Stress, Health Psychology, and Psychological Disorders

Disorders: Stress & Health Psychology

Notes on Stress, Health Psychology, and Psychological Disorders from the provided transcript.

Health Psychology

• Health psychology: is a field that focuses on how mental, emotional, and social factors affect physical well-being.

Stress

• Stress: A state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or demanding circumstances.

• General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS): A three-stage model of the body's physiological reactions to stress, including alarm, resistance, and exhaustion.

• Approach and avoid motives: Psychological factors influencing whether to engage with (approach) or withdraw from (avoid) a situation based on its potential rewards or threats.

• Tend-and-befriend response: A stress response that involves protecting and nurturing others (tending) and creating social networks (befriending).

Coronary Heart Disease and Personality

• Coronary heart disease: A condition in which the heart's blood supply is reduced due to plaque buildup in the arteries.

• Type A personality: A personality characterized by traits such as competitiveness, impatience, and hostility.

• Type B personality: A personality characterized by traits such as patience and a relaxed attitude.

Coping Mechanisms

• Coping: Methods used to manage or reduce stress.

• Problem-focused coping: Addressing stress by directly tackling the problem causing it.

• Emotion-focused coping: Managing the emotional reactions to stress rather than the stressor itself.

Personal Control and Learned Helplessness

• Personal control: The extent to which people feel they can influence events and outcomes.

• Learned helplessness: A condition in which a person believes they have no control over their situation, leading to passivity.

• External locus of control: The perception that chance or outside forces determine one's fate.

• Internal locus of control: The belief that one controls one's own destiny.

• Self-control: The ability to control impulses and delay gratification.

• Resilience: The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.

Adaptation and Well-being

• Adaptation-level phenomenon: The tendency to judge new stimuli and events in relation to our current state.

• Relative deprivation: The perception that one is worse off compared to others.

• Positive psychology: The study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.

• Subjective well-being: An individual's self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life.

• Aerobic exercise: Physical activity that increases heart rate and oxygen intake.

• Mindfulness: Paying attention to the present moment without judgment.

• Meditation: A practice that involves training the mind to focus and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm state.

• Gratitude: The quality of being thankful and appreciative.

• Character strengths and virtues: Positive traits that are consistently displayed across situations.

• Broaden-and-build theory: Positive emotions broaden our awareness and encourage novel, varied, and exploratory thoughts and actions.

• Therapeutic lifestyle changes: Lifestyle adjustments aimed at improving mental and physical health.

• Post-traumatic growth: Positive psychological change experienced as a result of adversity and other challenges.

Psychological Disorders

• Psychological disorder: A syndrome marked by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior.

• DSM-5-TR: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition, Text Revision, used for classifying psychological disorders.

Anxiety Disorders

• Anxiety disorders: Conditions characterized by persistent and excessive worry, fear, or anxiety.

• Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): Excessive anxiety and worry about a variety of topics, events, or activities.

• Panic disorder: Recurrent and unexpected panic attacks, often with concerns about future attacks.

• Agoraphobia: Fear of places and situations that might cause panic, helplessness, or embarrassment.

• Social anxiety disorder: Significant anxiety and discomfort related to social or performance situations.

• Specific phobia: Intense, irrational fear of specific objects or situations.

Obsessive-Compulsive and Trauma-Related Disorders

• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): Characterized by unwanted repetitive thoughts (obsessions) and/or actions (compulsions).

• Hoarding disorder: Persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their actual value.

• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Marked emotional disturbance after experiencing or witnessing a severely stressful event.

• Trauma- and stressor-related disorders: Disorders resulting from exposure to traumatic or stressful events.

Depressive and Bipolar Disorders

• Major depressive disorder: A persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest.

• Persistent depressive disorder (dysthymia): A chronic form of depression with less severe symptoms than major depressive disorder.

• Bipolar I disorder: A mood disorder characterized by at least one manic episode.

• Bipolar II disorder: A mood disorder characterized by alternating periods of hypomania and depression.

• Mania: A mood disorder characterized by periods of euphoria, elevated energy, and impulsivity.

• Rumination: Compulsive fretting; overthinking about our problems and their causes.

Schizophrenia and Dissociative Disorders

• Schizophrenia: A psychological disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and/or diminished, inappropriate emotional expression.

• Chronic schizophrenia: A form of schizophrenia in which symptoms develop gradually and persist over a long period.

• Acute schizophrenia: A form of schizophrenia in which symptoms appear suddenly.

• Delusions: False beliefs, often of persecution or grandeur, that may accompany psychotic disorders.

