Health, Adjustment, and Resilience

Question 1

what is mental health?

Answer 1

• dynamic state of internal equilibrium which enables individuals to use their abilities in harmony with universal values of society
• low neuroticism and high self-esteem
• in line with authenticity, individuation, self-actualization

Question 2

what is psychological adjustment

Answer 2

• process of altering behaviour to reach a harmonious relationship with one’s environment
• maintaining emotional equilibrium, coping well with stress

Question 3

what is stress?

Answer 3

• can be defined as a stimulus (life event, daily hassle), as a response (fight-or-flight), or as a transaction
• transaction is the interaction between the stimulus and response

Question 4

what is the transactional model of stress?

Answer 4

• states that how an individual appraises the event is what matters

1. primary appraisal - initial appraisal as something as relevant, threatening, demanding, or challenging
2. secondary appraisal - evaluation of our ability to manage the stress

Question 5

what is coping?

Answer 5

• the behavioural response of the individual that follows appraisal
• efforts to manage both internal and external demands of a situation
  • referred to as coping regardless of if it’s successful

Question 6

what is the transactional model of personality-illness connnection?

Answer 6

• personality can affect coping, how a person appraises events, and the events themselves
• moderator - a variable that influences the direction or degree of relationship between two other variables
• appraisal, arousal, coping, all effect health (but not the events themselves)

Question 7

how does personality affect stress appraisal?

Answer 7

• personality can affect how potentially stressful events are appraised (as well as degree of threat perceived)
• neuroticism – more likely to perceive events as stressful/severe, appraise events as threats; greater stress reactivity
• extraversion – less likely to perceive events as stressful; more likely to appraise events as challenges.
• agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness – associated with lower appraisals of threat.

Question 8

how does personality affect coping?

Answer 8

• personality is associated with coping strategies over time
• interactional model - personality factors influence people’s ability to cope which determines the impact of events
• neuroticism – greater variety of less effective strategies; more passive and emotion-focused (self-blame); confrontation/withdrawal
• extraversion – more problem-solving; fewer maladaptive strategies; more support-seeking; more positive thinking/reappraisal
• agreeableness – more likely to engage/protect relationships, seek support; less confrontation; more forgiveness, positive reappraisal
• conscientiousness – more active, problem-solving strategies.
• openness – more positive reappraisal; more likely to use humour

Question 9

what is a hardy personality?

Answer 9

• people who have the three main characteristics important in protecting against negative effects of stress
  1. control → perceive control, internal locus
  2. commitment → involved in life, sense of purpose
  3. challenge → appraise events as challenges

Question 10

what is trait resilience?

Answer 10

• involves high levels of three positive aspects of personality
• self-esteem, sense of personal control, and optimism
  - social support is also important
• are able to recover from stress/adversity without a lasting impact

Question 11

what is ego resiliency?

Answer 11

• dynamic ability to temporarily change reactions and perceptions to meet the situational demands of life
• ego-control - a person’s ability to control their behaviour and impulses
• ability to adjust ego-control as we need to in order to adjust to situation

Question 12

what do health and illness behaviour models tell us?

Answer 12

• personality affects health indirectly through health-promoting or degrading behaviours
• conscientiousness – associated with engaging in more healthy behaviours, fewer unhealthy or harmful behaviours
• correlations have been observed between harmful behaviours (e.g., smoking) and both neuroticism and extraversion

Question 13

what are some common health outcomes for people high in neuroticism?

Answer 13

• high neuroticism and low extraversion are associated with higher rates of morbidity/mortality and lower life expectancy (overall)
• higher levels of neuroticism is associated with over-using health services
  
  • those with fair or poor health may benefit from this
• high neuroticism is associated with lower mortality for those with fair or poor health

Question 14

what are some common health outcomes for people high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness?

Answer 14

• associated with lower rates of morbidity, higher life expectancy
• low conscientiousness in mid-life is associated with higher morbidity

Question 15

what is healthy neuroticism?

Answer 15

• healthy neuroticism - the cooccurrence of high neuroticism and high conscientiousness
• neuroticism leads to hyper-vigilance about health, conscientiousness provide self-discipline and planning needed to take adaptive action
• those high in both had lower inflammation, lower BMI, and less chronic disease

Question 16

what is the predisposition model of personality illness?

