Psych Ch. 14

14.1 What is Stress?

• Stress is a commonly used term but is tough to accurately define because its such a vague concept.

• Stimulus based definitions of stress (like a high stress job or a long commute to work) are problematic because they fail to recognize how people differ in how they view and react to challenging situations.

  • Ex. a student who has studied diligently all semester would be better prepared for finals than a student who has barely studied.

• Response based definitions of stress emphasizes the physiological responses that occur when faced with demanding or threatening situations.

  • Describe stress as a response to environmental conditions.

  • Hans Seyle defined stress as “a response of the body to any demand, whether it is caused by, or results in, pleasant or unpleasant conditions.

• Many physiological reactions that occur when faced with stress can also occur in response to things that most people would not consider to be genuinely stressful, like getting good news.

• Stress: a process whereby an individual perceives and responds to events that they appraise as overwhelming or threatening to their well being

• Stressors: demanding or threatening event.

• Appraisals influence our reaction to these events.

  • Primary appraisal: involves judgement about the degree of potential harm or threat to well-being that a stressor might entail.

    • A stressor would be appraised as a threat if you think it could lead to some sort of harm; it could be appraised as a challenge if you believe it can bring about gain or personal growth.

    • Ex. an employee who gets promoted to a leadership position would likely perceive the promotion as a much greater threat if they thought it would lead to excessive work demands than if they viewed it as an opportunity to gain new skills.

  • Secondary appraisal: judgement of the options available to cope with a stressor, as well as perceptions of how effective such options will be.

• If a person appraises an event as harmful and believes that the demands imposed by the event exceed the available resources to manage or adapt to it, the person will subjectively experience a state of stress.

  • Feeling a lump in your breast and determining that all options are bad and you will likely die vs. telling yourself that you probably don’t have cancer and that even if you do you’ll survive.

• Stress is largely in the eye of the beholder; it’s not what happens to you but how you respond to it. (Selye, 1976)

Good Stress?

• Can motivate us to do things in our best interest, like studying for exams or visiting the doctor regularly.

• Eustress: good kind of stress associated with positive feelings, optimal health, and performance. A moderate amount of stress can be beneficial in challenging situations.

  • Ex. athletes may be motivated and energized by pregame stress.

  • Research shows that moderate stress can enhance both immediate and delayed recall of educational material.

  • As stress increases, so does performance and general well being. (eustress)

• Distress: when stress levels exceed the optimal level and is no longer a positive force; it becomes excessive and debilitating.

  • People who reach this level feel burned out and fatigued; performance begins to decline.

  • Ex. high test anxiety→ when a student feels stressed about a test, negative emotions combined with physical symptoms may make concentration difficult.

Prevalence of Stress

• Stress can evoke a variety of responses, including:

  • Physiological: accelerated heart rate, headaches, gastrointestinal problems

  • Cognitive: difficulty concentrating or making decisions

  • Behavioral: drinking alcohol, smoking, or taking actions directed at eliminating the cause of stress.

• Health psychology: scientific study of how stress and other psychological factors impact health, a subfield of psychology devoted to understanding the importance of psychological influences on health, illness, and how people respond when they become ill.

Early Contributions to the Study of Stress

• An early pioneer was Walter Cannon, who was the first to identify the body’s physiological reaction to stress.

Cannon and the Fight or Flight Response

Imagine that you are hiking and at one point during your hike, a large, frightening-looking black bear appears from behind a stand of trees and sits about 50 yards from you. The bear notices you and begins to walk in your direction. In addition to thinking, “This is definitely not good,” lots of physiological reactions begin to take place. Prompted by a deluge of epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine (noradrenaline) from your adrenal glands, your pupils begin to dilate. Your heart starts to pound and speeds up, you begin to breathe heavily and perspire, you get butterflies in your stomach, and your muscles become tense, preparing you to take some kind of direct action.

• This reaction is called Fight or Flight response:

  • Occurs when a person experiences very strong emotions, especially those associated with a perceived threat.

  • During Fight or Flight, the body is rapidly aroused by activation of both the sympathetic NS and the endocrine system.

• According to Cannon, Fight or Flight is a built in mechanism that assists in maintaining homeostasis, which is an internal environment where physiological variables like blood pressure, respiration, digestion, and temperature are stabalized at levels optimal for survival.