• Dissociative disorders: Disorders in which conscious awareness becomes separated (dissociated) from previous memories, thoughts, and feelings.

• Dissociative identity disorder (DID): A rare dissociative disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating personalities.

• Dissociative amnesia: Inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness.

Personality Disorders

• Personality disorders: Inflexible and enduring behavior patterns that impair social functioning.

• Antisocial personality disorder: Lack of conscience for wrongdoing, even towards friends and family members; may be aggressive and ruthless or a clever con artist.

• Narcissistic personality disorder: Characterized by a grandiose sense of self-importance, a need for excessive admiration, and a lack of empathy.

• Avoidant personality disorder: Characterized by consistent discomfort and restraint in social situations, overwhelming feelings of inadequacy, and extreme sensitivity to negative evaluation.

• Dependent personality disorder: Characterized by submissive, clinging behavior and a fear of separation.

• Obsessive personality disorder: Characterized by preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and control.

• Histrionic personality disorder: Characterized by excessive emotionality and attention-seeking behavior.

Feeding and Eating Disorders

• Feeding and eating disorders: Disturbances in eating behavior that result in significant physical and psychological impairment.

• Anorexia nervosa: An eating disorder in which a person maintains a starvation diet despite being significantly underweight.

• Bulimia nervosa: An eating disorder in which a person alternates binge eating (usually of high-calorie foods) with purging (by vomiting or laxative use) or fasting.

Neurodevelopmental Disorders

• Neurodevelopmental disorders: Disorders that emerge during the developmental period.

• Autism spectrum disorder: A disorder that appears in childhood and is marked by significant deficiencies in communication and social interaction, and by rigidly fixated interests and repetitive behaviors.

• Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): A disorder marked by excessive inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.

Therapies and Treatment

• Biomedical therapy: Therapy focused on medication and other biological treatments.

• Psychopharmacology: The study of the effects of drugs on mind and behavior.

• Antidepressant drugs: Medications used to treat depression.

• Anti-anxiety drugs: Medications used to treat anxiety disorders.

• Antipsychotic drugs: Medications used to treat psychotic disorders.

• Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT): A biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients in which a brief electric current is sent through the brain.

• Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS): The application of repeated pulses of magnetic energy to the brain; used to stimulate or suppress brain activity.

• Psychosurgery: Surgery that removes or destroys brain tissue in an effort to change behavior.

• Lobotomy: A psychosurgical procedure once used to calm uncontrollably emotional or violent patients. The procedure cut the nerves connecting the frontal lobes to the emotion-controlling centers of the inner brain.

• Hypnosis: A social interaction in which one person (the hypnotist) suggests to another (the subject) that certain perceptions, feelings, thoughts, or behaviors will spontaneously occur.

• Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud’s therapeutic technique. Freud believed the patient’s free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences—and the therapist’s interpretations of them—released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight.

• Psychodynamic therapy: Therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition that views individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and that seeks to enhance self-insight.

• Humanistic therapy: Therapy focused on helping people achieve their full potential.

• Person-centered therapy: A humanistic therapy developed by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathic environment to facilitate clients’ growth.

• Unconditional positive regard: A caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients develop self-awareness and self-acceptance.

• Active listening: Empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies.

• Behavior therapy: Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors.

• Exposure therapy: Behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization and virtual reality exposure therapy, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actual situations) to the things they fear and avoid.

• Systematic desensitization: A type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias.

• Virtual reality exposure therapy: An anxiety treatment that progressively exposes people to simulations of their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders, or public speaking.

• Aversive conditioning: A type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state (such as nausea) with an unwanted behavior (such as drinking alcohol).

• Token economy: An operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token of some sort for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange the tokens for various privileges or treats.

• Cognitive therapy: Therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking; based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.

• Rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT): A confrontational cognitive therapy, developed by Albert Ellis, that vigorously challenges people’s illogical, self-defeating attitudes and assumptions.

• Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT): A popular integrative therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior).

• Group therapy: Therapy conducted with groups rather than individuals, permitting therapeutic benefits from group interaction.

• Family therapy: Therapy that treats the family as a system. Views an individual’s unwanted behaviors as influenced by, or directed at, other family members.

Professional Roles & Research

• Clinical psychologists: Psychologists who assess and treat mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders.

• Psychiatrists: Medical doctors licensed to prescribe drugs and otherwise treat physical causes of psychological disorders.

• Counselors: Professionals who provide guidance to clients and assist them in resolving psychological, emotional, or social problems.

• Psychiatric social workers: Social workers who specialize in providing guidance and assistance to clients with mental health and social problems.

• Confirmation bias: A tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.