Stress and Health Psychology Notes

Fast Stress Response

  • Fight-or-Flight:
    • The body's physiological response to stress, happening within seconds.
    • Involves the sympathetic nervous system.
    • Release of epinephrine from the adrenal gland medulla.
  • Rest and digest is enabled by the Parasympathetic system.

Slow Stress Response

  • Takes 10-30 minutes.
  • Involves the HPA axis (hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and adrenal gland).
  • Causes the release of cortisol.

Cortisol:

  • A glucocorticoid released from the adrenal gland.
  • Helps the body manage stress by releasing stored sugar for energy.
  • Signals the brain to remember stressful events.
  • Reduces inflammation and limits the immune system response.
  • Necessary for survival but damaging if constantly released.

HPA-Axis Acute and Chronic Stress

  • Acute stress:
    • A stressful event that starts and ends quickly.
    • Some acute stress (Eustress) can be healthy.
  • Eustress:
    • Beneficial stressful experience.
    • Examples: exercise, scary movies, roller coasters.
  • Chronic stress:
    • Persistent and long-lasting stress.
    • Examples: racism, harassment.
    • Harmful to physical and mental health.

Chronic Stress and Physical Health

  • Elevated cortisol leads to high blood pressure.
    • Linked to heart disease, stroke, and kidney disease.
  • Psychoneuroimmunology:
    • The study of how stress, emotions, and behavior affect the immune system.
  • Chronic stress can lead to a dysfunctional immune system.
  • Stress can increase symptoms of asthma and autoimmune diseases.

Chronic Stress and Physical Health: Digestion and Eating

  • Chronic stress increases the risk of gastrointestinal diseases.
    • Examples: irritable bowel syndrome, acid reflux, and ulcers.
  • Stress can induce cravings for high-fat, high-sugar, and salty foods (comfort foods).
  • Kummerspeck: “grief bacon.”

Chronic Stress and Mental Health

  • Chronic stress influences the development, severity, and progression of most psychological disorders.
  • Diathesis-stress model:
    • The severity and progression of symptoms are increased by experiencing chronic or intense stress in those who are at risk for developing a psychological disorder.
  • Increased HPA axis activity and cortisol levels enhance dysfunctional dopamine systems in those with schizophrenia.
  • Heightened cortisol levels increase dopamine system activity, exaggerating drug cravings.

Chronic Stress and Brain Health

  • Cortisol and adrenaline affect neurons in the hippocampus and amygdala to facilitate memory.
  • Cortisol can reduce dendritic branching, impede neuron replication, and kill neurons in the hippocampus.
  • People with PTSD often show shrinkage in the hippocampus, leading to cognitive problems.

Chronic Stress and Misbelief

  • Stress can affect decision-making and irritation thinking.
  • Providing a way to cope with feelings of uncertainty and anxiety.
  • Conspiracy theories thrived during COVID-19, which was extremely stressful.

Connections: Stress and Sex

  • Evolutionary reasons exist for why chronic or severe stress can diminish sex and reproduction.
  • As cortisol elevates, testosterone decreases, impacting sexual motivation and sperm production.
  • Chronic stress may lead to infertility in females by disrupting hormone systems essential for ovulation.
  • Balance is needed between sympathetic (arousal) and parasympathetic (blood flow to the penis) systems.
    • Too much anxiety or stress about a sexual encounter can cause temporary erectile dysfunction before and during sex.
  • About 40% of erectile dysfunction problems are caused by psychological factors such as stress.

What Makes Stress Bad?

  • Stress can be motivating and energizing if predictable and controllable.
  • Uncertainty, variability, lack of control, and chronic stress can cause stress to be damaging.

Causes of Stress

  • A rat who is given shocks randomly (unpredictable) will show chronic stress responses that will cause its hippocampus to shrink, its adrenal gland to swell, and its immune system to become dysfunctional.
  • Safety signal:
    • The physiological damage caused by stress can be reduced or eliminated if an animal is given a signal for when it will receive an aversive event like a shock and when it will not.

