Untitled Flashcards Set

Brain

Important Terms

• Glial Cells

  • work to provide structure and nourishment and clean up after the brain - worker beans 

  • outnumber neurons 9:1

• blood brain barrier

  • barrier of blood and other fluids that protect the brain from being poisoned

  • keeps bad things out of brain

  • one of the reasons why it takes a medication a long time to get to the brain

• neuroplasticity 

  • one of the reasons why the brain can change depending on your circumstances 

• neuropeptides

  • Brain chemicals that regulate the activity of neurons

• Neurogenesis

  • new brain cells created deep in the brain, they work their way up to the outer surface

Neurons

• cells in the nervous system that communicate with each other to perform tasks

• majority of neurons are in the brain

• basis for all human knowledge and behavior 

• Dendrites 

  • Branches reaching out and bringing information to the neuron

• Cell Body/Soma

  • where the nucleus of the neuron is located

  • decides what to do with the information the dendrites brought

  • sometimes where the process stops if not important info

• Axon

  • if the information is important the info goes down the axon os it can reach other neurons

• Myelin Sheath

  • speeds up information along the axon

  • surrounds axon

  • information skips over where the myelin sheath is aka speeds it up

• Terminal Buttons

  • where neuron releases information for other neurons to pick up

  • ends of the neuron

• Synapse

  • small space between neurons, the terminal buttons to the dendrites of a different neuron

• Synaptic Pruning

  • when ur first starting to learn information you are creating new connection and when you don’t need that anymore, they shave off something of these synaptic connections as you become more of an expert at some task

• Sensory neurons

  • takes information from your sense organs to the brain

  • afferent - information to the brain

• Motor neurons

  • takes information from our brain and directing it to our muscles

  • efferent - signals from the brain

• Mirror neurons

  • allows us to mimic things we see and are exposed to

  • empathy, following directions, sympathy

• interneurons

  • neurons that are connected to other neurons

  • majority of our neurons

Information Transmission

• electrical vs. chemical 

  • electrical - information transmission within a single neuron

  • chemical - information transmission between neurons

• Action Potential - electrical

  • along the axon 

  • -70 mV to +40 mV

  • location 

    • exterior barrier of the axon, surface, all long axon

  • ions - sodium and potassium ions

• refractory period

  • absolute - initial

    • neuron will not fire again no matter what

  • Relative 

    • when the neuron can fire again but it requires more stimulus aka more information to send the info again

Neuro-Transmitters 

• different chemicals our brain uses to communicate with other neurons

• Agonist vs Antagonist - medication

  • Agonist is meant to make a neurotransmitter more effective

  • antagonist is meant to make a neurotransmitter less effective

• dopamine

  • pleasure, or reward neurotransmitter 

  • associated with controlling voluntary movements

  • too much is associated with schizophrenic 

  • Parkinson’s is associated with too little dopamine

• serotonin

  • control negative emotionality 

  • helps with depression and anxiety

  • important for sleep/ attention / arousal

  • associated with depression, OCD, anorexia 

• epinephrine - adrenaline 

  • focused on energizing mental state

• norepinephrine

  • focused on energizing  mental and physical states - arousal

  • cocaine and others 

  • depression and PTSD are associated with it

• endorphins

  • painkiller - similar response as to morphine 

  • “runners high”

• GABA 

  • Primary inhibitory sender 

  • stops the passage of information

  • 40% of synapses 

  • seizures and epilepsy 

  • depressants tend to be agonist to gaba

• Glutamate 

  • Primary excitatory neurotransmitter

  • encourages neuron to send on information

  • associated with seizures (too much) 

• acetylcholine 

  • first one to be discovered

  • muscle movements

  • critical for memory and learning 

  • malfunctions are associated with Alzheimer’s and dementia 

Information Transmission

• Law of Forward Condition

  • Information is always going to travel from dendrites to terminal buttons and never backwards 

