Health Psychology: a field within psychology devoted to understanding psychological influences on how people stay healthy, why they become ill, and how they respond after they do get ill.
Consider the aids patient study. What did the researchers find led to certain patients dying 9 months before the others?
Stress: is the neg. emotional & physiological process that occurs as individuals try to adjust to or deal with stressors.
Stressors: environmental circumstances that disrupt, or threaten to disrupt, individuals’ daily functioning & cause people to make adjustments.
Stress mediators, such as the extent to which people can predict & control their stressors, how they interpret the threat involved, the social support they get, & their stress coping skills, help us cope.
Stressors have both physical & psychological components.
Lifestyle behaviors that affect the leading causes of death (heart disease, cancer, accidents & injury, stroke & lung disease) in the U.S:
Alcohol, smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise & stress. Which one of these was linked to all 5 leading causes of death?
Catastrophic events: sudden, unexpected, potentially life-threatening experiences or traumas. ie: physical or sexual assault, military combat, natural disasters, & accidents.
Life changes & strains: divorce, illness in the family, difficulties at work, moving to a new place, and other circumstances that create demands to which we must adjust.
Chronic stress: stressors that continue over a long period of time – living near a noisy airport, being unable to earn a decent living because of the economic conditions or job discrimination.
Daily hassles: - traffic jams, deadlines, other irritations, pressures and annoyances that might not be significant stressors by themselves but whose cumulative effects can be significant.
In 1967, Thomas Holmes & Richard Rahe made a pioneering effort to find a way to measure stress. Worked on an assumption that all change, positive or negative, is stressful. They asked people to rate LCU’s: life changing events. (checked divorcing, being fired, retiring, losing a loved one, getting married or becoming pregnant.) Holmes & Rahe created the Social Readjustment Rating Scale or SRRS. Someone scoring high on the SRRS are more likely to suffer physical illness, mental disorder, or other problems than those with lower scores.
LES: Life Experiences Survey – measures not only the stress of the life event, but also the respondents’ cognitive appraisal of how intensely pos. or neg. the events were. Typically, neg. events have a stronger neg. impact on health than pos. events do.
More info. is needed in studying daily hassles & uplifts and how these two variables affect the process of stress.
Stress responses: A pain in the chest might lead you to worrying about a heart attack, thus creating a psychological stress response of worrying.
Physical responses to stressors include rapid breathing, increased heart rate, sweating & a little later, shakiness. These reactions are part of the general pattern, or syndrome known as the fight-or-flight syndrome.
Hans Selye suggested that the sequence of physical responses to stress occurs in a consistent pattern & is triggered by the effort to adapt to any stressor. He called this sequence the General Adaptation Syndrome or GAS.
The GAS has 3 stages: 1) alarm reaction – which involves the fight-or-flight syndrome. 2) resistance – stressor still persists, alarm reaction diminishes & the body settles in to resist the stressor on a long-term basis. 3) exhaustion – the more stressors there are & the longer they last, the more resources the body must expend in an effort to resist them. Example: an extreme case is prolonged exposure to freezing temperatures, the result is death. Selye referred to illnesses that are caused or worsened by stressors as diseases of adaption.
Psychological responses: Selye has been criticized for overlooking the psychological factors in stress, such as a person’s emotional state or the way a person thinks about stresses, which has led to the development of psychobiological models. These models emphasize the importance of psychological as well as biological variables in regulating & producing stress responses.
Emotional Responses: People have emotional feelings during & after a stressor has been presented. Gen. these go away when the stressor goes away, but if stressors continue or there is a frequent succession of these stressors, people cannot recover from their emotional equilibrium, the report feeling tense, irritable, short-tempered or anxious.
Cognitive Responses: reductions in the ability to concentrate, to remember are typical cognitive stress responses. These problems appear because of ruminative thinking, the recurring intrusion of thoughts about stressful events.
Catastrophizing: dwelling on and overemphasizing the potential consequences of neg. events. Ex. During an exam, a test-anxious college student might say, “I’m falling behind” or “Everyone else is doing better than I am”. Telling yourself you can’t do something.
Behavioral responses: strained facial expressions, shaky voice, tremors or spasms, & jumpiness are common behavioral stress responses. Aggression is another common behavioral response to stressors. Domestic violence doubled in Florida in 1992 after Hurricane Andrew.
Burnout: increasingly intense pattern of physical & psychological dysfunction in response to a continuous flow of stressors or to chronic stress. What behaviors might you see in someone who is “burned out” from their job?
Posttraumatic stress disorder: a pattern of adverse reactions following a traumatic event. War, assault, rape are some examples. Describe the behaviors.
When do stress responses become mental disorders?
Appraisal of stressors: our perception of the world depends on what we attend to…do we see any potential stressor as a threat or do we see it more as a challenge? The impact of stressors depends on how we perceive them. An important aspect of this appraisal is the degree to which the stressors are perceived to be predictable or controllable.
Unpredictable stressors have more of an impact than predictable stressors. A perception of having some control over the stressor can help as well. The Swedish employee study: summarize. Pg. 462
Pre-surgery patients – control group and non-control group. (Ebert et al.,) Findings?
People who feel they have no control over negative events appear especially prone to physical & psychological problems. They often experience feelings of helplessness & hopelessness, that may promote depression or other mental disorders.
Coping Resources & Coping Methods: suffering from stressors will be less if people have adequate coping resource & effective coping methods. Coping resources include the money & time to deal with stressful events. If you have the money to fix your car if it breaks down, you are less likely to be stressed about it.
Coping Methods: either problem-focused or emotion-focused. Problem-focused: are efforts to alter or eliminate a source of stress, and emotion-focused involve attempts to regulate the negative emotional consequences of the stressor. These two sometimes work together. Look at the table on pg. 464 to see the different coping skills listed.
Having a social support network reduces the impact of a stressor, reduces the likelihood of illness, improves recovery from existing illness & promotes healthier behaviors.
But, people’s ability to cope may determine the quality of social support they receive. BMW’s of the world who complain endlessly about stressors but never try to do anything about them, may discourage social support, vs. those with an optimistic, action-oriented approach may attract reliable support.