events (getting married, having a child) always stressful? • People also differ in their reactions to stress • Life Change Units (LCU’s): Numerical values assigned to each life event on the SRRS

44. Hassle • Any distressing day-to-day annoyance; a.k.a. microstressor

45. Acculturative Stress • Stress caused by many changes and adaptations required when one moves to a foreign culture

46. Psychosomatic Disorders • Psychosomatic Disorders: Psychological factors contribute to actual bodily damage or to damaging changes in bodily functioning • Hypochondriacs: Complain about diseases that appear to be imaginary • Certain kinds of ulcers are not psychosomatic • Most common complaints: respiratory and gastrointestinal

47. Biofeedback • Applying informational feedback to bodily control • Aids voluntary regulation of activities such as blood pressure, heart rate, and so on • Helpful but not an instant cure • May help relieve muscle-tension headaches, migraine headaches, and chronic pain • May help control seizures, and treat insomnia

49. Cardiac Personalities • Type A Personality: Personality type with elevated risk of heart disease; characterized by time urgency and chronic anger or hostility • Anger and hostility are strongly related to heart attack • Type B Personality: All types other than Type As; unlikely to have a heart attack

50. Hardy Personality • Personality type associated with superior stress resistance • Sense of personal commitment to self and family • Feel they have control over their lives • See life as a series of challenges, not threats