22 - Stress, Life Events, Coping Flashcards
What are the subjective sensations of stress?
Headache, nausea, fatigue, muscle tension
What are behavioural characteristics of stress?
Crying, smoking, drinking, problems concentrating
What are the health effects of stress?
CV disease, cancer, colds, skin disease, depression, weight gain/loss
What is the Yerkes-Dodson plot of relationship between arousal and performance?
Level of stress on x axis Performance on y axis 3 stages: Calm, eustress, distress Calm: - Bored - Seeing improvement Eustress: - Optimal performance found at ‘eustress’ stage - Energised, focused, work feels effortless Distress: - Fatigue, exhaustion, health, breakdown and burnout
What is eustress?
Beneficial stress
How do stress levels and health relate?
Lack of stress = boredom
Moderate levels of stress = beneficial
Too much stress = increasing ill-health
What are the physiological reactions to stress?
- Fight or flight
- General adaptation syndrome
What does the fight or flight response involve?
- Sympathetic nervous system
- Adrenal cortical system
What is the general adaptation syndrome? Who came up with it?
Selye
Three-stage process that describes the physiological changes the body goes through when under stress:
- Alarm (initial response, adrenaline)
- Resistance
- Exhaustion (chronic stress can lead to disease)
Stress can lead to decreased resistance to new stresses
What is psychoimmunology?
The study of the connections between the mind and the immune system. The basic concept of psychoimmunology is the concept that the mind and body are inseparable. It follows that stress affects the body’s ability to resist disease.
What was Cohen’s 1991 study on psychoimmunology?
Found that immune system decreased under high psychological stress:
- MRC common cold unit
- 5.8x more likely to become infected
- 2.2x more likely to get illness (cold)
What are long-term immunity effects of chronic stress?
- Increased immuno-suppression (decreased efficacy of vaccination and wound healing, decreased resistance to infection and cancer)
- Increased immuno-pathology (increased pro-inflammatory and autoimmune disease)
How can chronic stress lead to immuno-suppression?
Chronic stress decreases baseline leukocyte numbers, suppresses leukocyte function, mobilises immuno-suppresive mechanisms (e.g. reg T cells, accelerates immunosenescence
How can chronic stress lead to increased immune pathology?
Chronic stress induces increase in dysregulated, pro-inflammatory or Type-2 cytokine driven responses
How can short-term stress prove beneficial to immunity?
Increased immuno-protection
- Increased efficacy of vaccination and wound healing
- Increased resistance to infection and cancer
What are the psychological reactions to stress?
- Cognitive impairment
- Anger
- Depression
- Anxiety (PTSD, acute stress disorder)
What is PTSD?
A natural emotional reaction to a deeply shocking and disturbing experience i.e. a normal reaction to an abnormal situation
What are the key features of PTSD?
- Repeated re-living of traumatic event
- Persisten efforts at avoidance of memories and emotional blunting
- Persistent symptoms of hyperarousal and survivor guilt
What was results of study on PTSD after Piper Alpha oil rig 1988 explosion that killed 200 men?
10 years later:
- 21% with PTSD
- Worse if injured
- Improvement over time
What is the Social Readjustment Rating Scale? Who was it created by?
Holmes and Rahe 1967
Developed a questionnaire for identifying major stressful life events. Each one of the 43 stressful life events was awarded a Life Change Unit depending on how traumatic it was felt to be by a large sample of participants.
E.g. death of spouse 100 points
What is the hassles and uplifts scale?
Measures respondents attitudes about daily situations defined as “hassles” and “uplifts.” Instead of focusing on highly charged life events, the HSUP provides a comfortable way to evaluate positive and negative events that occur in each person’s daily life (children, parents, spouse etc)
What are quasi-prospective studies?
Studies that aim to evaluate interventions but that do not use randomisation
What was the result of Cooper & Faragher’s quasi-prospective study about life events and breast cancer?
Certain types of coping strategies and personality dispositions predispose some women to an increased risk of developing breast cancer following the occurrence of a major life-event such as bereavement or other loss-related event.
- Regular exposure to stress situations appears to reduce the risk of a malignancy
- A single, major life event was found to be potentially much more damaging, particularly if the individual was unable to externalise her emotions and obtain help
What is a type A behaviour pattern?
Competitve, time urgent, hostile, try to do 2 things at once, hard workers and career orientated
What are health effects of Type A behaviour?
High blood pressure, heart disease
What is type B behaviour pattern?
Relaxed, imaginative and creative, lower levels of anxiety
What is the ACE pyramid?
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Pyramid assesses associations between childhood exposure to traumatic stressors and later-life health and well-being.
What are appraisal approaches to stress?
Refers to the process by which individuals evaluate and cope with a stressful event. Concerned with individuals’ evaluation of the event, rather than with the event. People differ in how they construe what is happening to them and their options for coping.
What is key to approaching stress?
Perceptions of controllability (stop, start) and predictability (if, when)
What was Lazarus & Folkman’s appraisal process?
- 1ary –> perception of demands (potential for threat, harm)
- 2ary –> available coping options
- Re-appraisal –> regular re-evaluation and re-labelling of the above
What are problem focused coping strategies?
Changing the situation (physical, social, work)
What are emotion focused coping strategies?
- Active
- Habits - eating, sleeping, exercise
- Managing time, priorities, delegatio
- Cognitive - positive thinking, imagery, preparation
- Rest/habituation
* Relaxation, leisure, holidays, exercise
* Distraction, denial, rumination, discussion
Stress spectrum
The extent and efficiency with which an organism returns to its resting zone after stress depends on RESILIENCE
What is resilience?
The capacity of psychophysiological systems to recover from challenging conditions. Psychological and physiological resilience factors determine the overall effects of stress on an individual.