• All or None Principle 

  • If a cell body determines they want to send the information along, the information will travel along the entire axon. Will not just lose power halfway through

• Excitatory vs. Inhibitory

  • can get both signals and they need to make a decision on which one

• Hebb’s Rule

  • Repeated information between 2 neurons will have a stronger connection which will make it easier to send the signals

  • when ur learning

• Clean up

  • have to resolve neurotransmitters that weren’t taken by the dendrites of another neuron

  • enzymatic degradation 

    • There is an enzyme that eliminates the neurotransmitter that was left in the synapse

  • reuptake

    • terminal button takes back some of the neurotransmitter that it released 

    • SSRI- selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor 

      • no take back of the serotonin - depression

The Brain

• the center of the nervous system, everything goes to and comes from the brain

• intelligence correlation

  • people used to think if you had a larger brain you were more intelligent, instead what actually correlated with intelligence is the amount of surface area of the brain

• new builds on old

  • evolutionarily the oldest parts of our brain are the parts at the bottom, hindbrain, first part that develops in utero

• contralateral control

  • brain is divided into 2 hemispheres, left is in control of our right side of our body, right is in control of the left side

• association area

  • part of the brain that isn’t specifically involved with motor movements, sensory, but instead the processing of information 

Brain Divisions

• hindbrain 

  • oldest part of the brain, develops first in uter ,focused on survival mechanisms - controlling breathing/heart rate

• midbrain

  • focused on orienting ourselves in our environment

• forebrain

  • sensory information, creativity, memory, more advanced part, processing information 

Hindbrain

• oldest evolutionary and developmental 

• conducts information from the rest of the body 

• contralateral control - some happens here

• vital bodily functions

  • Keeps our body living and breathing 

• medulla 

  • bottom part of hindbrain

  • heart rate, circulation, respiration, reflexes

  • vital bodily functions

  • Reticular formation 

    • inside 

    • mood, sleep, attention 

    • lots of serotonin formed here, associated with depression

• pons

  • sleep and attention 

  • critical for facial expressions, creating and understanding 

• Cerebellum

  • where the difference between humans and other mammals is

  • deals with balance, coordination, fine motor movement 

  • more complex, we use our hands for fine motor movement, walking upright, speaking

  • most neurons in cerebellum 

  • see issues with motor control if damaged 

Midbrain

• primarily focused on orientation, orienting yourself in your environment 

• dopamine

  • about moving yourself in your environment, responsible for voluntary movement

• tectum

  • receives sensory information from the hindbrain and build a map from the environment

• tegmentum

  • helps you move throughout your environment 

Forebrain

• highest level

  • top of brain

  • more complex thinking occurs here

• cerebral cortex

  • can see from the outside when looking at the brain

  • hemispheres 

    • 2 hemispheres 

    • sex differences

      • men have more connection between front and back in the same hemisphere

      • women make more connections across hemispheres

• corpus callosum

  • Band of fibers that connects the hemispheres so that they can communicate 

• lobes

  • each hemisphere has 4 so in total you have 8

• subcortical structures

  • can’t see unless brain is split in half

  • under cerebral cortex 

  • see same ones on the left and right side of the brain

frontal lobe

• front of the brain

• high order processing

  • reallly complex higher order processing, judgement and decision making, creativity, logic, and reasoning, lots of things we think of that separate us from other animals happens in the frontal lobe

• prefrontal cortex

  • very front part of the frontal lobe, disproportionately larger than other animals, helps regulate and coordinate other brain systems, not just frontal lobe, last part of the brain to develop

  • 28% of the frontal lobe in humans, larger than in a lot of other animals/primates

  • Phineas Gage

    • was a railway worker, explosion sent a piece of railroad through his brain, severe damage to frontal lobe, went from happy and easy going to irritable, quick to anger, not lots of impulse control.

