Chapter 12: Health, Stress, and Coping

1. Chapter 12: Health, Stress, and Coping

2. Health Psychology • Health Psychology: Uses behavioral principles to prevent illness and promote health • Behavioral Medicine: Applies psychology to manage medical problems (e.g., asthma and diabetes) • Lifestyle Diseases: Diseases related to health-damaging personal habits

3. Behavioral Risk Factors • Behaviors that increase the chances of disease, injury, or premature death • Disease-Prone Personality: Personality type associated with poor health; person tends to be chronically depressed, anxious, and hostile

4. Ways to Promote Health and Early Prevention • Refusal Skills Training: Program that teaches young people how to resist pressures to begin smoking • Can be applied to other drugs and health risks • Life Skills Training: Teaches stress reduction, self-protection, decision making, self-control, and social skills

5. Ways to Promote Health and Early Prevention (cont.) • Role Model: Person who serves as a positive example of good and desirable behavior • Wellness: Positive state of good health and well-being

6. Figure 12.1

7. Stress • Mental and physical condition that occurs when a person must adjust or adapt to the environment • Includes marital and financial problems • Eustress: Good stress • Stress Reaction: Physical reaction to stress • Autonomic Nervous System is aroused • Stressor: Condition or event that challenges or threatens the person • Pressure: When a person must meet urgent external demands or expectations

8. Figure 12.2

9. Burnout • Job-related condition (usually in helping professions) of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion • Emotional Exhaustion: Feel “used up” and apathetic toward work • Cynicism: Detachment from the job • Feeling of reduced personal accomplishment

10. How to Manage a Threat • Primary Appraisal: Deciding if a situation is relevant or irrelevant, positive or threatening • Secondary Appraisal: Assess resources and decide how to meet the threat or challenge • Perceived lack of control is just as threatening as an actual lack of control

11. Coping With Threats • Emotion-Focused Coping: Trying to control one’s emotional reactions to the threatening or stressful situation • Problem-Focused Coping: Managing or correcting the distressing situation • Traumatic Stresses: Extreme events that cause psychological injury or intense emotional pain

12. Frustration • Negative emotional state that occurs when people are prevented from reaching desired goals • External Frustration: Based on external conditions that impede progress toward a goal • Can be social or non-social • Personal Frustration: Caused by personal characteristics that impede progress toward a goal

13. Figure 12.3

14. Reactions to Frustration • Aggression: Any response made with the intention of harming a person, animal, or object • Displaced Aggression: Redirecting aggression to a target other than the source of one’s frustration • Scapegoating: Blaming a person or group for conditions they did not create; the scapegoat is a habitual target of displaced aggression

15. Reactions to Frustration (cont.) • Escape: May mean actually leaving a source of frustration (dropping out of school) or psychologically escaping (apathy) • Conflict: Stressful condition that occurs when a person must choose between contradictory needs, desires, motives, or demands

16. Types of Conflicts

17. Approach-Approach Conflicts • Having to choose between two desirable or positive alternatives (e.g., choosing between a new BMW or Mercedes)

18. Avoidance-Avoidance Conflicts • Being forced to choose between two negative or undesirable alternatives (e.g., choosing between going to the doctor or contracting cancer) • NOT choosing may be impossible or undesirable

19. Approach-Avoidance Conflicts • Being attracted (drawn to) and repelled by the same goal or activity; attraction keeps person in the situation, but negative aspects can cause distress

20. Ambivalence • Mixed positive and negative feelings; central characteristic of approach-avoidance conflicts

21. Figure 12.5

22. Multiple Conflicts • Double Approach-Avoidance Conflicts: Each alternative has both positive and negative qualities • Vacillation: When one is attracted to both choices; seeing the positives and negatives of both choices and going “back and forth” before deciding, if deciding at all! • Multiple Approach-Avoidance Conflicts: When several alternatives have positive and negative features

23. Anxiety • Feelings of tension, uneasiness, apprehension, worry, and vulnerability • We are motivated to avoid experiencing anxiety • Similar to fear but based on unclear threat

