Chapter 18: Stress, Coping, And Health Flashcards
Chapter Overview
- Some material from chapter
- Cashier: optimism and health
- Penne baker: Biases in symptom reports
HIV Rates in Africa 2000
- 37% in Botswana, 38% in Swaziland
Role for Personality
- Although proximate cause of HIV is a virus
- Ultimate cause is behavior
- Unsafe sex
- Sharing needles
- Therefore, role of psych is to help deal with behaviors
Today
- Longer life span
- Infection, death, etc. has been pretty much eliminated as a cause of death.
- Lifestyle factors play a bigger role:
* Smoking, diet, exercise, stress, etc.
Health Psychology
- How psych affects health
_ How personality factors predict reactions to: - Stress and illness
Cohen et. All (1997)
- Some as had experienced a lot of stress in a year
- All exposed to cold virus
- Those with more stress were more likely to catch a cold
Conclusion: - Stress weakens immune response to virus
- Stress leads to more illness
Managing Emotions
- Gross, levenson studies
- Suppression = don’t let your feelings show
- King and Edmonds (1990)
- Emotional expressiveness is healthy
- Those who expressed negative emotion less sick
Pennebaker: cost f inhibiting traumatic memories
- Suppression uses energy, causes stress
- Leads to health problems
- Headaches, trouble sleeping, lower immune functioning, Illness
- Pennebaker (1990)
- 1 hour of writing about trauma
- Less illness in the next 6 months
But all emotion control is not bad
- among children
- Ability to control neg is greatly beneficial.
- Less depression and aggression
- among adults
- Reappraisal = controlling negative emotion before it starts.
- Higher SWB, many positive benefits
- Conclusions:
- Suppression bad
- Reappraisal good
Type A and cardiovascular disease
- One of most important causes of death in USA
- Type A syndrome
- Competitive, aggressive, active, energetic, ambitious, driven, etc. Composed actually of diff things
What about Type A is lethal? Not time urgency and etc, but…….
- Hostility
- Easily frustrated, even by little things, irked, peaved, upset. But not necessarily overtly aggressive
Type A could affect cardiovascular functioning
- Flight or fight sympathetic arousal
- Higher heart rate, blood pressure.
- Wear and tear on arteries and fat molecules glob into those tears
- Arteriosclerosis
- Arteries harden and become narrow but again, fat build up
Scheier & Carver ( 1985)
- General optimism = expecting good things to happen
- Optimism predicted
- Less symptoms
- Particularly during finals week
- Health benefits oof expecting positive outcomes
Present studies
- Partients undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery
- 170K operations each year
- What we know about bypass surgery; No longevity, however they feel better
- 51 patients w/ a mean age of 49, all men
- 50% blockage
- 31% 1 blocked artery
- 47 % 2 blocked artery
- 18 % has 3 blocked arteries
Optimism
- Not attributional (Internal, stable, global expectations for good events)
- Rather general expectancies of good or bad things happening in future
- “I look on the bright side of life”
Initial contact
- Pre-surgery
- 6-8 days post surgery with regular symptoms of pain
- 6 months; how long to resume to normal activities and life satisfaction
- Optimism did not correlate with this stuff, thus equally serious surgical procedures
Results:
* those with optimism began walking sooner, rated as progressing better by staff, more satisfied with care, and most likely to seek out information about recovery
* Optimists are more likely to have resumed physical exercise, normalized social life, fewer weeks to normalize behavior, and higher quality of life
