Prologue to Chapter 13

1. Prologue to Chapter 13 • This chapter is about stress and health • Purely psychological stressors can result in a diminished ability of the body’s immune system to fight disease • Can stress make us sick? Cause serious illness? Kill us? • Do lifestyles lead to early death? What causes cancer and heart attacks? What is the role of stress in these? Psych 101 Chapter 13

2. Stress Pressure Frustration Conflict Psych 101 Chapter 13

3. Stress: Challenges to Coping • Sources of stress include: • frustration: a result of failure to satisfy a motive • conflict: a result of holding two or more incompatible motives at the same time • pressure: the stress that arises from the threat of negative events • life events: both positive and negative • environmental conditions: living in pollution Psych 101 Chapter 13

4. Stress: Challenges to Coping • Stress reactions and Hans Seyle’s “General Adaptation Syndrome” (GAS) • three phases in dealing with stress • alarm phase: sympathetic nervous system arousal • resistance phase: the battle between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems • exhaustion phase: the victory of the parasympathetic nervous system Psych 101 Chapter 13

5. Stress: Challenges to Coping • Healthy and unhealthy aspects of the GAS • the GAS is a lifesaver in the face of emergencies and disease • the GAS is a killer in the face of prolonged unremitting stress • effective handling of stress is an absolute necessity to avoid serious illnesses and psychological disturbance Psych 101 Chapter 13

6. Stress: Challenges to Coping • Stress, the GAS, and the immune system • stress causes changes in the body’s immune system • OKT4+ helper/inducer and T8 hunter-killer cells of the immune system are depleted in long-term stress • subject to illnesses in the face of long-term stress Psych 101 Chapter 13

7. Stress: Challenges to Coping • Psychological reactions to stress • in the resistance phase of the GAS: anxiety, depression, and irritability can appear along with idiopathic aches and pains • in the exhaustion phase of the GAS: severe depression, mood disorders, suicidal thinking, delusions, and halucinations are possible Psych 101 Chapter 13

8. Factors Influencing Stress Psych 101 Chapter 13

9. Factors influencing reactions to stress • Prior experience with stress • immunizing yourself to stress by exposing yourself to stresses slowly and progressively can help you to handle stress • practice drills for emergencies are designed to immunize workers against the stress of the real thing Psych 101 Chapter 13

10. Factors influencing reactions to stress • Developmental factors • the degree of impact of a given stressor on an individual is partly determined by that person’s level of development • there are critical times in our lives when developmental changes seem to decrease our ability to deal with stress, e.g., adolescence, early adulthood, and middle age developmental changes Psych 101 Chapter 13

11. Factors influencing reactions to stress • Predictability and control of stressors • being able to predict a stressor lessens its impact on you: being forewarned is to be forearmed against stress • having some control over a stressor (whether real control or imaginary control) will lessen the degree of impact on you by that stressor • internal vs external locus of control Psych 101 Chapter 13

12. Factors influencing reactions to stress • Social supports • events are generally less stressful to individuals who receive good social support from friends and family • share your stresses with somebody else; “no man is an island, no man stands alone” • self-disclosure is good for you in the long run; share yourself with others for your own good health Psych 101 Chapter 13

13. Factors influencing reactions to stress • Person variables in reactions to stress • according to the interactional model of personality, we are influenced both by the situation we encounter AND our cognitive interpretation of that situation • stress is in the eye of the beholder • cognitive factors in stress reactions • sensitizers: seek out information and think about stress • repressors: don’t worry be happy Psych 101 Chapter 13

14. Factors influencing reactions to stress • The “Type A” and “Type B” personality • a type “A” personality is characterized by someone who is highly competitive, has a sense of time urgency, is perfectionistic, and hostile; they often die of heart attack or stroke • a type “B” personality is characterized by someone not competitive, not bothered by waiting, is forgiving, and patient; usually die from cancer Psych 101 Chapter 13

15. Coping with Stress Psych 101 Chapter 13

16. Coping with stress • Effective coping is characterized by: • efforts to remove the stress • good cognitive coping skills • effectively managing stress reactions • Ineffective coping characterized by: • withdrawal from social supports • aggression and exaggerated use of defense mechanisms • ineffective or absent problem-solving skills Psych 101 Chapter 13

17. Changing health-related behavior • Learning how to relax • progressive relaxation training • using biofeedback to learn how to let go of muscle tension and how to produce alpha- pattern brain waves • changing how you think about things: how important are you, anyway, in the Big Picture of life? Psych 101 Chapter 13

18. Changing health-related behavior • Eating right, exercising, and doing what the doctor ordered • improved eating habits helps with coping effective with stress • foods useful for making the neural transmitter serotonin • foods useful for making nervous system function more effectively, e.g., B vitamins • don’t eat junk food (chocolate is OK) Psych 101 Chapter 13

19. Changing health-related behavior • Regular aerobic exercise is helpful to effective coping with stress • exercise in a group where you can get social supports • get aerobic! This will make your body produce beta-endorphins and enkephalins which are good for relaxation • you can set clear, visible goals and meet them in exercising (real world more nebulous usually) Psych 101 Chapter 13

20. Health Psychology Psych 101 Chapter 13

21. Health Psychology • Changes in life-style can produce dramatic improvements in health and longevity • psychologists have only had limited success in helping individuals engage in more healthy behavior • why do we continue to do the behaviors that we know will kill us or make us sick? • how can we change long-term self-destructive behaviors in persons? Psych 101 Chapter 13

22. Health Psychology • The future of health care and personal responsibility in America • costs of health care are escalating in the United States • should we fund a person’s medical care (via socialized medicine) if they willingly misbehaved themselves and that caused their illness? • smoking, drinking? • AIDS? Psych 101 Chapter 13

23. Application of Psychology • Prevention and treatment of AIDS • Prevention of AIDS through behavior change • AIDS is primarily transmitted by one’s behavior with another person; as an STD it can be generally avoided • Teens still engage in unprotected sex and they are the group with the highest percentage growth rate of AIDS infection • What will make people stop engaging in behaviors that transmit AIDS? Psych 101 Chapter 13

24. Application of Psychology • Psychological factors in treating people with AIDS • can we improve the immune system using psychological techniques? • what psychological interventions will slow down the HIV virus? • can an infected person’s attitude affect how long they can live with HIV? Psych 101 Chapter 13

25. Questions? • Any questions over Chapter 13? Psych 101 Chapter 13

26. Test #4 Coming Up! • Test #4 is coming up so be ready • Test #4 will cover chapters 10, 11, 12, and, perhaps, chapter 13 • Be sure your studyguides are checked by me or a proctor before test day for your extra credit Psych 101 Chapter 13