Psychosocial Stress

  • Humans are social animals, and throughout our history, we lived in hierarchical systems with members fighting for the place in society.
  • Psychosocial stress:
    • This is stress brought on by society, such as comparing oneself to others, feeling judged, or being lower in the social hierarchy.
  • Dr. Robert Sapolsky studied the behavior and physiology of troops of baboons in Africa.
  • Like humans, baboons live in hierarchies with the dominant, alpha, male getting their choice of food and mates.
  • The alpha males psychologically torment those lower in social status.
  • The members of the baboon troop spend their days feeling hassled by those above them, turning around and tormenting those below them in status.
  • Those lower in status show stress related help problems.

Psychosocial Stress

  • Social self-preservation theory:
    • The theory that we are highly sensitive to threats to our social status when comparing ourselves to others.
  • This may also involve feeling embarrassed or shamed by others.
  • Social-evaluation threat:
    • The stress that occurs when others judge a critical part of our self-identity.
  • Status anxiety hypothesis:
    • The idea that we feel stress and anxiety when we feel judged because we are lower on the socioeconomic ladder.

Minority Stress Theory (MST):

  • A theory that proposes that health disparities in minority communities can be largely explained by psychosocial stress related to discrimination and bigotry.
  • MST has three tenets:
    1. Being a minority leads to increased exposure to social stressors.
    2. Being a minority leads to increased stress responses, such as fear of rejection, anxiety, and rumination.
    3. Being a minority leads to increased adverse health outcomes caused by the increase in stressors compared to people who are not a member of a minority group.

Psychosocial Stress in a Lab

  • Trier Social Stress Test (TSST):
    • A method for creating social stress often used to study stress in humans in a controlled laboratory setting.
  • Participants are asked to give a speech and perform cognitive tasks in front of a panel of three judges.
  • The judges are very critical and ask the participants to start over when they make a mistake.
  • This produces an extreme stress response in participants.

Learned Helplessness

  • Lack of predictability or controllability can significantly affect motivation and learning.
  • Learned helplessness:
    • Experiencing an inability to control one negative event produces a sense that one cannot control other situations where one may have more control.
    • A person or animal learns that their behaviors do not affect outcomes in one situation and transfers this belief to other situations.

Coping Strategies

  • Coping:
    • Cognitive, behavioral, or social means to reduce the negative impact of stressful events.
  • There are several theoretical coping strategies.
  • Problem-focused coping:
    • A coping strategy where a person focuses on strategies to reduce the impact of stress -- an active form of coping with stress.
    • Examples: Making a list, scheduling time, seeking help.
  • Emotion-focused coping:
    • A coping strategy where one attempts to regulate their emotional reactions to stressful events.
    • Often used when stress is beyond our control.
    • Talking with friends, family, or therapists about one’s feelings.
  • Rumination
    • A process where a person replays past events or worries about possible future stressful events. Rumination is often accompanied by experiencing physiological and physiological stress
      Intrusive ruminations:
      A person cannot keep from thinking about a traumatic event
      Deliberate rumination:
      A positive aspect of thinking about a stressful event, as it allows a person to find meaning and growth from the bad experience
  • Avoidance-focused coping:
    • A coping strategy where one avoids or puts off dealing with stressors.
    • Can lead to exaggerated stress-related psychological and health problems.
    • Puts people at greater risk for developing symptoms of depression and slows the progress of treatment for PTSD.

Social Support

  • There are few things that buffer against the negative effects of stress better than good friends or a supportive family.
  • Levels of social support have been linked to reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and improved hormone and immune system function.
  • Having a strong social network is also important in reducing symptoms of psychological disorders.

Social Support

  • There are several theories about how social support and social networks reduce the negative effects of stress.
  • Stress-buffering hypothesis:
    • The idea that support from others reduces the physiological reaction to a stressor.
  • Direct effect hypothesis:
    • The idea that social support directly helps the body resist the damaging effects of stress.
    • Example: Men who report high levels of stress also have higher levels of PSA, which is linked to prostate cancer. Those with social support may show reduced levels of PSA and a lower risk of prostate cancer.

Physical Activity

  • An exercise routine can also be very healthy for the brain.
  • Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF):
    • A protein that is created during exercise that protects neurons and fosters the growth of dendrites.
  • Exercise can also be an effective strategy to reduce the symptoms of stress-related disorders like anxiety and depression.
  • Exercise could be considered an evidence-based treatment for depression.
  • Even a moderate amount of light exercise can be beneficial in reducing stress.

