Chapter 11 Health, Stress, and Coping

1. Chapter 11Health, 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 behavioral problems • Lifestyle Diseases: Diseases related to health-damaging personal habits • Behavioral Risk Factors: Behaviors that increase the chances of disease, injury, or premature death • Disease-Prone Personality: Personality type associated with poor health; person tends to be chronically depressed, anxious, and hostile

3. 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 • Wellness: Positive state of good health and well-being

4. 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) • Distress • Stress Reaction: Physical response to stress • Autonomic Nervous System is aroused • Stressor: Condition or event that challenges or threatens the person • More damaging when considered__________________ • Intensified when perceived as a ___________________

5. Burnout • Prolonged, stress can lead to burnout. • 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

6. 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

7. Threats and Frustration • Problem-Focused Coping: Managing or altering the distressing situation • Emotion-Focused Coping: Trying to control one’s emotional reactions to the situation • Frustration: Negative ________ state that occurs when one is prevented from reaching desired _________. • External Frustration: Based on external conditions that impede progress toward a goal • Personal Frustration: Caused by personal characteristics that impede progress toward a goal

8. Reactions to Frustration • Persistence • More vigorous responding • Circumvention • 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)

9. Conflicts • A stressful condition that occurs when a person must choose between contradictory needs, desires, motives, or demands • Avoidance-Avoidance Conflicts: • Appraoch-Approach Conflicts: • Approach-Avoidance Conflicts: • Double Approach-Avoidance Conflicts: • 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:

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

11. Freudian Defense Mechanisms: Psychological Defenders of You! • Defense Mechanisms: Habitual and unconscious (in most cases) psychological processes designed to reduce anxiety • 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

12. Freudian Defense Mechanisms: Some Examples • Denial: Most primitive; • Fantasy • Intellectualization • Isolation • Repression: • Projection: • Rationalization: • Reaction Formation: • Regression

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

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

15. 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. Suicide – Ideations Gestures Serious Attempts

16. Immunity (Similar to “Survivor?”) • 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

17. Stress Management • Use of behavioral strategies to reduce stress and improve coping skills • Progressive Relaxation: Produces deep relaxation throughout the body by tightening all muscles in an area and then relaxing them • Guided Imagery: Visualizing images that are calming, relaxing, or beneficial

18. Stress Management (cont'd) • Stress Inoculation: Using positive coping statements internally to control fear and anxiety; designed to combat: • Negative Self-Statements: Self-critical thoughts that increase anxiety and lower performance • Coping Statements: Reassuring, self-enhancing statements used to stop negative self-statements

19. Chapter 12Psychological Disorders

20. What is Normal? • Psychopathology: Scientific study of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders Normality takes into account 3 things: • Subjective Discomfort: Feelings of discomfort, unhappiness, or emotional distress • Statistical Abnormality: Having extreme scores on some dimension, such as intelligence, anxiety, or depression • Social Nonconformity: Disobeying societal standards for normal conduct; usually leads to destructive or self-destructive behavior

21. What Is Normal? (cont'd) • Situational Context: Social situation, behavioral setting, or general circumstances in which behavior takes place • Cultural Relativity: Judgments are made relative to the values of one’s culture

22. Clarifying and Defining Abnormal Behavior (Mental Illness) • Maladaptive Behavior: Behavior that makes it difficult to function, to adapt to the environment, and to meet everyday demands • Mental Disorder: Significant impairment in psychological functioning DSM – IV – TR (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) Mental Disorders v. Insanity

23. Insanity • Definition: A legal term; refers to an inability to manage one’s affairs or to be unaware of the consequences of one’s actions • Those judged insane (by a court of law) are not held legally accountable for their actions • Can be involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital • Many movements today are trying to abolish the insanity plea and defense; desire to make everyone accountable for their actions • How accurate is the judgment of insanity?

24. Clarifying and Defining Abnormal Behavior (Mental Illness) (cont'd) • Psychotic Disorder: Severe psychiatric disorder characterized by hallucinations and delusions, social withdrawal, and a move away from reality • Organic Mental Disorder: Mental or emotional problem caused by brain pathology (i.e., brain injuries or diseases) • Mood Disorder: Disturbances in affect (emotions), like depression or mania • Anxiety Disorder: Feelings of fear, apprehension, anxiety, and distorted behavior

25. Clarifying and Defining Abnormal Behavior (Mental Illness) (cont'd) • Somatoform Disorder: Physical symptoms that mimic disease or injury (blindness, anesthesia) for which there is no identifiable physical cause • Dissociative Disorder: Temporary amnesia, multiple personality, or depersonalization (like being in a dream world, feeling like a robot, feeling like you are outside of your body) • Personality Disorder: Deeply ingrained, unhealthy, maladaptive personality patterns • Sexual and Gender Identity Disorder: Problems with sexual identity, deviant sexual behavior, or sexual adjustment

26. Clarifying and Defining Abnormal Behavior (Mental Illness) Concluded • Substance Related Disorders: Abuse or dependence on a mind or mood-altering drug, like alcohol or cocaine • Person cannot stop using the substance and may suffer withdrawal symptoms if they do • Neurosis: Archaic; once used to refer to excessive anxiety, somatoform, dissociative disorders, and some kinds of depression

27. Specific Phobias • Irrational, persistent fears, anxiety, and avoidance that focus on specific objects, activities, or situations • People with phobias realize that their fears are unreasonable and excessive, but they cannot control them.

28. Social Phobia • Intense, irrational fear of being observed, evaluated, humiliated, or embarrassed by others (e.g., shyness, eating, or speaking in public)

29. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) • Extreme preoccupation with certain thoughts and compulsive performance of certain behaviors • Obsession: Recurring images or thoughts that a person cannot prevent • Cause anxiety and extreme discomfort • Enter into consciousness against the person’s will • Most common: Being dirty or wondering if you performed an action (turned off the stove)

30. Compulsions • Compulsion: Irrational acts that person feels compelled to repeat against his/her will • Help to control anxiety created by obsessions • Checkers and cleaners

31. Schizophrenia: The Most Severe Mental Illness • Psychotic disorder characterized by hallucinations, delusions, apathy, thinking abnormalities, and “split” between thoughts and emotions • Does NOTrefer to having split or multiple personalities