Lecture_13_Social Psychology and Health Flashcards
Stress
The negative feelings and beliefs that arise whenever people feel unable to cope with demands from their environment
Examples of link between stress and health
- When people undergo a major personal upheaval, their chance of dying increases
- The number of people who died from a heart attack increased after a major earthquake
Fight-or-Flight response
Respond to stress by attacking the source or fleeing from it
Resilience
Mild, transient reactions to stressful events, followed by a quick return to normal, healthy functioning
Resilience in the Face of Disaster
People are surprisingly resilient in the face of stressful events
- After 9/11, relatively few people showed long-term signs of depression or other mental health problems
Even Happy Events May Be Stressful
Some of these events or situations are happy, yet they cause stress
Stress and the Likelihood of Catching a Cold
People were first exposed to the virus that causes the common cold and then isolated
-> The greater the amount of stress they were experiencing, the greater the likelihood that they caught a cold from the virus
Internal Locus of Control
- Believe that things happen because we control
them - Do not believe that good and bad outcomes are
out of our control
Perceived Control
Belief that we can influence our environment in ways that determine whether we experience positive or negative outcomes
Gender Differences in Coping with Stress
- Tend-and-befriend response
- Depressing rumination
Tend-and-Befriend Response
- Respond to stress with nurturing activities
- Protect oneself and one’s offspring (tending)
- Create social networks that provide protection from threats (befriending)
- Prevalent in women (Gender differences not very large)
Depressing Rumination
More common among women,
- Men tend to act
- Women tend to think — and often to overthink
- Beginning in adolescence, women a nearly doubled risk of depression
Social Support: Getting Help from Others
Perception that others are responsive and receptive to one’s needs
- Helps physically as well as emotionally
1. Invisible support
2. Visible support
Invisible Support
- More effective
- Give support without implying that the person is incapable
Visible Support
- Less effective
- Portrays person as incapable of helping themselves
Rate of Colds by Sociability
Highly sociable people were less vulnerable to catching colds
Diary Therapy
- Long-term health benefits
- to writing or talking about one’s personal traumas,
- particularly if enough time has passed
- to allow people to gain a new perspective on the traumatic events
Illusory Correlations
- A cognitive bias wherein perceive relationship between two variables even when none exists
- Because of the way our brains are wired to notice and remember events that seem to be connected or unusual
- Cognitive shortcut or heuristic, where our minds are trying to find patterns and connections to make sense of the world
- Sometimes leading to erroneous conclusions
Hindsight Bias
“I-knew-it-all-along”
- After an event has happened, people believe they could have predicted the outcome beforehand
- Leads to an oversimplification of cause and effect in hindsight
- Can affect learning processes, as individuals may not accurately remember their original predictions or the uncertainty surrounding a situation
Overconfidence
A bias where an individual’s subjective confidence in their judgments is greater than their objective
accuracy
- Such as overestimating one’s abilities or knowledge, underestimating risks, or being overly optimistic about the outcome of one’s actions
- Leads to risky behaviors, poor decision-making, and failure to adequately prepare for different scenarios
Self-Confirming Diagnoses / Confirming bias / Self-
fulfilling prophecy
People often test for a trait by looking for information that confirms it
- If people are trying to find out if someone is an
extravert “What would you do if you wanted to liven things up at a party?”
- Testing for introversion, “What factors make it hard for you to really open up to people?”
In response, those probed for extraversion seem more sociable, and those probed for introversion seem shyer
- Our assumptions about another help elicit the behavior we expect
Self-serving Bias
“We physicians gladly accept personal credit when things go well
- When they don’t - when the patient is misdiagnosed or doesn’t get well or dies — we attribute the failure elsewhere. We were given inadequate information or the case was ill-fated from the beginning.”
Clinical Intuition Vs. Statistical Prediction
Hindsight- and diagnosis-confirming tendencies
- Most clinicians and interviewers express more confidence in their intuitive assessments than in statistical data
- Statistical prediction against intuitive prediction,
- Statistics usually wins
Implications for Better Clinical Practice
Professional clinicians are human; they are “vulnerable to insidious errors and biases
- Victims of illusory correlation
- Hindsight bias: too readily convinced of their own after-the-fact analyses
- Often unaware that erroneous diagnoses can
be self-confirming
- Overconfidence: likely to overestimate the accuracy of their clinical intuition
Depressive Realism
“Sadder-but-wiser effect”
The tendency of mildly depressed people to make accurate rather than self-serving judgments, attributions, and predictions
- In various judgments of one’s control or skill
Positive Illusions
The ability to see things better as somewhat better than they are and to find benefits even when thing seem most bleak
Negative Explanatory Style
Attributes failure and setbacks to causes that are
- Stable (“It’s going to last forever”)
- Global (“It’s going to affect everything I do”)
- Internal (“It’s all my fault”)
The Vicious Cycle of Depression
- Negative experience ->
- Self-focus and self-blame ->
- Depressed mood ->
- Cognitive and behavioral consequence ->
Loneliness
- Genetically influenced
- For example, identical twins are much more likely than fraternal twins to share moderate to extreme loneliness
- People who spent more time on social media
- Facebook use led to loneliness, rather than loneliness leading to Facebook use
- Communicate in person, they feel significantly more emotional closeness than when communicating electronically
Phubbing
Phone + Snubbing
- Ignoring someone else while looking at your phone
- Increase feeling of social exclusion and depression among those ignored
Shyness
Social anxiety marked by self-consciousness and worry about what others think
- Shyness leads to loneliness and later depression
Self-presentation Theory
we are eager to present ourselves in ways that make a good impression
- Feel social anxiety when we are motivated to impress others but have self-doubts.
- Compared with outgoing people, shy, self-conscious people see incidental events as somehow relevant to themselves
- Spotlight effect; they overestimate the extent to which other people are watching and evaluating them
- To reduce social anxiety, some people turn to alcohol
- Alcohol lowers anxiety and reduces self consciousness
- Thus, chronically self-conscious people are especially likely to drink following a failure
Stress-caused Negative Emotion may Have Various Effects on Healths
Especially anger and depression prone people
1. Negative emotions ->
2. Stress hormones ->
3. Heart diseases, immune suppression, autonomic nervous system (ulcers, headache, hypertension)