Resilience

  • Resilience:
    • A trait that makes some individuals less prone to the aversive effects of stress.
  • The majority of people who experience a traumatic event do not develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
  • Post-traumatic growth:
    • The idea that, for some, a traumatic event can produce positive changes in a person.
  • Deliberate rumination or creatively thinking about and processing the memories and emotions of a traumatic event are key to post-traumatic growth.

Health Psychology

  • Health psychology:
    • A subfield in psychology interested in applying psychological principles to understanding and improving human health.
  • Health psychology follows a biopsychosocial model of health, which takes a systems theory approach.
  • This is the idea that human health and healthcare need to be understood as part of many interconnected systems.
  • Basic researchers in health psychology often work in universities conducting studies on psychological and social influences on health.
  • Clinical health psychology takes an applied approach to working in the healthcare industry, helping patients make better choices in activity, diet, and stress management.

Positive Psychology

  • Positive psychology:
    • A subfield in psychology that studies how people thrive, enjoy life, and become the best versions of themselves.
  • Has its roots in humanistic psychology.
  • Developed as an alternative to what psychology tends to overemphasize: psychological disorders, stress, cognitive disabilities, and learning disorders.
  • Positive psychology formally began as a subdiscipline by psychologist Martin Seligman.

Happiness and Life Satisfaction

  • The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) has people respond on a seven-point Likert scale (strongly agree–strongly disagree) to five statements about lack of regrets, achievements, and overall life satisfaction.
  • According to the World Happiness Report, some countries consistently rate higher than others in happiness and life satisfaction.
  • Rating high: Finland, Iceland, and Denmark.
  • Rating low: Zimbabwe, Cambodia, and Iraq.
  • These countries tend to rate high and tend to have good social safety nets, paid parental leave, and greater gender and economic equality.
  • Bhutan, a country on the eastern edge of the Himalayas in Asia, the gross national happiness (GNH) of their country.
  • Variation of the GNH has been used around the world by communities and cities such as British Columbia, Vermont, and São Paulo, Brazil.

Can Money Buy Happiness?

  • Winning the lottery can increase measures of life satisfaction and happiness that are relatively long-lasting; however, there is variation in the happiness that sudden wealth brings.
  • Hedonic Adaptation:
    • We tend to return to our baseline level of happiness.
  • Life satisfaction and happiness scales do show positive correlations with overall income and wealth—to a point.
  • However, once basic needs are met, increased wealth has only a minor effect on happiness.

Gratitude

  • The simple act of recognizing and writing down the things in one’s life that bring one happiness can elevate mood and sense of well-being.
  • Robert Emmons and his students conducted research on gratitude with three groups of participants.
    • Group 1 wrote about events that happened during the week.
    • Group 2 wrote about the hassles in their lives.
    • Group 3 wrote about things they were grateful for.
  • Results: Those that were in group 3 reported greater optimism and life satisfaction and fewer symptoms of illness or headaches than the other groups.

Making Choices for Happiness

  • We have some control of some aspects in our lives that influence our happiness and live satisfaction.
  • Here are some suggestions to elevate positive emotions.
    1. Limit time on social media.
    2. Prioritize getting quality sleep.
    3. Pick an exercise routine that you enjoy and make it an essential part of your day.
    4. Practice being thankful, appreciative, and grateful, and try keeping a gratitude journal.
    5. Practice compassion and kindness.
    6. Volunteer your time in service of others and worthwhile organizations.
    7. Surround yourself and spend time with supportive and caring people.
    8. Find active ways to manage stress in healthy ways.
    9. Take part in activities that allow you to be creative.
    10. Participate in cultural activities like going to a museum, attending a concert, or joining a club.
    11. Find activities that challenge you cognitively or physically and that put you into a flow state.
    12. Don’t get caught in fiercely competitive jobs where you must struggle for wealth and power.
    13. Experience nature and spend time in green spaces.

Connections: Environmental Psychology

  • Environmental psychology:
    • A subdiscipline in psychology interested in the effects that the environment and green spaces have on improving aspects of people's emotions, happiness, productivity, stress reduction, and physical and mental health.
  • Biophilia hypothesis:
    • An idea put forth by biologist E. O. Wilson that suggests humans have an innate tendency to feel happiness when connected to nature.
  • Increased green spaces in a town have been shown to correlate with reduced crime and improve the physical and mental health of the people who live there.
  • There is strong evidence that people who spend time in nature report a greater sense of happiness and life satisfaction.