Selye and the General Adaptation Syndrome

• General Adaptation Syndrome: the body’s nonspecific physiological response to stress. Does not depend on the stressor, pattern of reactions will be the same.

• Consists of three stages:

  • Alarm Reaction: describes the body’s immediate reaction upon facing a threatening situation, roughly similar to fight or flight.

    • You are alerted to a stressor and your body alarms you with a cascade of physiological reactions that provide you with energy to manage the situation.

    • Ex. you wake up in the middle of the night to find that the house is on fire.

  • Resistance: initial shock of the alarm reaction has worn off and the body has adapted to the stressor. Body remains alert and is prepared to respond as it did during the alarm reaction but with less intensity.

  • Exhaustion: person is no longer able to adapt to the stressor, the body’s ability to resist becomes depleted as physical wear takes its toll on the body’s tissues and organs.

    • Illness and disease will likely occur, maybe even death.

    • If a child remains missing for more than three months, a parent might faint with exhaustion or develop a serious disease.

• This model is effective because it gives a general explanation for how stress can lead to physical damage, but it doesn’t take into account appraisal and variability in how people deal with stress.

The Physiological Basis of Stress

• Physiological mechanisms of stress are extremely complex, but the generally involve work of two systems:

  • Sympathetic nervous system

  • Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis: endocrine in nature, becomes active at the same time as the SNS but works much slower

    • Hypothalamus releases corticotropin, which causes pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). This hormone orders adrenal glands to release a number of other hormones into the bloodstream, a main one being cortisol.

  • Cortisol: commonly known as a stress hormone and helps provide that boost of energy when we first encounter a stressor, preparing us to run away or fight.

    • Sustained levels of cortisol weaken the immune system.

• Extended release of cortisol has been shown to produce a number of harmful effects:

  • High cortisol levels can weaken the immune system

  • Can lead to depression

• Cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine prepare the body for fight or flight but can also heighten potential for illness.

• Stress can contribute to the development of certain psychological disorders, like PTSD, major depressive disorder, and others.

  • Research found that those who were injured during 9/11 or who developed PTSD afterwards suffered significantly higher levels of heart disease.

14.2 Stressors

• Stressors can be placed into two major categories: Chronic and Acute

  • Chronic stressors: events that persist over an extended period of time, like caring for a parent with dementia, long term unemployment, or imprisonment.

  • Acute stressors: involve brief focal events that sometimes continue to be experienced as overwhelming well after the event has ended, like falling on an icy sidewalk and breaking your leg.

Traumatic Events

• A person is exposed to actual or threatened death or serious injury

  • military combat, threatened or actual physical assaults, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and wrecks.

• Men, non-white people, and people in lower socioeconomic classes report experiencing a greater number of traumatic events than women do.

• Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): chronic stress reaction characterized by experiences and behaviors that may include intrusive and painful memories of the stressor event, jumpiness, persistent negative emotions, detachment, angry outbursts, and avoidance of reminders of the event.

Life Changes

• Most stressors that we encounter are not nearly as intense as the traumatic events mentioned.

• Many stressors we face involve events or situations that require us to make changes in our ongoing lives.

  • Ex. death of a family member, marriage, divorce, and moving.

• Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS): Developed by Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe, examines the link between life stressors and physical illness. Consists of 43 life events that require varying degrees of personal readjustment.

  • Includes examples of distress and eustress

  • Life Change Units (LCU’s): perceived magnitude of life change that each event entails.

    • Death of a spouse ranked the highest with 100 LCUs, divorce ranked second highest with 73 LCUs

  • Accumulating a high number of LCUs within a brief time period (1-2 yrs) is related to a wide range of physical illnesses and mental health problems.

Hassles

• Daily Hassles: minor irritations and annoyances that are part of our everyday lives (rush hour traffic, forgetting your keys). They can build on each other and leave us just as stressed as life changing events.

• Frequency of daily hassles is a better predictor of both physical and psychological health than LCUs

Occupation-Related Stressors

• Some jobs are more stressful than others. You are exposed to more demanding and unsafe conditions as a firefighter than you would be as a florist.

• Occupations and Their Related Stressors:

  • Police officer → physical dangers, excessive paperwork, dealing with court system, tense interactions, life and death decision making

  • Firefighter → Uncertainty over whether a serious fire or hazard awaits after an alarm, potential for extreme physical danger

  • Social worker → Little positive feedback from jobs or the public, unsafe work environments, frustration in dealing with bureaucracy, excessive paperwork, sense of personal responsibility for clients, work overload.