Answer 16

• predisposition - a third variable that causes the associations between personality and illness
• ex. enhanced sympathetic reactivity may be the cause of both subsequent illness and behaviours/emotions that make up neuroticism

Question 17

what is general adaption syndrome (GAS)

Answer 17

• developed when a person is exposed to a particular stressor consistently
• the idea that people under chronic stress eventually deplete bodily resources and become vulnerable to infections and illness

Question 18

what are some different types of stress?

Answer 18

1. acute stress - results from sudden onset of demands
2. episodic acute stress - repeated episodes of acute stress
3. traumatic stress - massive instance of acute stress in which effects can reverberate for years or even a lifetime
4. chronic stress - stress that does not end until the resistance is gone

Question 19

how is optimism related to health?

Answer 19

• optimism was shown to predict good health makes people less likely to die from any cause
  
  • optimists were less likely to develop coronary heart disease
• pessimists experience more accidental and violent deaths than optimists
• pessimism prevention program were shown to prevent symptoms of depression in low-income minority middle school students

Question 20

how are emotions seen as states vs. traits?

Answer 20

• emotional states - transitory, depend more on the situation a person is in than on the specific person
• emotional traits - patterns of emotional reactions that a person consistently experiences across a variety of life situations

Question 21

what are the three components of emotion?

Answer 21

1. distinct subjective feeling or affect (fear)
2. bodily changes/symptoms (heart rate increases)
3. action tendencies (running away, fighting back)

Question 22

what is the criteria for primary emotions?

Answer 22

• to be a basic emotion, it must…
  
  1. have distinct facial expression
  2. be recognized across cultures
  3. be universal
• categorical approach to emotions

Question 23

why is pride thought to be a primary emotions?

Answer 23

• pride is an aspect of human nature that evolves to help people navigate social hierarchies and attain social rank
• participants were able to point out pride in photographs of emotional expression
• two types of pride: authentic pride and hubristic pride (self-aggrandizing aspects of narcissism)

Question 24

what is the circumplex model of emotions?

Answer 24

• two factors appear to underlie emotions:
  
  1. valence (+/- ; pleasure/displeasure)
  2. arousal (high/low activation)
• but… emotion that are close to one another aren’t necessarily correlated
  
  • might want to consider if the emotion involves avoidance or approach

Question 25

what is emotional style vs. emotional content?

Answer 25

• style - the “how” of emotional life
  
  • how are these emotions typically experienced? variable? intense?
• content - the “what” of emotional life
  
  • what types of emotions does a person frequently experience

Question 26

what is high affect intensity/variability vs. low affect intensity/variability?

Answer 26

High Affect Intensity / Variability - experience emotions strongly; emotionally reactive, variable
- associated with high neuroticism, high extraversion, and high openness to experience

Low Affect Intensity / Variability - experience emotions mildly; only gradual fluctuations over time, minor emotional reactions

Question 27

how do we categorize emotional content?

Answer 27

• pleasant vs. unpleasant emotions
• pleasant emotions usually associated with extraversion and unpleasant emotions associated with neuroticism

Question 28

what is beck’s cognitive triad depressive style?

Answer 28

• depressing/negative schemas of the (1) self, (2) world, and (3) future
• emphasizes internal, global, and stable causes for negative events (pessimisstic)
  
  • associated with feelings of helplessness and poor adjustment
• associated with many cognitive distortions
  
  • overgeneralizing
  • arbitrary inferences
  • personalizing
  • catastrophizing

Question 29

what is a type A personality? why it is important?

Answer 29

• hostility (anger and aggression)
• competitive, achievement-striving
• time urgency (impatience)
• associated with more risk for heart disease, especially hostility and anger

Question 30

what is a type B personality?

Answer 30

• opposite end of the continuum of type A
• less competitive, more emotionally stable, creative, reflective

Question 31

what is dispositional happiness (subjective well-being)?

Answer 31

• some people are more likely to feel happy than others
• has three components
  1. cognitive appraisal of satisfaction with life
  2. the presence of positive emotions
  3. the absence of negative emotions
• hedonic balance - the ratio of a person’s positive emotions to their negative emotions

Question 32

what is the authentic happiness theory?

Answer 32

• the three main routes to happiness are pleasure, engagement (flow) and meaning
• evaluations of a persons happiness is correlated with evaluations of social desirability

Question 33

how does subjective well-being differ across different economies?

Answer 33

• poor countries appear to possess less happiness and life satisfaction than countries that were wealthier
• economic development may be the primary source of differences in the subjective well-being of societies
• countries that provided few civil and political rights tend to have lower well-being

Question 34

how do positive emotions influence coping with stress?

