Life events, stress and coping Flashcards
What are life events?
Major happenings that can occur in a person’s life that require some degree of psychological treatment
What are some examples of life event stressors related to an individual?
- Illness
- Conflict (including internal conflict)
- Personal relationships
- Lacking control
What are some examples of life event stressors related to family?
- Divorce
- Marriage
- Illness
- Disability
- Death
- Addition to family
What are some examples of life event stressors related to society?
Job, environment:
- Deadlines
- Workload
- Responsibility
- Relationships
- Physical environment
What systems/aspects of the human body are impacted by stressors?
- Physiological system
- Psychological aspect
- Social aspect
Describe the social re-adjustment rating scale (SRRS)
- Developed to measure life events - based on adjustment required for various life events
- List of events rated on a scale of 0-100
- Scoring: adults indicate which life events have occurred to them in the past 12 months
- Values of all experienced life events added resulting in total stress score
What are the strengths of the social re-adjustment rating scale?
- Wide range of events that most people find stressful
- Values assigned to the listed life events based on broad sample of adults
- Easy, quick to complete
- Useful tool for assessment of stress and illness
- Positive correlation between life events and illness
What are the limitations to the social re-adjustment rating scale?
- Items vague/ambiguous
- Failure to consider impact of event for individual
- Failure to distinguish between desirable and undesirable
Apart from the social re-adjustment rating scale, what are some life events scales?
- The life experiences survey (LES)
- The PERI life-events scale
- The unpleasant events scale (UES)
What are some physiological measures to assess stress?
- Physiological arousal
- Biochemical markers in blood/urine
What are some limitations of physiological measures of stress?
- Measure itself may induce stress
- Influenced by other than stress variables
- Expensive, labour intensive, time consuming
Explain stress as a stimulus
- Focus on the environment
- Events or circumstances is the cause of stress
- Events or circumstances are known as stressors
Explain stress as a response
- Focus on individual’s reaction to stressors
- Psychological response
- Physiological response
- Responses are known as strain
Explain stress as a transaction
- Focus on stress as a process
- Relationship between the person and environment
- Continuous interactions and adjustments
Define stress
The perceived discrepancy between demands of the situation and the resources of the person that they appraise in a stressful situation
What are the two types of cognitive appraisal?
Primary and secondary
Describe primary appraisal
After receiving a stimulus, primary appraisal is making the decision as to whether the stimulus is dangerous or not
Describe secondary appraisal
If the stimulus has been found to be dangerous then secondary appraisal is deciding how to cope with the stimulus
What are the two physiological models of stress?
- Fight or flight response - acute/short term
- General adaptation syndrome - chronic/long term
Describe the fight or flight response
- Homeostasis threatened/disrupted
- Response to acute/short lived stress
- External threats elicit fight or flight response
- Increased physiological arousal
- Enable fight or flight response and restore homeostasis but prolonged state of high arousal harmful to health
What are the stages of the general adaptation syndrome response to stress?
- Stressor
- Alarm - mobilisation to fend of threat/stressor
- Resistance - continued fight against stressor (vulnerability to health problems)
- Exhaustion - depletion of resources, ability to resist may collapse (immune system weakened; abnormal heart rhythms
What are some short-term stress responses?
- Increased heart rate
- Increased blood pressure
- Increased metabolic rate
- Changes in blood flow
- Dilation of bronchioles
Where do the short-term responses to stress come from?
Medulla
Where do the long-term stress responses come from?
Cortex
What are some long-term stress responses?
- Retention of sodium & water by kidneys
- Increased blood volume and pressure
- Proteins and fats converted to glucose/broken down for energy
- Increased blood sugar
- Decreased immune system
Define coping
The process by which people manage the perceived discrepancy between demands of the situation and the resources of the person that they appraise in a stressful situation
What are features of a trait?
- Personality
- Style
- Consistency
What are features of a state?
- Response to time and situation
- Process or strategy
- Different ways of coping
What are the two types of coping?
- Problem focused - reduce demands of situation or expand resources to deal with it
- Emotion focused - control emotional response to situation
Name some coping strategies
- Planning (PF)
- Active (PF)
- Seeking social support (PF/EF)
- Distancing (EF)
- Escape-avoidance (EF)
- Denial (EF)
- Distraction (EF)
- Self control (EF)
- Substance use (EF)
- Accepting responsibility (EF)
- Positive reappraisal (PF/EF)
What are some examples of coping with illness?
- Normalising - interpret symptom as normal experience
- Denial - denies existence of symptom
- Resignation - become consumed by illness
- Accommodation - acknowledges, deals with problem
What are some examples of coping with illness?
- Normalising - interpret symptom as normal experience
- Denial - denies existence of symptom
- Resignation - become consumed by illness
- Accommodation - acknowledges, deals with problem
What are some coping resources?
- Money
- Health
- Sense of control
- Personality
- Beliefs and attitudes
- Become informed
- Exercise
- Social support
What are some questionnaires/rating scales used to assess coping?
- Ways of coping checklist
- COPE
What types of information can be given to aid coping?
- Procedural information
- Sensation information
- Behavioural instruction