    • accident helped us to understand some of the things the frontal lobe seems to be in control of

  • motor cortex

    • fibers at the very back of the frontal lobe, seems to be critical for motor movement 

    • hands and mouth are huge here

  • homunculus 

    • big hands and mouth?

    • how it would be proportioned if it mapped onto the motor cortex

    • artist rendering 

Parietal lobe

• somatosensory cortex

  • touch sensation processed here 

  • not proportional to our bodies 

    • hands and lips are larger but rest is more proportional 

    • homunculus looks more normal than other but not great

• visual integration

  • integrating visual info and other information (stored) to build a more rich picture of our environment 

• orientation 

  • orientation of the midbrain is reflected in the parietal lobe

Occipital Lobe

• vision 

  • anything that uses visual information starts at the occipital lobe and goes from there

• builds 

  • starts with simple features, processes these features until they become complex visual representations that we think about

Temporal lobe

• hearing and language 

  • big job is ^

• recognition 

  • recognize objects and what they are kinda because they are a language 

• lateralization 

  • left is in a way different from right, usually they are mirror images 

  • left lobe is more focused on speech, right is non-speech hearing

  • Broca’s Area

    • understandable speech production. Important for being able to produce speech. Next to motor cortex

      • BROCA’s APHASIA

        • cannot speak words, but you are aware. Not saying words, nothing to do with comprehension, all about production. Can be caused by migraines. ISSUE WITH SPEECH PRODUCTION 

        • commonly affected by strokes

  • Wernicke’s Area 

    • Responsible speech comprehension, in the temporal lobe

      • Wernicke’s Aphasia 

        • can understand the words but not the meaning sometimes

        • cannot generally understand others words or meaningful words, doesn’t make sense when talking

        • can say words but lack meaning 

        • not aware that they aren’t making sense

        • stroke can cause this

Subcortical Structures 

• under the cerebral cortex but still forbrain

• Thalamus 

  • all sensory information goes here except for smell 

• Pituitary gland

  • control the release of hormones 

• Limbic System

  • Focused on emotion and memory 

  • hypothalamus 

    • feeding, fleeting, fighting, mating (fucking)

    • 4 F’s

    • fight or flight system 

  • amygdala

    • deals with strong negative emotions, fear and anger

    • directs brain to create a strong memory related to stress so you can deal with it better in the future

  • hippocampus

    • memory

    • critical for creating stable long term memory

    • decreases/shrinks overtime - why older people have trouble with memory

  • Cingulate Gyrus

    • Critical for focusing on information, allows you to ignore irrelevant information and allows you to focus on the information you should be processing

    • doesn’t function well with people with schizophrenia 

  • Basal Ganglia

    • motor control 

    • critical for dopamine production 

    • Parkinson’s 

Brain Imaging Techniques 

• Structure 

  • CT Scan

    • images put together to show brain from X-rays 

  • MRI

    • magnets and polarization of brain to see structure 

  • DTI

    • type of MRI - magnets - focusing on the myelination of neurons

  • NIRS

    • light pulses to create image of the mind 

• Activity

  • EEG

    • electrodes that can tell us when electrical activity is happening in the brain

  • ERP

    • comes from an EEG 

    • looks at a singular electrode and when it is occurring 

  • fMRI

    • magnets, looks at metal in our blood

  • PET

    • drink a weird drink, glucose, so you can see where glucose is going to see where activity is happening

  • TMS

    • use a strong magnet into brain to disrupt processing in that area 

    • only non invasive treatment to see something

    • has been shown to help depressed people who don’t work well with antidepressants 

Nervous System

• Central

  • Brain

  • Spinal Cord

    • most information goes here before brain, reflexes can happen without brain coming into play

    • Gate Control Theory

      • your spinal cord is going to decide if your brain shouldn’t get information especially with pain

      • thinks that experiencing pain may put you at more of a risk

  • Cerebrospinal Fluid

    • liquid cushioning to help protect central nervous system, provides fuel for central nervous system