Answer 34

1. they may sustain coping efforts
2. they may provide a break from stress
3. they may give people time and opportunity to restore depleted resources

• positive emotions broaden the scope of attention, cognition, and action, while allowing a person to build up reserve of energy and social resources

Question 35

what are the three coping mechanisms that are capable of generating positive emotion during stress?

Answer 35

1. positive reappraisal - person focuses on the good in what is happening or has happened
2. problem-focused coping - using thoughts and behaviours to manage underlying causes of stress
3. creating positive events - creating a positive time-out from the stress

Question 36

what do the individual differences in happiness come from?

Answer 36

• demographic variables account for approximately 10–15% of the variance in happiness
• personality traits account for 3 X as much variance in happiness as demographic variables
• happy people tend to be high in extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness and low in neuroticism

Question 37

does money buy happiness?

Answer 37

• correlations between income and happiness are 0.12-0.25
• once a person can afford basic necessities, increasing financial status doesn’t increase well-being
• the absence of health or wealth can bring misery, but their presence doesn’t guarantee happiness
• spending more money on others (prosocial spending) can have a larger positive impact on happiness than spending the same money on oneself

Question 38

how does emotional inhibition and/or disclosure affect health?

Answer 38

• pushing down emotions and not dealing with them leads to undesirable consequences
• suppression takes effort (from PFC) and exerts physiological costs above and beyond emotional arousal
• people who suppress emotions report poor physical health and display evidence of a suppressed immune system
• emotional expressiveness correlated with higher levels of happiness and lower levels of anxiety and guilt

Question 39

what is dispositional empathy?

Answer 39

• the ability to imagine oneself in another’s place and understand the other’s feelings, desires, ideas, and actions
• involves perspective taking, fantasy (identifying with fictional characters), empathic concern, and personal distress
• empathetic concern is associated with agreeableness and personal distress is associated with neuroticism

Question 40

what are the social benefits of empathy?

Answer 40

• empathy (and perspective taking specifically) have been shown to…
  
  • reduce prejudice
  • reduce stereotype expression
  • reduce interpersonal aggression
  • improve health precautions during disease outbreaks/pandemics

Question 41

what is the relationship between money and empathy?

Answer 41

• as income increases, empathy decreases
  
  • people with more income exhibit less brain activity in the regions associated with empathy
• lower class people show more empathy, more prosocial behaviour, more compassion
• rich people are more likely to…
  
  • cut in front while driving/double park
  • ignore pedestrians
  • take candy from a jar marked “for children”
  • lie to get money

Question 42

how does eysenck’s biological theory explain neuroticism?

Answer 42

• believed that neuroticism is due to a tendency of the limbic system (fight or flight) to become easily activated
• trait of neuroticism is very stable overtime and is heritable so it may have a biological explanation

Question 43

how do cognitive theories explain neuroticism>

Answer 43

• people high neuroticism are more likely to recall unpleasant information, and are also faster to recall unpleasant words
• people high in neuroticism have a richer network of association surrounding unpleasant information in memories, which makes those instances more easily accessible
• people high neuroticism pay more attention to threats and unpleasant information in their environment
• they have a stronger behavioural inhibition system, making them more vulnerable to punishment and more vigilant for signs of threat

Question 44

what is the diathesis stress model?

Answer 44

• suggest that there is a pre-existing vulnerability that is present among people who later become depressed
• vulnerabilities may be genetic, environmental, behavioural, or even cognitive and nature
• the person must be triggered by a major life event and be vulnerable in order to develop depression

Question 45

how do we explain depression with biology?

Answer 45

• emotional problems may be the results of neurotransmitter imbalance at the synapses of the nervous system (norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine)
• there are varieties of depression, some more biologically based and others more reactive to stress or cognitively based
  • sometimes depression is treated successfully by changing neurotransmitter release, but not always

Question 46

why are disorders controversial?

Answer 46

• pathologizing “bad ways to be” → where do we stop?
• labelling → helpful in some settings but can be stigmatizing
• ‘abnormal’ → less of a sharp divide than previously assumed (categorical or dimensional)

Question 47

what defines abnormality?

Answer 47

• we use the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders
• statistical infrequency (2+ SDs above or below mean)
• failure to function adequately or successfully
• violation of social norms and standards