24. Freudian Ego Defense Mechanisms • Habitual and unconscious (in most cases) mental processes designed to reduce anxiety • Work by avoiding, denying, or distorting sources of threat or anxiety • If used short term, can help us get through everyday situations • If used long term, we may end up not living in reality • Protect idealized self-image so we can live with ourselves

25. Freudian Ego Defense Mechanisms: Some Examples • Denial: Most primitive; refusing to accept or believe reality; usually occurs with death and illness • Repression: When painful memories, anxieties, and so on are held out of our awareness • Reaction Formation: Impulses are repressed and the opposite behavior is exaggerated

26. More Freudian Ego Defense Mechanisms • Projection: When one’s own feelings, shortcomings, or unacceptable traits and impulses are seen in others; exaggerating negative traits in others lowers anxiety • Rationalization: Justifying personal actions by giving “rational” but false reasons for them

27. Learned Helplessness (Seligman) • Acquired (learned) inability to overcome obstacles and avoid aversive stimuli; learned passivity and inactivity to aversive stimuli • Occurs when events appear to be uncontrollable • May feel helpless if failure is attributed to lasting, general factors

28. Figure 12.6

29. Depression • State of feeling despondent defined by feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness • One of the most common mental problems in the world • Childhood depression is dramatically increasing • Some symptoms: Loss of appetite or sex drive, decreased activity, sleeping too much

30. Mastery Training • Responses are reinforced that lead to mastery of a threat or control over one’s environment • One method to combat learned helplessness and depression

31. How to Recognize Depression (Beck) • You have a consistently negative opinion of yourself • You engage in frequent self-criticism and self-blame • You place negative interpretations on events that usually would not bother you • The future looks grim • You can’t handle your responsibilities and feel overwhelmed

32. Stress and Health • Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS): Rates the impact of various life events on the likelihood of contracting illness • Not a foolproof method of rating stress • Are positive life events (getting married, having a child) always stressful? • People also differ in their reactions to stress • Microstressors (Hassles): Minor but frequent stresses

33. Psychosomatic Disorders • Illness where psychological factors contribute to actual illnesses (bodily damage) or to damaging changes in bodily functioning • Hypochondriacs: Complain about diseases that appear to be imaginary • Certain kinds of ulcers are not psychosomatic • Most common complaints: respiratory and gastrointestinal (e.g., stomach pain and asthma)

34. Biofeedback • Applying informational feedback to bodily control • Aids voluntary regulation of bodily states such as blood pressure, heart rate, and so on • Helpful but not an instant cure • May help relieve muscle-tension headaches, migraine headaches, and chronic pain

35. Figure 12.7

36. Cardiac Personalities • Type A Personality: Personality type with elevated risk of heart disease; characterized by time urgency, chronic anger, or hostility • Anger may be the key factor of this behavior • Type B Personality: All types other than Type As; unlikely to have a heart attack

37. Hardy Personality • Personality type associated with superior stress resistance • Sense of personal commitment to self and family • Feel they have control over their lives and their work • See life as a series of challenges, not threats

38. General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS; Selye) • Series of bodily reactions to prolonged stress; occurs in three stages

39. Stage One: Alarm Reaction • Body resources are mobilized to cope with added stress

40. Stage Two: Stage of Resistance • Bodily adjustments to stress stabilize but at a high physical cost; resistance to other stressors is lowered

41. Stage Three: Stage of Exhaustion • Body’s resources are drained and stress hormones are depleted, possibly resulting in: • Psychosomatic disease • Loss of health • Complete collapse

42. Immunity • Immune System: Mobilizes bodily defenses like white blood cells against invading microbes and other diseases • Psychoneuroimmunology: Study of connections among behavior, stress, disease, and immune system

43. Stress Management • Use of behavioral strategies to reduce stress and improve coping skills • Progressive Relaxation: Produces deep relaxation throughout the body by tightening all muscles in an area and then relaxing them • Guided Imagery: Visualizing images that are calming, relaxing, or beneficial in other ways

44. More on Stress Management • Stress Inoculation: Using positive coping statements internally to control fear and anxiety; designed to combat: • Negative Self-Statements: Self-critical thoughts that increase anxiety and lower performance • Coping Statements: Reassuring, self-enhancing statements used to stop self-critical thinking

45. Figure 12.9