• Autonomic

  • involuntary movements 

    • sympathetic

      • fight or flight response

    • parasympathetic 

      • rest or digest, restful and restoring body / digesting food

      • always active 

    • enteric

      • nerve cells imbedded into the gastrointestinal system 

      • second brain, as many nerve cells as spinal cord

      • ”I’m full, lets stop eating”

      • can be connected to a gut feeling 

      • serotonin 

Sensation and Perception

Psychophysics 

• Sensation

  • external stimulation interacting with our different organs, objective

• Perception

  • brain's interpretation of that interaction, sub

• Transduction

  • Happening from time information leaves our sense organs and goes to the brain

  • The conversion of physical into neural information

  • When our sensation becomes perception 

• Just Noticeable Difference

  • Smallest change in a stimulus for you to be able to notice that the stimulus has changed

  • Larger stimulus requires a larger change

• Weber's Law

  • Just noticeable difference is going to be a constant proportion of the size of the initial stimulus

  • Mathematical way of saying large large small small 

• Absolute threshold

  • Minimum stimulus to say that a stimulus exists 

  • How much perfume will it take for you to smell it? 50% of time 

Signal Detection Theory

• How are you able to say yes or no when it comes to the absolute threshold 

  • Stimulus intensity

    • A strong stimulus is very easy to say it exists

  • Noise

    • The external environment that is unrelated to the stimulus

  • Response Criteria

    • How confident are you to be to say that a stimulus exists 

    • Liberal means that you are more likely to say yes

    • Conservative means you will say no

• Hits

  • Where a stimulus is present and you are saying that a stimulus is present 

• False Alarms 

  • You saying yes when there is no actual stimulus

• Correct Rejection 

  • When there is no stimulus and you say that there is no stimulus

• Misses

  • When there is a stimulus and you say that there is no stimulus

Processing Theories

• Bottom up

  • Where you will start building you perception of sensory information

  • As you get more complex with it, you are doing more complex processing

  • This is a data driven approach to perception (more likely to be accurate, but it takes a lot of time and resources)

• Top-down

  • Where we interpret sense information as it fits with our expectations and beliefs (usually use this one)

  • Perceptual Set

    • How our experiences guide our expectations

  • Contextual Effect

    • How our environment is guiding our expectations

  • Halberstadt et al. (1995)

    • Either played participants sad music or happy music and they gave them homophonic words (die vs dye)

    • The people who listened to the sad music were more likely to interpret the words in their more depressing context

• Constancy

  • Where we expect certain things to remain constant even when our senses are perceiving a change, we will expect them to be the same (actors in different roles)

Vision

• Light vs color

  • Light - the visual/external stimulus for the sensation of vision (comes in waves)

  • Color - your interpretation/perception

• Waves

  • The stimulus of light is waves

  • Wavelength 

    • Has objective color connected to it

  • Amplitude 

    • Height from the tallest point of the wave to the lowest. Determines the intensity of the stimulus

    • Low amplitude - pastels , light experiences of colors

    • High amplitude - dark colors, hard to tell the difference, oversaturated 

• Biology 

  • Cornea 

    • The external covering of the eye, primarily there for protection 

    • First part of the eye that the light will go through

  • Pupil

    • After the cornea. The light will then pass through the pupil

  • Iris

    • Muscle that will change the size of the pupil

  • Lens

    • Clear segment of the eye that light will pass through

    • Accommodation 

      • The process of your eye changing the shape of the lens in order to better focus on that information

  • Retina

    • The light waves go through the fluid to get to the retina

    • Fovea

      • The light that is projected here will be the cleanest and sharpest in your vision

    • Rods

      • Active in low light. Allows you to see when there is not a lot of light available to you. 

