Social Psych Exam #5

Stress

• The negative feelings and beliefs that arise when people feel unable to cope with the demands of their environment 

• You not having enough resources (time, money etc)

• Highly subjective—What stresses one person, may not stress another person 

• Distress and eustress

Distress

• The stimuli causes the stress is negative

  • ex: Break up with boyfriend = causes stress 

Eustress

• The stimuli causes the stress is negative

  • ex: Break up with boyfriend = causes stress 

Catastrophes

• Large scale disasters that affect a large number of people for an extended period of time

  • ex: Natural disasters (earthquake, hurricanes, tornadoes)

  • Causes psychological and mental stress

  • 63% increase in sucide following an earthquake 

  • Increase in domestic violence following the eruption of mount st. Helen 

Life stress

• Things that we expect to happen in someone’s normal lifespan

  • ex: Death of family member, losing job, death of friend, divorce 

Everyday stress

• Little things throughout the day that are annoying  and lead you to feel a small amount of stress 

  • ex: Interpersonal conflict (disagreement with friend, partner boss) , you feel awkward having an encounter with a stranger, traffic (noise pollution) 

  • Makes every day more stressful 

Resilience

• Mild transient reactions to stressful events, followed by quick return to homeostasis or normal experience

  • Common way people deal with stress 

Hostility

• A driving predictive factor for people experiencing stress and a critical predictive factor for heart disease 

  • People who are angry and confrontational, more likely to engage in aggressive cations  

  • Common for Type A personality 

  • Hostility is a critical complement for more racist people, and more likely to have heart disease 

Immune response

• There is a negative correlation with stress and immune system. 

  • When you are more stressed, your immune system is weaker 

Stone et al. (1994)

• Looked at people catching colds. They pity them in high vs low stress individuals. High stress individual is 53% rate and low stress is 40% rate 

Everyday viruses

• Have a tendency to go where there have been catastrophes 

  • Cancer: Rats that are more biologically to get sick. One group of rats would get randomly socked and get stressed. One control group ( no shock), there was a difference in the likelihood for the rats that got shocked 73% vs non shocked stressed rats 50%

    • Followed by looking at male employees who were depressed a low self system,  were more likely to die of cancer 

    • Stress can make you more vunlernvale to the genetiuc predisposition of cancer 

Internal locus of control

• feels like they are in control of their life, decisions, experience or destiny 

External locus of control

• They feel like the world is in control of their fate, they have no control 

  • More positively correlated with stress 

Illness

• People with an internal locus of control can prolonged illness (can be seen with breast cancer and heart disease)

Langer & Rodin (1976)

• Director of a nursing home and had the resident pick a movie night and a choice to have a plant in their room that they can take care of or the nurse can take care of. The other groups were told what night to watch a movie and forced to take the plant. Group 1 had choice of experience (internal LOC) and group 2 had no choice (external LOC). Those who were the internal locus of the control group veered better. 15% in group 1 died vs. 30% to the external locus of the control group.

Schulz (1976)

• Those that had internal locus of control then got it taken away and were worse then the external locus control group only. 

Cultural differences

• Individualistic cultures have more internal locus of control and are more affected by this (if they have this control)

Coping

• Is our ability to manage distressing problems

• Problem focused or emotion focused

Problem focused

• Where you are attempting to solve the issue that is causing stress 

  • ex: Car breaks down, so you try to fix it so you can reduce the stress

Emotion focused

• Focused on responding to the negative emotional reaction from the stress. 

  • Ex: eating your favorite food or watching your favorite movie to change your emotions 

    • Positive—do things that push you into a positive mindset 

    • Neutral—You just emotionally shut down rather than replace the native emotions 

    • Sharing—When we are able to share our experiences with others it makes us peace and calm

Proactive

• Rather than waiting to respond, you prepare for your event to occur for your stressful experience 

  • Occurs before the event occurs—studying before final 

Cognitive appraisal

• Where you look at the event in two stages

  • Primary: Look at the event and determine if it is positive, neutral or negative. Determine if it is a negative harmful, threatening or negative challenging event  

  • Secondary: Do I have the resources or ability to cope with this event? 