  • Teacher → Excessive paperwork, lack of adequate supplies, work overload, lack of positive feedback, threat of physical violence, lack of support from parents and administrators

  • Nurse → Work overload, heavy physical work, patient concerns (dealing with death and medical concerns), interpersonal problems with other medical staff.

  • Emergency medical worker → Unpredictable and extreme nature of the job, inexperience

  • Clerical and secretarial work → Few opportunities for advancement, unsupportive supervisors, work overload, lack of perceived control

  • Managerial work → Work overload, conflict and ambiguity in defining the managerial role, difficult work relationships

• Job strain: work situation that combines excessive job demands and workload with little discretion in decision making or job control.

• Job Burnout: a general sense of emotional exhaustion and cynicism in relation to one’s job.

  • Occurs frequently among those in human service jobs (social work, teachers, therapists)

  • Consists of three dimensions:

    • exhaustion: sense that one’s emotional resources are drained

    • depersonalization: sense of emotional detachment between the worker and the recipients of their services, often resulting in callous attitudes toward these individuals.

    • diminished personal accomplishment: tendency to evaluate one’s work negatively by, for example, experiencing dissatisfaction with one’s job related accomplishments.

• Close relationships with friends and family can be a potent source off stress, primarily the negative aspects.

14.3 Stress and Illness

• Stress related disease comes from the fact that we often activate a physiological system that was intended to be used to acute stressors and started using it for long term situations.

Psychophysiological Disorders

• If reactions that compose the stress response are chronic, then they can lead to wear and tear on your body.

  • Ex. running your AC on full blast during the summer will cause long term wear and tear on it.

• Psychophysiological Disorders: physical disorders or diseases whose symptoms are brought about or worsened by stress and emotional factors.

• Types of Psychophysiological Disorders:

  • Cardiovascular → hypertension, coronary heart disease

  • Gastrointestinal → irritable bowel syndrome

  • Respiratory → asthma, allergy

  • Musculoskeletal → low back pain, tension headaches

  • Skin → acne, eczema, psoriasis

Stress and the Immune System

• Immune system: body’s surveillance system. Consists of a variety of structures, cells, and mechanisms that serve to protect the body from invading microorganisms that can harm or damage the body.

Immune System Errors

• Sometimes the immune system can mistake your body’s own healthy cells for invaders and repeatedly attack them. This is known as an autoimmune disease.

• Immune system can break down and not do its job

  • Immunosuppression: decreased effectiveness of the immune system. This makes people susceptible to any number of infections, like AIDS and HIV

Stressors and Immune Function

• Psychoneuroimmunology: Field that studies how psychological factors such as stress influence the immune system and immune functioning.

• Studies have shown that immune responses can be classically conditioned in both animals and humans.

• Stress hormones released during hypothalamic-pitutiary-adrenal axis activation can adversely impact immune function. They do this by inhibiting the production of lymphocytes

  • Lymphocytes: white blood cells that circulate in the body’s fluids that are important in the immune response.

• Stress doesn’t make you sick, it breaks down the immune system that prevents you from getting sick.

Cardiovascular Disorders

• Cardiovascular Disorders: disorders that involve the cardiovascular system.

  • Recently studied because of the cardiovascular system’s centrality in the stress response system.

  • Heart Disease is one of the conditions studied.

  • Symptoms depend on the kind of disease one has, but they generally involve angina, which are chest pains that occur when the heart does not receive enough blood.

  

• Hypertension: high blood pressure, major risk factor for heart disease.

  • Causes a person’s heart to pump harder and puts more physical strain on it. Can lead to heart attack.

  • Often called a silent killer because if you have it you may not be aware of it.

Are You Type A or Type B?

• People who are prone to heart disease tend to think, feel, and act differently than those who are not.

• Type A: Individuals who are intensively driven workaholics who are preoccupied with deadlines and always in a rush

• Type B: Individuals who are more relaxed and laid back.

• In a sample of Type A’s and Type B’s, they were startled to discover that heart disease was over 7 times more frequent among A’s than B’s

  • It does not pay to be an angry person

• One reason that angry and hostile moods can contribute to cardiovascular diseases is that they can create social strain, mainly in the form of antagonistic social encounters with others.

• Negative Affectivity: Tendency to experience distressed emotional states involving anger, contempt, disgust, guilt, fear, and nervousness. It has been linked with the development of hypertension and heart disease.