      • Make up the majority of our receptor neurons in our eyes

    • Cones

      • Responsible for color vision and sharp detail

      • Need bright light in order to process this information. Majority in the fovea

    • Bipolar & ganglion cells

      • Will gather the information that the rods and cones have collected. Usually one cone will send information to a bipolar cell. The ganglion cells will send this information to the optic nerve 

    • Blindspot

      • Part of the retina that has no photoreceptors. No way of processing light that falls on that area

  • Sclera

    • The whites of your eyes. Humans have more of this than animals

    • Use sclera to get information from others (easier to tell where people are looking)

• Color

  • Trichromatic 

    • We have 3 different types of cones

    • We perceive color from how these cones are sending information to the brain. Can see 1 million colors

  • Tetrachromatic 

    • 4 cones. The addition of one more cones takes our perception ability to 100 million colors

  • Mantis shrimp

    • Have 12 different cones. Able to process light differently because of how many cones they have

  • Herring's opponent process

    • Red cones will be overly active for red and suppress green. Yellow will suppress blue. White will suppress black 

• Adaptation 

  • When there is a drastic change in our visual information, we adapt to it

  • Stratton, 1896

    • Wore glasses that flipped everything upside down. Caused him to be depressed however his brain eventually learned how to process that visual information. When he took the glasses off, he was more quickly able to readapt at his old situation 

Visual Pathway

• Retina

• Optic nerve

  • Send information to the brain

• Optic chiasm

  • Left of visual field goes to right hemisphere and vice versa

  • Contralateral control (left hemisphere is concerned for the right side of the body)

• Optic tract

  • Path from the chiasm to thalamus

• Thalamus 

  • All information will go here before other parts of the brain

  • Will determined if it is visual information and will send to the primary visual cortex

• Primary visual cortex

  • Will deal with simple pieces of information

  • Deal with this information until it constricts this complex visualization that we recognize

• Cells 

  • Simple - start by processing simple situation

  • Complex - will be processing simple information but also starts to integrate movement information

  • Hypercomplex - start to integrate this information from multiple different areas, creates a more complex visual image

• Direction

  • Ventral stream

    • Move from occipital lobe to temporal lobe

    • Will help identify and name the shape/object in the image that you are constructing

    • Gives recognition information 

  • Dorsal stream

    • occipital lobe to the parietal lobe

    • Help identify the location and movement of an object

    • Known as the “where or how pathway” (where is image and how is it moving)

• Apparent motion

  • If you project still images quickly, your brain perceives it as fluid motion (flipbook)

• Illusory conjunction

  • Flashing an image at a participant. They don't have enough time to build  complete images and they bind features together incorrectly

  • You don't have time to bind features so you end up making up characteristics 

Depth Cues

• Binocular Cues

  • Depth cues that require both eyes to determine depth

  • Retinal disparity 

    • Our eyes are set slightly apart therefore each eye has a slightly different view. 

    • Closer object  = more difference    further object = less difference 

  • Convergence

    • The closer the object is to us, the more our eyes have to turn inwards in order to look at it

• Monocular Cues

  • Cues from just one eye

  • Familiar size

    • We use our background knowledge to guess the size

  • Linear perspective

    • Parallel lines look like they will converge in the distance (looking at a railroad)

  • Texture Gradient

    • Objects that are closer to us, it is easier to determine their texture

  • Interposition

    • Things that are in front of something else are close to us

  • Relative size

    • Things at the bottom of our visual field are close to us than things that are at the top of the visual field 

Gestalt Grouping

• How we assume relationships between objects

• Simplicity (pragnanz)

  • We process information in the simplest way

• Closure

  • We create closure between open spaces

• Continuity 

  • See things as continuous even if they are not continuous

• Similarity 

  • More likely to group similar objects together 

• Proximity

  • More likely to group objects together that are close to each other

• Common Fate

  • Objects that move together are grouped together 

Sensing Sound

• Waves

  • External stimulus for sound (different properties of waves give different sense information)

  • Frequency

    • High frequency sound = higher pitch      low frequency = lower pitch

  • Amplitude 

    • Higher amplitude = louder wave     lower amplitude = quieter wave

  • Complexity 

    • Where there are multiple sound waves that you are encountering at the same time

