Health

Question 1

psychological adjustment

Answer 1

• Process of altering behaviour to reach harmonious relationship with the environment.
• • Coping successfully with stress; maintaining emotional equilibrium
• • often used as a way of referring to mental health and psychological well-being more generally

Question 2

Health

Answer 2

• Complete state of well-being, encompassing:
• • Physical well-being
• • Mental well-being
• • Emotional well-being
• • Social well-being
• • Cultural well-being
• • Spiritual well-being
• • Environmental well-being

Question 3

Stress

Answer 3

• Arises when individuals perceive that they cannot adequately cope with the demands being made on them or with threats to their well-being
• the RESPONSE to situations (the situations themselves are “stressors”)

Question 4

Transactional model of Stress (Lazarus)

Answer 4

• Stimulus ->
• Cognitive appraisal ->
• • Primary appraisal (whether event is seen as threatening/demanding)
• • Secondary appraisal (whether person believes they have resources to cope with the event)
• If seen as threat & no resources -> stress, otherwise no stress (cannot occur with just one or the other)

Question 5

Coping

Answer 5

• Behavioural response of the individual (doesn’t have to be successful or adaptive)
• Technically, efforts to manage both internal and external demands of a situation; whether successful or not
• A dynamic process; comprises a series of transactions between the individual and the environment
• Adaptive coping strategies: problem-solving, positive reappraisal, support-seeking
• Maladaptive coping strategies: denial, avoidance, rumination

Question 6

Models of personality-illness interaction

Answer 6

• interactional model
• transactional model
• health behaviour model
• predisposition model
• illness behaviour model

Question 7

Personality-illness models: Interactional

Answer 7

• Personality influences a person’s ability to cope
• Personality moderates the relation between stress and illness (lessens or worsens)
• Objective events happen to a person, but personality determines the impact of those events on illness by affecting ability to cope
• Ex. Someone with Type A personality may be more predisposed to take less time off to recover from illness, making their illness worse

Question 8

Personality-illness models: transactional

Answer 8

• Transactional -> people don’t just respond to events, they also create situations through their choices and actions
• Personality has 3 potential effects:
• • Personality can influence coping
• • Personality can influence how a person appraises events
• • Personality can influence events themselves
• Ex. Someone with low agreeableness and high neuroticism will fight more often with others and then be more stressed after fights, reducing coping and increasing illness

Question 9

Personality-illness models: health behaviour

Answer 9

• Personality affects the stress-illness link indirectly, through health promoting or health degrading behaviours
• Builds on interactional/transactional models with consideration of health behaviours
• Personality influences event, appraisal, coping, and health behaviour
• Ex. Someone low in conscientiousness might engage in more problematic behaviours to cope with an approaching deadline, making them more vulnerable to heart disease

Question 10

Personality-illness models: predisposition

Answer 10

• Associations may exist between personality and illness because of a third variable that is causing them both -> 3rd variable is aka a “predisposition”
• Ex. Enhanced sympathetic reactivity may be the cause of both subsequent illness and behaviours and emotions that make up neuroticism
• Predisposition -> physiological responsiveness, which influences illness and personality (which correlate with each other)
• Ex. Someone with a dopamine receptor gene that results in needing more arousal might lead to both drug addiction and high novelty-seeking

Question 11

Personality-illness models: illness behaviour

Answer 11

• A model of illness behaviour (not illness itself)
• Personality influences:
• • The agree to which a person perceives and attends to bodily sensations
• • The degree to which a person interprets and labels sensations as illness
• • Both of these influence reporting of symptoms
• Ex. Someone with high neuroticism might perceive fatigue during flu season as the flu, which would make them more likely to engage in health behaviours or see a doctor

Question 12

exposure (and Big 5)

Answer 12

• amount of stress reported; differences in stress exposure may be due to actual differences in experiences/situations or differences in how stress is perceived and/or reported
• Ex. Those high in neuroticism experience greater stress exposure; report more daily/life stress
• Ex. Those high in extraversion report more events in general; mixed findings on stress exposure
• Ex. Agreeableness: fewer stressful events; fewer negative interactions
• Ex. Conscientiousness: perceive less stress
• Ex. Openness: perceive fewer stressful events

Question 13

Appraisal (and Big 5)

Answer 13

• tendency to appraise events as more or less threatening
• Ex. Those high in neuroticism appraise events as more threatening and demanding
• Ex. Those high in extraversion appraise events as less threatening and demanding
• Ex. Agreeableness: appraise many events as less threatening and demanding (b/c they’re so easy-going they end up in situations that end of being stressful)
• Ex. Conscientiousness: appraise events as less demanding
• Ex. Openness: appraise many events as less threatening; greater stress resilience (open even with negative events)

Question 14

Reactivity (and Big 5)

Answer 14

• degree of physiological and psychological responsiveness
• Ex. Those high in neuroticism have greater stress reactivity; higher blood pressure reactivity; more negative emotions; greater interpersonal conflict
• Ex. Those high in extraversion have lower physiological stress reactivity; more positive emotions
• Ex. Agreeableness: Lower physiological stress reactivity in some studies; some studies suggest greater reactivity in certain settings
• Ex. conscientiousness: lower stress reactivity
• Ex. Openness: lower stress reactivity; lower blood pressure reactivity; more positive emotions

