Chapter 3: Stress Flashcards
What are the main components of stress?
Physical and psychological
What are the 3 ways to conceptualize Stress?
Stress=stimulus, stress= response, and stress=processs
Explain stress=stimulus
Stressor: Events or circumstances a persons receives as threatening or harmful
Explain stress=response
Strain: the psychological and physiological response to a stressor
Explain stress=a process
Transactions: the continuous interplay and adjustments of the person and environment
What is stress?
when transactions lead a person to perceive a discrepancy between the physical or psychological demands of a situation and their resources of his or her biological, psychological, or social systems.
What is a cognitive appraisal?
The mental process people use in assessing: whether a demand is threatening=primary appraisal, and whether they have the resources to meet the demand=secondary appraisal
Describe Primary Appraisal
Is the situation/event threatening? this appraisal is context specific and individual. 3 initial judgements are: irrelevant: stressor unlikely to impact you. Benign positive: stressor might work to your advantage. stressful: stressor may harm you
What are the 3 additional judgements if you appraised the situation as stressful?
Harm-loss: damage that has been done (in the past)
Threat: expectation of future harm (in the future)
Challenge: opportunity for growth, mastery, profit. The stressor will still induce stress but you think you can cope with it. (past or future)
Describe secondary appraisal
As we engage in primary appraisal we are concurrently comparing it to the resources we have to determine if we can cope with the stressor. Especially if we determine something as stressful, must determine if we can overcome harm, threat or challenge.
What factors can lead to a stressful appraisal?
Person factors (personality, motivation), Situation factors (difficult Timing, imminence, temporal uncertainty) Situational factors (low desirability, low controllability, ambiguity)
What is the central nervous system made up of?
Brain and spinal cord
What is the peripheral nervous system made up of?
The somatic nervous system and the Autonomic nervous system. The somatic NS is made up of the sensory and motor systems and the Autonomic is made up of the sympathetic NS and the parasympathetic NS
Describe fight or flight response
Stress causes arousal and motivation through physiological responses. Sympathetic NS is activated, endocrine system and adrenal glands activated (epinephrine is secreted). These physiological responses help prepare the body for stress,
What is the First stage of the General adaptation syndrome (Hans Selye)?
1) Alarm: mobilized body’s resources to meet the stressor (fight or flight). Fast acting: sympathetic activation, epinephrine released into blood stream.Slower acting: Hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) stimulates responses that lead to the release of cortisol to further prepare body for mobilization.
What is the Second stage of the General adaptation syndrome (Hans Selye)?
2) Resistance: efforts to cope/adapt with a strong stressor that has continued
Fast acting physiological processes diminish but slower acting HPA activation predominates. Continued physiological arousal might lead to inability to cope with new stressors. Impairment makes people more vulnerable to health problems
What is the Third stage of the General adaptation syndrome (Hans Selye)?
3) Exhaustion: depleted physiological resources
Caused by severe, long term, repeated stress
Weaken immune system
Deplete energy reserves
Resistance becomes limited
If continues, disease and internal damage likely
What happens when exposure to a stressor is prolonged?
Hans selye: results from his ovarian injection experiment: rats had ulcers, larger adrenal glands, shrunken immune tissue . Control group, injected them with saline, and then found that the control group had the same results.
Gender and stress
Women generally repost more major than minor stress compared to men
Woman generally repost more interpersonal strains and home based stress
Caveat: women might be more willing to admit these stressors
What is intergenerational trauma?
It is trauma that is transferred from the first generation of trauma survivors to the second and further generations of offspring of the survivors
Canada’s first nations peoples- loss of culture and loss of land
Carleton study: offspring of residential school had higher depressive symptoms
What is the minority stress hypothesis?
minority individuals at greater risk for health problems because of greater exposure to social stress related to prejudice and stigma,
Sexual minority status related to higher risk of stress
Evidence shows effects can reduced through sexuality support from family, non-minority friends, minority friends
Measuring stress physiologically
Assess physiological arousal with electrical/mechanical equipment
Polygraph: blood pressure, heart rate, respiration rate, galvanic skin response
Corticosteroids (e.g., cortisol): present in blood urine, saliva
Catecholamine’s (e.g, epinepherine)
What are the advantages and disadvantages of measuring stress physiologically
Advantages: More direct and objective (still some room for bias)
and Fairly reliable and easier to quantify.
Disadvantages: Expensive,Might be stressful for participant, Affected by other factors such as gender, age, body weight, consumption of caffeine etc.
What are life events?
major happenings that can occur in a persons life that require some psychological adjustment. Scale assigns a value that reflects how stressful it is. Self report scale: ask participants to rate their agreement (or disagreement) to questions about stress. The social readjustment rating scale. Based on model of stress as change
43 negative and positive events
What are advantages and disadvantages of life events?
Advantages: Items include wide experiences most people have had, Values were determine through a lot of research, Easy to fill out, Distinguishes stressors well (e.g., death vs. vacation)
Disadvantages: Items might be vague (e.g., work responsibility change), Does not consider meaning person has (e.g., death of a loved one), Recall bias
Measuring stress: Daily hassles
Daily hassles: smaller stressors that wear on you (e.g., loosing your keys)
Hassles scales: 117 daily hassles, Ranges in seriousness, making silly mistakes to not having enough money for food.
Advantages
Easy to complete
Allows researchers to examine daily stressors
Disadvantages: Recall bias
What is allostatic load?
The effects of the body’s adapting repeatedly to stressors-such as with fluctuations in levels of hormones like cortisol and epinephrine, blood pressure and immune function- that accumulate over time is called allostatic load. Which creates wear and tar on the body and impairs its ability to adapt to future stressors.