Outer Ear

• Pinna 

  • The divet of our ear

• Auditory canal

  • The soundwaves the pinna catches will send them into here 

• Eardrum/tympanic membrane 

  • Separates outer ear from middle ear

Middle Ear

• Air 

  • Pocket of air right behind your eardrum

• Ossicles

  • Three smallest bones in our bodies. Connected to the eardrum

  • Hammer (malleus)

  • Anvil (incus)

  • Stirrup (Stapes)

Inner Ear

• Cochlea 

  • Snail looking object. Inner ear is the cochlea 

• Fluid

• Basilar membrane 

  • Inside the cochlea. Retina but for the ear

  • There are hair cells on the membrane. The hair cells are the receptor neurons for hearing 

• Hair cells

  • Info from basilar membrane

  • Create information to be sent to the brain. Send information to the auditory nerve

• Auditory Nerve

  • Hearing version of the optic nerve. Collects information on what the hair cells are providing. Will send that information to the brain for hearing perception to occur 

• Semicircular canals

  • Important for balance 

Sound Perception

• Place theory

  • How we perceive a sound is based on where the hair cells are. Works best for high frequency sounds

• temporal/frequency theory

  • The hair cells fire information at the highest point of the wave (since its always at the highest point, higher frequency sounds will cause hair to fire information more frequently)

  • Temporal theory works best for low frequency sounds

• Localization 

  • How are we determining where a sound is coming from?

  • One ear will hear something quicker than the other ear. The sound wave will be louder at the ear closer to the sound

• Gestalt grouping 

  • Location 

    • We assume that sounds are coming from the same location are connected

  • Temporal

    • Assuming that sounds that stop and start at the same time are connected

  • Music

    • Uses gestalt rules to group together sounds in order to create a more melodic tone

• Hearing loss

  • Sensorineural

    • Hearing loss is happening at the inner ear 

    • Where our hair cells are dying off. Hearing aids will not work because the hair cells are dead. As we age, we cannot hear higher frequencies 

    • The amplitude of waves can end of damaging hair cells

  • Conduction 

    • Where there is a problem with either the eardrum or the middle ear

    • You can usually fix this with hearing aids

• Perfect pitch

  • Can replicate/identify any tone that you hear

  • Have good sound perception if you have

  • Have larger and more dense left temporal lobes 

Skin Sense

• Touch

  • Plastic

    • Somatosensory cortex can change. When someone loses a limb other parts compensate 

  • phantom limb pain

    • Can occur when you lost a limb that you originally had and your brain perceives pain and feeling in the missing limb. Can overrule our other senses

• Pain 

  • A-Delta Fibers

    • Sharp shooting pain. Will send information quicker to the brain

  • C-Fibers

    • Responsible for dull throbbing pain. Will take it easy on that part of the body so that it can heal

  • Referred Pain

    • Where you are experiencing pain internally

• Haptic Perception

  • One of the first ways we start to explore the world. We are understanding our world through touch (why babies grab anything they touch)

• Kinesthesia

  • Sense of where your body is and how it’s moving 

Chemical Sense

• smell/olfaction 

  • Unique 

    • Only sense that does not go through thalamus. directly connected to the forebrain 

  • Olfactory receptors

    • Receptors located in your nose. Different receptors that are going to be activated are going to determine how we sense smell

    • Humans have 350 receptor neurons and we can recognize 1 trillion different smells - dogs have 35,000 types of receptor neurons 

• Taste/Gustation 

  • Papillae

    • Bumps on our tongue. Contain hundreds of taste buds which are the actual receptors

  • Receptor replacement 

    • Receptors are usually quick to replace but not for the receptors on the tongue 

  • 5 primary sensations 

    • Salty, sweet, sour, bitter, umami

  • Flavor

    • Your perception of flavor will change as you age

    • Younger people are pickier when it comes to food because they have more taste sensations. Permanently lost by 20