    • IF you change get your evaluation of the event, you can change the way you'd deal with the stress 

    • Ex: You lose your job so you can reappraise the situation to what you want to do with life bc you hated your job 

Received

• The social support you actually experience 

Perceived

• Is the amount of support you feel is available to you

  • More about your mental health 

    • Both are important (received) for actually dealing with stressful situation and perceived goes into you determining if you have this or resources 

Instrumental

• There are tangible materials for you to deal with the situations. 

  • Ex: If you are out of money but your friend lends you $20 so you can buy groceries  

Informational

• They can give your advice or information to help you (not tangible)

  • Ex: Friend tells you where you can donate plasma to make money for groceries 

    • Both are problem focused 

Emotional

• Rather than trying to fix any problem, they are there to help us with our emotional needs 

Health outcomes

• Social isolation leads to worse health outcomes, both mental  and physical health 

Interventions

• Anything you are trying to do to change a person’s individual response to a stressful event 

  • Ex: Depression fríen doesn’t leave house for weeks, but you go and get them out if the house

Biopsychosocial

• A model for humans and health, that our health behaviors are culturally or socially defined  

  • Reid & Aiken (2013): Looked at women in Phoenix, Arizona and having tanned skin was valued and using sun protection was dumb. Many women thought that their tan skin was very attractive. When researchers fixed the women’s mindset they’ve they started to use sunscreen and protective clothing 

Health belief model

• Beliefes about the effectiveness, consequences, and ease of healthy behavior will determine if a behavior will happen

  • Smoke if others are smoking 

Prototype-Willingness Model

• For adolescent health, risky behavior is derived from one or more of the following sources

  • Social Activity—If someone is doing it, you would also do it 

  • Reactive—If yo tell someone not to do something, it increases the attraction 

    • don’t jump off a bridge (parents) so you want to 

Nonadherence

• An individual does not follow the doctor’s advice or adherence. We see this with medications and people won;t take their prescribed medicine, consistently, or stop taking it. THE DOCTORS ARE NOT BEING PERSUASIVE  

Formative assessments

• Giving a person advice on how to change their behavior 

  • teacher giving notes to improve, doctor recommendations 

Summarize assessments

• Re-evaluation on the advice or recommendations 

Hawthorne effect

• The observation that people behave differently when they are being watched 

  • People performed better when being watched 

Job interviews

• Physical attractiveness is the most influential thing that has been found, the more physically attractive you are, more likely to get the job 

  • What matters?

    • The more dissimilar you are to your interviewer, more likely to get the job 

    • Halo effect= we assume people that have one positive trait, have many others 

  • What are the issues?

    • The application you submit, creates an impression on the interviewer

  • Structured

    • There is a high amount of structure in the interview 

    • These are meant to level the playing field and minimize any interpersonal bias 

    • Structured interviews have been seen as finding more qualified candidates than unstructured interviews

Intelligence tests

• Meant to measure your basic intelligence and cognitive ability 

  • There could be job specific knowledge such as the area where you are applying for or how you use your intelligence “street smart” 

Personality tests

• Looking at the big five, especially those who score high in consciousness  

Integrity tests

• Looking at their moral character 

  • “Interview starts when you walk through the door, not when you sit down”

  • Overtly and covert

Overt

• Asking someone what you would do in a specific scenario

  •  “how would you deal with someone who tries to return something without a receipts”

Covert

• These are more successful in determining high vs low integrity. 

