14. Health and Well-Being Flashcards
The study of physical health and illness by psychologists from various areas of specialization.
Health psychology
An unpleasant state of arousal in which people perceive the demands of an event as taxing or exceeding their ability to satisfy or alter those demands.
Stress
The process by which people make judgments about the demands of potentially stressful events and their ability to meet those demands.
Appraisal
Efforts to reduce stress.
Coping
Anything that causes stress.
Stressor
A condition in which a person experiences enduring physical and psychological symptoms after an extremely stressful event.
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
A three-stage process (alarm, resistance, and exhaustion) by which the body responds to stress.
General adaptation syndrome
A pattern of behavior characterized by extremes of competitive striving for achievement, a sense of time urgency, hostility, and aggression.
Type A personality
A biological surveillance system that detects and destroys “nonself” substances that invade the body.
Immune system
A subfield of psychology that examines the links among psychological factors, the brain and nervous system, and the immune system.
Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI)
A phenomenon in which experience with an uncontrollable event creates passive behavior in the face of subsequent threats to well-being.
Learned helplessness
A habitual tendency to attribute negative events to causes that are stable, global, and internal.
Depressive explanatory style
A person’s belief that he or she is capable of the specific behavior required to produce a desired outcome in a given situation.
Self-efficacy
Cognitive and behavioral coping efforts to alter a stressful situation.
Problem-focused coping
Cognitive and behavioral coping efforts to reduce the distress produced by a stressful situation.
Emotion-focused coping