  • Cravings 

    • Explained by taste perception. Different foods are associated with different taste sensations. Bodies way of saying you need a certain nutrient 

Stress

Important terms 

• Stress

  • The process by which we perceive and respond to certain events that we view as threatening or challenging

• Tend and Befriend

  • An alternative to fight or flight

  • We rely on a social response to deal with a threatening situation

  • We tend to offer/seek out social support from others. Women use this more than men

• Catharsis

  • An idea that expressing anger will allow you to leave that anger behind

  • Research shows that if we express anger it actually makes us angrier for longer

• Adaptation-level phenomenon

  • We judge our current experiences in relation to our past experiences. 

• Relative deprivation

  • The tendency for us to judge a situation that we are in as worse than a situation that someone else is in (the grass is always greener on the other side) 

• Crisis debriefing 

  • Theory that the best way to prevent a negative stress response was to go through a one time 3-4 hour session with other who have experienced a similar event shortly after the event has occurred

  • This did make PTSD worse in the case of the hurricane town and the opposite of what was thought 

• Lifestyle disease

  • Related to health damaging habits. Factors contributing to a disease (smoking)

Theoretical Perspectives on Stress

• Stress as stimuli

  • Identifying different types of events that have stress associated with it

  • Will generally focus more on what's actually happening in the world 

• Stress as a response 

  • Focuses on physical and mental reaction to stressful circumstances

  • More lab focused 

• Stress as a transaction 

  • Interaction between a person and their environment during stressful events

  • Will look at how they cope with that stress

• Appraisal 

  • Happens in 2 stages 

  • Primary appraisal

    • Where we look at the citation and determine its relevance to us. If none then we will not move onto the next step 

  • Secondary appraisal

    • Look at the resources you have available to you and see how well those resources can deal with a situation

    • If there is a deficit between resources and what you need to deal with the situation, you will experience stress 

Overall Categories of Stressors

• Frustration 

  • When you have a goal but for some reason you are not able to complete that goal. Want something and cant get it

• Conflict

  • Internal - battling with yourself

  • External - disagreeing with something not in yourself. Person

  • Approach- Approach

    • Choosing between 2 options. Worried about making a wrong decision when both options are good

  • Avoidance - avoidance 

    • Choosing between 2 bad options. Worried about the worst option

  • Approach - Avoidance

    • Having to make a decision about a singular thing. But the decision has pros and cons

• Pressure

  • Has expectations or demands that you behave in a certain way (peer pressure or internal pressure) (cultural and societal pressure)

• Life changes

  • Some aspect of your life is going under a long term change 

  • Married, getting a job (positive but causes stress), moving, etc. 

• Daily hassles

  • Small annoyances that strain your ability to cope

  • Everyone experiences these but individuals who face more prejudice or discrimination feel these hassles more 

  • Traffic, sound of living in a neighborhood, parking

• Catastrophe

  • Large scale disasters 

  • Correlated with life changes 

• Acculturative 

  • Occurs when you are living in a foreign culture 

  • Trying to understand and adapt to the new culture, being away from support system

• All are associated with negative health outcomes

Personality and Stress

• Type A vs. B

  • A - competitive, driven, hostile, ambitious 

  • B - easy going, relaxed, patient 

  • A is more associated with stress, the hostility part 

• Explanatory Style

  • Optimism vs pessimism 

    • Do you think things are going to turn out positive or negative

  • Pessimism more closely related to stress - more likely to develop heart disease 

• Hardiness

  • Set of personality characteristics 

    • Commitment 

    • Comfortable with challenges

    • Feeling in control

  • Resistant to stress - less likely to feel the negative effects of stress

• Locus of control

  • Internal - You feel in control over your decision making and your life

  • External - don’t feel like you are in control of your life (destiny is already written)

