5.1-5.2 vocab psych

Health psychology: a subfield of psychology that explores the impact of psychological, behavioral, and cultural factors on health and wellness.

Psychoneuroimmunology: the study of how psychological, neural, and endocrine processes together affect our immune system and resulting health.

Stress: the process by which we perceive and respond to certain events, called stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging.

approach and avoidance motives: the drive to move toward (approach) or away from (avoid) a stimulus.

general adaptation syndrome (GAS): Selye’s concept of the body’s adaptive response to stress in three phases — alarm, resistance, exhaustion.

tend-and-befriend response: under stress, people (especially women) may nurture themselves and others (tend) and bond with and seek support from others (befriend).

coronary heart disease: the clogging of the vessels that nourish the heart muscle; a leading cause of death in many developed countries.

Type A: Friedman and Rosenman’s term for competitive, hard-driving, impatient, verbally aggressive, and anger-prone people.

Type B: Friedman and Rosenman’s term for easygoing, relaxed people.

Catharsis: in psychology, the idea that “releasing” aggressive energy (through action or fantasy) relieves aggressive urges.

Coping: alleviating stress using emotional, cognitive, or behavioral methods.

problem-focused coping: attempting to alleviate stress directly — by changing the stressor or the way we interact with that stressor.

emotion-focused coping: attempting to alleviate stress by avoiding or ignoring a stressor and attending to emotional needs related to our stress reaction.

personal control: our sense of controlling our environment rather than feeling helpless.

learned helplessness: the hopelessness and passive resignation humans and other animals learn when unable to avoid repeated aversive events.

external locus of control: the perception that outside forces beyond our personal control determine our fate.

internal locus of control: the perception that we control our own fate.

Self-control: the ability to control impulses and delay short-term gratification for greater long-term rewards.

positive psychology: the scientific study of human flourishing, with the goals of promoting strengths and virtues that foster well-being, resilience, and positive emotions, and that help individuals and communities to thrive.

subjective well-being: self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life. Used along with measures of objective well-being (for example, physical and economic indicators) to evaluate people’s quality of life.

feel-good, do-good phenomenon: people’s tendency to be helpful when in a good mood.

adaptation-level phenomenon: our tendency to form judgments (of sounds, of lights, of income) relative to a neutral level defined by our prior experience.

relative deprivation: the perception that we are worse off relative to those with whom we compare ourselves.

broaden-and-build theory: proposes that positive emotions broaden our awareness, which over time helps us build novel and meaningful skills and resilience that improve well-being.

character strengths and virtues: a classification system to identify positive traits; organized into categories of wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.

Resilience: the personal strength that helps people cope with stress and recover from adversity and even trauma.

aerobic exercise: sustained exercise that increases heart and lung fitness; also helps alleviate depression and anxiety.

mindfulness meditation: a reflective practice in which people attend to current experiences in a nonjudgmental and accepting manner.

Gratitude: an appreciative emotion people often experience when they benefit from other’s actions or recognize their own good fortune.