Question 15

Coping (and Big 5)

Answer 15

• behaviours or responses to stress
• Ex. Those high in neuroticism perceive fewer coping resources available; often choose maladaptive coping strategies; cope less effectively
• Ex. Those high in extraversion perceive more interpersonal coping resources available; often cope more effectively, especially on an interpersonal level -> social connections help them out*
• Ex. Agreeableness: Less interpersonal conflict; employ more interpersonal and adaptive coping strategies; generally cope more effectively with stress.
• Ex. Conscientiousness: Employ more active coping strategies like problem-solving and planning; less likely to engage in avoidance
• Ex. Openness: More likely to employ positive reappraisal/positive reframing coping strategies

Question 16

Health (and Big 5)

Answer 16

• health outcomes (i.e., disease and illness)
• Ex. Those high in neuroticism have links to heart disease; poorer health in general, despite more visits to the doctor; increased risk of mortality from variety of diseases; more anxiety about health
• Ex. Those high in extraversion have better health in general; lower risk of mortality; some links to negative health behaviours like smoking and drinking
• Ex. Agreeableness: More positive health perceptions; fewer visits to the doctor; fewer medical problems; better health in general
• Ex. Conscientiousness: Engage in better health behaviours; better health overall, despite more visits to the doctor; lower mortality risk
• Ex. Openness: More positive health perceptions; better health overall; may be protective against all-cause mortality

Question 17

Health psychology

Answer 17

study of the relationship between the mind, body, and the way they respond to the environment to produce health outcomes

Question 18

attributional style (and optimism vs. pessimism)

Answer 18

• way of explaining causes of bad events
• 3 dimensions: external vs. internal, unstable vs. stable, specific vs. global
• optimists: unstable, specific, external attributors (predicts good health and positive health behaviours)
• pessimists: stable, global, internal attributors (believing their behaviour can’t influence things that happen; have more accidental or violent deaths)

Question 19

concepts related to optimism: dispositional optimism, self-efficacy, & perceptions of risk

Answer 19

• dispositional optimism: expectation that good events will be plentiful in the future and bad events will be rare
• self-efficacy: belief that one can do the actions necessary to achieve a desired outcome
• perceptions of risk: optimists believe they are less likely to experience negative events (however, most people underestimate this -> “optimistic bias”)

Question 20

3 roles of positive emotions in coping with stress

Answer 20

• sustain coping efforts
• provide a break from stress
• give people opportunity to replenish depleted resources (ie. social relationships)

Question 21

3 positive emotion coping strategies

Answer 21

• positive reappraisal: focusing on the good in what has happened (ie. feeling like it’ll make you stronger)
• problem-focused coping: using thoughts and behaviours to solve underlying causes of stress (ie. creating to-do lists)
• creating positive events: creating a positive time-out from stress (ie. stopping to reflect on something positive)

Question 22

categories of coping

Answer 22

• problem-focused: efforts to deal with source of stress (ie. making pro/con list) - Lazarus
• emotion-focused: efforts to deal with emotional affects of stress (ie. engaging in denial to avoid anxiety) - Lazarus
• relationship-focused: maintaining social relationships during stressful events (ie. responding to your partner empathetically) - DeLongis
• • can include maladaptive strategies like “interpersonal withdrawal”, which is more common amongst people high in neuroticism

Question 23

emotional inhibition

Answer 23

• pushing back negative emotions so you can deal with other events; prefrontal cortex involved
• ie. ignoring feelings of doing poorly on exam for now so you can focus on studying for another exam
• can be beneficial in some contexts (ie. to not hurt someone’s feelings), but not if it becomes chronic -> suppression of emotion takes additional effort/SNS arousal and physiological costs (ie. suppression of immune system)

Question 24

Disclosure

Answer 24

• telling someone a private aspect of yourself
• researchers suggest always keeping things to yourself is a source of stress that could eventually lead to disease or psychological distress
• • by sharing secrets, no longer have to spend energy/effort holding them in -> relief
• sometimes just writing down your feelings is helpful, even if you never disclose them to someone directly
• • by writing about/talking about events, it helps you re-frame them and better understand them

Question 25

Type A and Type B

Answer 25

• not categories of people -> rather, dimensions
• not single traits -> rather, collections of various traits
• • ex. Type A: competitive achievement motivation, time urgency, hostility in frustrating situations (ie. blocked goals)

Question 26

Type A and Heart Disease

Answer 26

• strong correlation between type A personality and heart disease, but may not be Type A in general
• the specific factor of hostility (reacting disagreeably to disappointments, frustrations, etc.) appears to be the “lethal” aspect of type A

Question 27

Type D (“distressed”) and Heart Disease

Answer 27

• dimensional, not categorical
• 2 underlying traits: negative affectivity (frequently experiencing negative emotions and negative self-view) and social inhibition (inhibiting thoughts, emotions, etc. in social interactions; afraid of being negatively viewed by others)
• puts people at high risk for cardiac disease, potentially due to high levels of cortisol in the blood it incites as well as negative social factors like lack of social support