  • external locus of control is more associated with stress

• Diathesis-Stress model

  • Prolonged stress can kick off a genetic predisposition for a disease or disorder 

  • Health is genetics and environment

Immune Response

• Kiecolt-Glaser et.al. 1998

  • Gave dental students a puncture wound either during summer vacation or 3 days before an exam. If you got it during summer vacation they healed 40% faster compared to the ones who got it right before an exam 

• Cancer

  • Stress doesn’t cause cancer but it can kick off a genetic predisposition for cancer 

  • If you had prolonged workplace stress you were 5.5% more likely to develop colon cancer

• Inflammation 

  • Psychological trauma is associated with an increase physical inflammation 

  • Can contribute to heart disease 

Reducing Stress

• Misconception 

  • Fallacy of Uniform Efficacy

    • There is an action that will reduce stress for everyone. If it works for me then it works for all.

• Exercise 

  • Can help deal with the negative physical reactions for stress

  • The endorphins released help with the mental effects of stress 

• Meditation 

  • Calms the mind and helps you not overly focus on things 

  • Thinking about stress makes it worse 

  • Friedman & Ulmer, 1984

    • Men who have had a heart attack before one group was given the normal advice and others getting normal advice along with meditative things and the men who had a lifestyle modification had less people have another heart attack

• Religiosity 

  • Decreases the stress and the negative health effects that come with it

  • Just being religious comes with good effects

  • Social support from others in your group

  • Rules that don’t allow you to do things that exasperated negative health effects

• Stress Inoculation Training

  • Change your thinking from pessimistic and negative thinking to more optimistic and positive 

• Increase control 

  • Decrease stress by increasing control of your life

  • Decisional Control

    • Decide between actions, this class or that class

  • Informational Control

    • Ability to gain information about a potentially stressful event

    • Feel less stressed when you know about the event 

  • Emotional Control

    • Ability to suppress or express your emotions

Coping

• Problem focused

  • Preparing for stress causing event or work to solve stress causing event

  • Can happen before or after

  • How you deal with stress is dealing with the event that is causing the stress

• Emotion focused

  • After the event. Dealing with the emotion caused by the event. Replacing negative emotion with positive emotions. Or decrease negative emotional response 

• Repressive 

  • Avoid feelings, thoughts or emotions that remind us of the event. Refusal to acknowledge. Not effective long term

• Social support

  • Reaching out to others to help you deal with the event and your emotional reaction to the event

  • Direct effects hypothesis

    • Beneficial to your emotional health whether you are stressed or not

Positive Psychology 

• Subfield that has 3 pillars that all help reduce stress

  • Positive Well Being

    • Focuses on creating satisfaction for past, present and future

  • Positive Traits

    • Exploring and enhancing positive traits; courage, creativity, resilience 

  • Positive Institutions

    • Seaking to encourage a positive social environment that allows for individual growth and development

Longevity 

• Money 

  • If you have more money you tend to live longer 

  • causes changed in happiness the less money you have and more as well

  • Creates more stress because you don’t know how to make ends meet

• Locus of control

  • When you give more decisional control they have better health outcomes

• Self control

  • People who have higher level of self control have less stress 

  • Higher self control allows you to have healthier behaviors and avoid more unhealthy behaviors 

• Explanatory style

  • More optimistic style are less likely to die and are more satisfied in life 

  • Danner et. al., 2001

    • Followed nuns around, going in they had lots of differences but its a controlled environment after in. They wrote autobiographies and they gave them an optimistic score. Those going in more optimistic lives longer. By 80 54% of negative nuns had died while only 24% of positive had

• Social Support

  • You see a strong connection between close relationships and happiness and health in collectivist cultures (cultures where a group is prioritized so relationships with others is more important) but even in more individualistic cultures you saw social support strongly predicted both happiness and physical health

  • Socially isolated people are more likely to die sooner in comparison to more socially connected people during the same time period

  • Risk factor associated with smoking 15 cigarettes a day