  • Looking to see how you interact with secretary (nice or being rude bc they are not boss)

Cognitive ability

• Your general intelligence and your working memory components (creativity, how you process information)

Inner drive

• Better at leadership (stronger intrinsic motivation) compared to someone who is more extrinsically motivated 

Leadership motivation

• People who have a motivation to be in a leadership positive are more likely to be more successful in leadership  

Flexibility

• People that are flexible in their own thinking and future components, tend to be associated with better leadership 

Integrity

• Leaders are in a position of power, those that have high levels of integrity are less likely to abuse it and are more effective leaders 

Guilt-prone

• When something goes bad for one of their followers, it is good for a leader to feel bad about them and help them to avoid mistakes. This keeps their groups cohesive 

Task orientation

• The person is single mindedly focused on what it is like to be successful in the group (how do you run the business)

  • the more complex a task is, the more you want them to be task oriented 

Relations orientation

• Concerned about the feelings  and well-beings of your employees 

  • This makes employees more committed to the job 

High vs low control

• Low control is where there is not much definition in the task or it is new/novel 

• High control is when the task is very well-defined, employees feel comfortable in completing them. This is very practical and know how to deal with issues.

Transformational leadership

• The leader is changing the opinion of their followers 

Charisma in transformational leadership

• High levels of charisma, they are socially adaptive and interact very positively with a wide number of people 

Intellectual stimulation

• They encourage their followers to express their ideas even if they are not practical. Validate the new expression of these ideas 

  • Cult specific language to trap people in that mentality  

Inspirational motivation

• They think that the leaders will set a very positive example and be optimistic for the future 

Individualized consideration

• Support and recognize the achievements of individuals 

  • We like to be recognized for our autonomy and recognition is a positive reinforcement 

• We see intrinsic motivation in the followers of the transformational leader 

Bad leaders

-Irrelevant traits

-Overpromoted

-Poor team hiring

-Poor interpersonal skills

-Lack of trust

Irrelevant traits

• Bad leaderships traits lead people to be in the position 

  • Tallest presidential candidate wins

Over-promoted

• People are over promoted and some people can run a small team , but don’t do so well when in control of a larger group 

Poor team hiring

• Hiring people that don’t have the skills to be put in the positions

  • example: nepotism= they are put in the position NOT because they are qualified, but because they have an interpersonal relationship with you

Poor interpersonal skills

• These bad interpersonal skills affect the cohesion of the group 

Lack of trust

• If there is not enough trust, then the followers will not act accordingly. They will question the decision and think that it is a bad decision 

Yam et al (2014)

• They examined flexible start time so ex players came in between 5am and 9:45am. They wanted to see how the employers would see their employees. Employee start arrived later were rated more poorly than those who arrived earlier regardless of their time at the job or quality of work.

Restriction of range

• If people are given a scale to rank individuals from 1 to 5, very very people are using the entire scale. 

  • They don’t use the entire scale when they should 

Self-evaluations

• Ask the person being praised to speak about themselves. Overly optimistic and tend to ignore their work errors 

  • Have more hope for the future than we actually do

Immediate ratings

• We are not getting immediate ratings. The further we get from the specific job we are doing , the worse our rating and recognition 

  • It is more accurate right after the event

360 degree assessment

• It includes your boss and the people you are managing. By taking this global evaluation, you can get more accurate ratings 

  • Gold standard 

Due process (Folgers et al., 1992)

• Adequate Notice—People are having enough notice on what they will be appraised on and when it will happen 

• Fair Hearing—Making sure you choose good parameters 

  • ex: someone who hired for a remote job, if they would be judged for times coming to the office, it is not fair 

• Evidence of Job Performance—You want the person doing the appraisal to be someone who supervises their work and has a clear impression of what someone has done 

Expectancy theory

• Workers tend to be more motivated when their efforts are going to produce valued outcomes

  • If an employee believes that they will recognize and appreciate the work that they do, they will be more motivated 

Incentives

• Work bonuses or based on amount of sales.

  • Overjustification effect= When you are intrinsically motivated then changes to extrinsic motivation then intrinsic stops.

  • If you are presenting incentives, and you bribe them then. You lower intrinsic motivation

  • instead, if you reward quality work then that doe snot fact in string motivation  

Equity theory

• Those that put in the most work, put in the most effort should be the most rewarded 

Progress theory

• People feel motivated to work after they feel that they have made actual progress.