Chapter 13: Stress, Coping, and Health Flashcards
According to Lazarus and Folkman, there are primary and secondary appraisals of stress. What is the difference?
Primary– evaluation of whether an event is either irrelevant to you, relevant but not threatening, or stressful
IF YOU THINK AN EVENT IS STRESSFUL, YOU’LL MAKE A 2ND
Secondary– evaluation of your coping resources and options for dealing with the stress
What is stress?
Any circumstances that threaten or are perceived to threaten one’s well-being and that thereby tax one’s coping abilities.
How objective are our appraisals of stress?
Not every, some people are more prone than others to feeling threatened by life’s difficulties
What is the difference between acute and chronic stressors?
Acute– threatening events that have a relatively short duration and a clear end point
Chronic– threatening events that are relatively long and no readily apparent time limit
What are the 4 major types of stress?
Frustration, conflict, change, and pressure
What is frustration?
Occurs in any situation in which the pursuit of some goal is thwarted
when you want something and you can’t have it
What is conflict?
Occurs when 2 or more incompatible motivations or behavioural impulses compete for expression.
What are the 3 types of conflict that are considered especially stressful, and who is credited for creating them?
1) Approach-Approach- A choice must be made between 2 attractive goals. (Least Stressful)
2) Avoidance- Avoidance- A choice must be made between 2 unnattractive goals. (Highly Stressful)
3) Approach-Avoidance- Choice must be made whether to pursue a single goal that has both attractive and unattractive aspects. (Quite Stressful)
Kurt Lewin
What is pressure?
Expectations or demands that one behave in a certain way
What are the three common emotional responses to stress?
1– annoyance, anger, and rage
2– apprehension, anxiety, and fear
3– dejection, sadness, and grief
Explain the three steps of the broaden and build theory of positive emotions
Positive emotions alter people’s mindsets
Positive emotions can undo the lingering effects of negative emotions, and short circuit the physiological changes
+ Emotions can promote rewarding social interactions and build coping
Explain the inverted u hypothesis
Typically, task performance should improve with increased emotional arousal-up to a point, after which further increases in arousal become disruptive and performance deteriorates.
True or false, as a task becomes more complex, the optimal level of arousal tends to decrease
True
What does the inverted u hypothesis explain?
How emotional arousal could have either beneficial or disruptive effects on coping
True or false, the nervous system involved in the fight or flight response is the autonomic N.S
True
Who identified and named the concept of stress?
Hans Selye
Are stress reactions specific?
No, stress reactions are nonspecific
Explain the general adaptation syndrome coined by Hans Selye
A model of the body’s stress response, consisting of three stages:
Alarm
Resistance
Exhaustion
Talks about how long stress stays around and how it affects you
What happens during each stage of Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome? alarm, resistance, and exhaustion
Alarm– organism first senses the existence of a threat, similar to ForF
Resistance– physiological changes stabilize, coping efforts get started
Exhaustion– body’s resources for fighting stress may be depleted
What are the two major pathways that stress signals travel to the endocrine system?
1- routed through ANS, hypothalamus activates sympathetic NS, release of CATECHOLAMINES
2- hypothalamus signals pituitary gland, releases CORTICOSTEROIDS
True or false, Women’s stress responses tend to be more mild than mens, if so, why?
True.. because of Estrogen
What is coping?
active efforts to master, reduce, or tolerate the demands created by stress
True or false, coping can be adaptive as well as maladaptive
True
What three stable coping dimensions does the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS) measure?
task-oriented coping
emotion-oriented coping
avoidance-oriented coping
What is learned helplessness?
Passive behaviour produced by exposure to unavoidable aversive events.
When people think that events are beyond their contol
What is behavioural disengagement?
Giving up