Depression and the Heart

• Benjamin Malzberg found that the death rate among institutionalized patients with depression was six times higher than that of the population.

• In a study of over 700 Denmark residents, those with the highest depression scores were 71% more likely to experience a heart attack than those with lower depression scores.

• American Heart Association recommended including depression as a risk factor for heart disease patients.

• Depression, especially if diagnosed early in life, may lead a person to live an unhealthy lifestyle, thereby predisposing people to unfavorable cardiovascular disease risk profile.

Asthma

• Asthma: Chronic and serious disease where airways of the respiratory system become obstructed, leading to a great difficulty expelling air from the lungs.

  • Obstruction is caused by inflammation of the airways and tightening of the muscles around them.

  • Symptoms include: difficulty breathing, wheezing, chest tightness, shortness of breath, and coughing.

• Certain areas are known for having higher rates of asthma and related diseases because of high rates of air pollution.

  • Long Beach (LBC), Bronx (asthma alleys)

• Some research has shown that people with asthma will only experience asthma like symptoms if they expect to experience such symptoms, like breathing an inert substance that they falsely believe will lead to airway obstruction.

Headaches

→ Continuous pain anywhere in the head or neck region.

• Migraines are thought to be caused by blood vessel swelling and increased blood flow.

  • Symptoms include severe pain on one or both sides of the head, an upset stomach, and disturbed vision.

• Tension headaches are triggered by tightening/tensing of facial and neck muscles; they are the most commonly experienced kind of headache

  • Factors that contribute to tension headaches: sleep deprivation, skipping meals, eye strain, overexertion, muscular tension caused by poor posture, and stress.

14.4 Regulation of Stress

→ essential to use healthy coping strategies to manage stress

• Coping: mental and behavioral efforts that we use to deal with problems related to stress.

Coping Styles

• Lazarus distinguished two fundamental kinds of coping:

  • Problem focused coping: one attempts to manage or alter the problem that is causing one to experience stress. Involve identifying the problem, considering possible solutions, weighing the costs and benefits of these solutions, and then selecting an alternative.

  • Emotion focused coping: consists of efforts to change or reduce the negative emotions associated with stress. These efforts may include avoiding, minimizing, or distancing oneself from the problem, or positive comparisons with others. (I’m not as bad off as she is)

    • These strategies can involve reappraisal, where the stressor is construed differently without changing its objective level of threat. Ex. a person sentenced to federal prison who thinks “This will give me a great chance to network with others”

    • Can be thought of as treating symptoms instead of the stress

Control and Stress

• Ability to control our lives is a basic tenet of human behavior

• Perceived Control: our beliefs about our personal capacity to exert influence over and shape outcomes, and it has major implications for our health and happiness.

  • Associated with better physical and mental health and a greater psychological well being.

• Seligman believed that the passivity and lack of initiative demonstrated by his dogs was similar to what was observed in human depression.

  • Humans who experience negative life events that they believe they are unable to control may become helpless. As a result they may show lack of initiative in the future over events that they can control.

• Studies have found that more affluent individuals experience better health partly because they tend to believe that they can personally control and manage life’s stressors.

Social Support

• Need to form and maintain strong relationships with others is a powerful and fundamental human motive

• Social Support: can be thought of as the soothing impact of friends, family, and acquaintances.

  • Can take the form of advice, guidance, encouragement, acceptance, emotional comfort, and tangible assistance.

  • This is even observed in animals as their mates support them in times of stress.

• A study of 7,000 Alameda County residents were followed over 9 years. Those who had previously indicated that they lacked social support were more likely to die during the follow up period than those with more extensive social networks.

  • Isolated men were 2.3 times more likely to die and isolated women were 2.8 times more likely to die.

• A person who has higher levels of social support is less likely to contract a common cold.

• Social support is connected to favorable health outcomes because it has several beneficial physiological effects in stressful situations. It can also lead to better health behaviors

Stress Reduction Techniques

• A common way to combat stress is exercise. Both long and short duration is beneficial for physical and mental health.

• Exercise in later adulthood appears to minimize the detrimental effects of stress on the hippocampus and memory.

• Relaxation Response Technique: combines relaxation with transcendental meditation, consists of four components:

  • sitting upright in a comfortable chair with feet on the ground and body in a relaxed position

  • being in a quiet environment with eyes closed

  • repeating a word or phrase to oneself, such as “alert mind, calm body”

  • passively allowing the mind to focus on pleasant thoughts, such as nature or the warmth of your blood nourishing your body.

• Biofeedback: uses electronic equipment to accurately measure a person’s neuromuscular and autonomic activity-feedback is provided in the form of visual or auditory signals

  • Has been successfully applied to individuals with tension headaches, high blood pressure, asthma, and phobias.

14.5 The Pursuit of Happiness

Happiness

• America’s founders declared that its citizens have an unalienable right to pursue happiness.

• Some people view happiness in a way that emphasizes virtuousness, reverence, and enlightened spirituality. Others see it as contentment.

Elements of Happiness

• Some psychologists suggest that happiness consists of three distinct elements: the pleasant life, the good life, and the meaningful life.

  • Pleasant life: attainment of day-to-day pleasures that add fun, joy, and excitement to our lifestyle.

  • Good life: achieved through identifying our unique skills and abilities and engaging these talents to enrich our lives.

  • Meaningful life: involves a deep sense of fulfillment that comes from using our talents in the service of the greater good: in a way that benefits others.

• Happiness: an enduring state of mind consisting of joy, contentment, and other positive emotions, plus the sense that one’s life has meaning and value.

• How happy are people in general?

  • Average person tends to be relatively happy and tends to indicate experiencing more positive feelings than negative ones.

• Recent poll found that only 42% of American adults report being “very happy”. Groups that show greatest declines in happiness are people of color, those who have not completed college, and those who politically identify as Democrats or independents.

Factors Connected to Happiness

• Studies have found that age is related to happiness and there doesn’t appear to be gender differences in happiness.

  • Most of this work is correlational.

• Family appears to be key factors correlated with happiness

  • Those who are married report being happier than those who are single, divorced, or widowed.

• Residents of affluent countries tend to be happier than residents of poor countries

• Extraverts tend to be happier in extraverted cultures than in introverted cultures.

• No link has been identified between happiness and physical attractiveness

  • Is this because attractiveness is subjective?

Life Events and Happiness

• People are poor at affective forecasting:

  • predicting the intensity and duration of their future emotions.

  • Ex. nearly all newlywed spouses predicted their marital satisfaction would remain stable or improve over the following four years, but despite this high level of initial optimism, their marital satisfaction actually declined.

• Something similar to sensory adaptation occurs when people experience emotional reactions to life events. We eventually adapt to changing emotional circumstances in our life just like our eyes adjust to bright light.

  • Ex. we feel a burst of pleasure in response to something like a marriage proposal. We would also feel a surge of misery following a divorce. In the long run we eventually adjust to the new emotional normal. The emotional impact erodes and we return to our baseline happiness.

  • However, there has been some research into how important life events can permanently alter people’s set happiness levels.

Increasing Happiness

• One way to increase happiness could be to write down three good things that occurred each day; led to an increase in happiness that lasted over 6 months.

Positive Psychology

• 1998, Seligman (learned helplessness), urged psychologists to focus more on understanding how to build human strength and psychological well being.

• Positive Psychology: can be thought of as the science of happiness. it is an area of study that seeks to identify and promote those qualities that lead to greater fulfillment in our lives.

  • Moves away from focusing on people’s pathology and what’s wrong with them.

• Some of the topics studied include altruism and empathy, creativity, forgiveness and compassion, the importance of positive emotions, enhancement of immune system functioning, savoring the fleeting moments of life, and strengthening virtues as a way to increase authentic happiness.

Positive Affect and Optimism

• Qualities that help promote psychological well being are linked with a range of favorable health outcomes (especially cardiovascular)

• Positive affect: refers to pleasurable engagement with the environment, like joy and happiness.

  • Can also serve as a protective factor against heart disease.

• Optimism: general tendency to look on the bright side of things, significant predictor of positive health outcomes.

  • “don’t worry, be happy” is actually good advice.

• Positive affect and optimism are related but not the same.

• Positive affect is concerned with positive feeling states, optimism is the generalized tendency to believe that good things will happen.

Flow

• Flow: described as a particular experience that is so engaging and engrossing that it becomes worth doing for its own sake.

  • Usually related to creative endeavors and leisure activites.

  • When people experience flow, they become involved in an activity to the point that they feel they lose themselves in the activity.

• Flow is considered a pleasurable experience and it typically occurs when people are engaged in challenging activities that require skills and they know they possess.