Problem 1 - Stress

Question 1

What is Stress?

Answer 1

Stress is the circumstance in which transactions lead a person to perceive a discrepancy between the physical or psychological demands of a situation and the resources of their systems. It often results from inaccurate perceptions of discrepancy.

Conditions:

1. Physical: direct material/bodily changes.
2. Psychological: how individuals are perceiving circumstances in life.

Examining the conditions:

• Environment: stress = stimulus, challenging events = stressors.
• Response perspective: the reaction to the stressors = physiological or psychological strains.
• Transactions: process of stressors and strains + the relationship between the person and the environment. The experience/impact of the strain through behavioural, cognitive and emotional strategies.

Question 2

Cognitive appraisal

Answer 2

A mental process by which people assess two factors:

1. Whether a demand threatens their physical or psychological well-being.
2. The resources available for meeting the demands.

Question 3

Primary appraisal

Answer 3

Assessing the meaning of the situation for yourself. It leads to 1 of 3 judgements:

1. Irrelevant appraisal
2. Good appraisal (benign-positive)
3. Stressful appraisal

Stressful appraisal receives 3 further implications:

1. Harm-loss: the amount of damage that has already occurred.
2. Threat: the expectation of future harm.
3. Challenge: the opportunity to grow or profit from the situation.

Question 4

Secondary appraisal

Answer 4

The assessment of the resources available for coping.

• Conscious when judging stressful situations.

Question 5

Factors leading to stressful appraisals (2)

Answer 5

1. Personal factors: intellectual, motivation and personality characteristics. These define how one will view the stressor - harmful, threatening or challenging.
2. Situational factors: situations that induce stress. Strong demands + imminent events = stressful.

Question 6

Bio-psychosocial aspects of stress: basics

Answer 6

• The body is aroused and motivated to defend itself during stress
• The arousal is caused by the sympathetic nervous system and the endocrine system.
• Reactivity is the physiological portion of the response to a stressor/strain, measured at baseline.
• Genetic factors influence the degree of reactivity to stressors.

Question 7

Bio-psychosocial aspects of stress: Fight or flight

Answer 7

It’s the process of preparing the organism to attack or flee the threat.

• The perception of danger > sympathetic nervous system stimulates organs + adrenal glands of the endocrine system > epinephrine is secreted > body is aroused further.
• Arousal can have positive of negative effects = its adaptive but can be harmful if prolonged.

Question 8

Bio-psychosocial aspects of stress: General adaptation syndrome (GAS)

Answer 8

The syndrome when the fight or flight response is prolonged.

Alarm reaction

• Response to an emergency.
• Mobilises the body’s resources.
• Fast acting arousal
• Results from: the SNS activates organs + adrenal glands > epinephrine and norepinephrine secretes into the bloodstream > HPA axis is activated

Stage of resistance: when the strong stressor continues.

• HPA axis predominates.
• Body tries to adapt to the stressor.
• The physiological arousal remains high and the body replenishes the hormones secreted by the adrenal glands.
• The stage can make individuals vulnerable to health problem = disease of adaptation.

Stage of exhaustion: when the prolonged physiological arousal is severe and long term.

• Costly to the body = weakens the immune system and depletes the body’s energy reserves.
• Stress continues and damages internal organs.
• Death is likely to occur.

Criticism:

• Non-specific with regard to the type of stressor.
• Does not take cognitive processes into account.

Question 9

Bio-psychosocial aspects of stress: Allostatic load

Answer 9

The effect of the body having to adapt repeatedly to stress, such as flections in hormones and immune functions that accumulate.

• Creates wear and tear on the body.
• Impairs ability to adapt to future stressors.
  -High levels related to poor health.
• The cumulative amount of strain has a greater influence on health than the degree of activation in response to any one stressor.
• The restoration of resources is a major impact on the load.

Question 10

Bio-psychosocial aspects of stress: Factors for allostatic load

Answer 10

1. Amount of exposure: the more stressors the more physiological activation.
2. Magnitude of reactivity: individual differences.
3. Rate of recovery: individual differences but the longer the recovery, the greater the total amount of psychological activation.
4. Resource restoration: sleep is most important in replenishing the resources.

Question 11

Bio-psychosocial aspects of stress: physical reactions of stressors

Answer 11

Some stressors appear to elicit stronger responses than others = sudden vs gradual stressors.

The pattern of physiological arousal under stress depends on:

• Effort: the person’s interest, striving, and determination. Active and successful coping. Increase In catecholamine and suppression of cortisol.
• Distress: anxiety, uncertainty, bordered and dissatisfaction. Increase in cortisol and catecholamine may be elevated too.
• Effort + distress: The state of daily hassles. Increase in both catecholamine and cortisol.

Question 12

Psychological aspects of stress: Cognition

Answer 12

Stress can impair cognitive functions by distracting our attention.

• Memory, executive functions.
• These depletions can lead to even more stress and difficulty in dealing with the stress.

Question 13

Psychological aspects of stress: emotions

Answer 13

Stress can influence emotional states of individuals, such as fear, sadness or anger.

Question 14

Psychological aspects of stress: social behaviour

Answer 14

Some situations lead people to come together and others to isolate.

Question 15

Psychological aspects of stress: Gender and sociocultural differences

Answer 15

• Women report more major and minor stressors than men = more open, more daily hassles.
• Men show more reactivity when psychologically stressed.
• Men take longer to return to baseline levels.
• Both differ in what is considered stressful = strength of reactivity changes drastically.

Question 16

Sources of stress:

Answer 16

Within the person:

Within the family:

• Addition to the family, marital strain/divorce, illness, disability and death.

Within the community and society:

• Job stress and environmental stress

Question 17

Measuring stress: physiological arousal

Answer 17

1. Electrical/mechanical equipment for blood pressure, heart rate, respiration etc = can be measured individually or together using a polygraph.
2. Biochemical analysis of blood, urine and saliva samples to assess the level of hormones the adrenal glands secrete during stress = corticosteroids (cortisol) and catecholamines (epinephrine and norepinephrine)

Advantages:

• Direct and objective
• Reliable and easily quantified

Disadvantages:

• Expensive
• The techniques themselves can be stressful.
• The measures are affected by gender, body weight, consumption of substances, and the activity prior to the measurement.

Question 18

Measuring stress: life events

Answer 18

Targets long-term stress.
The act of asking about individual’s experience of stress.

• Self-reports but these not enough to assess stress.

Social readjustment rating scale (SRRS):

• values range from 100 to 11 points
• Individuals indicate which event has happened in the past 24 months.

Strengths:

• Items represent a wide range of stressful events
• Values assigned to each are carefully determined.
• Easy and quick to fill out.

Weaknesses:

• Items can be vague or ambiguous.
• The meaning or impact of the event is not taken into account = no subjective appraisal.
• No distinction between desirable and undesirable events.
• Susceptible difficulties recalling events accurately and willingness to report honestly.

Question 19

Measuring stress: daily hassles

Answer 19

Targets short term stress.

1. Hassles scale: measuring people’s experiences with day-to-day unpleasant or harmful events. Individuals indicate which hassle has occurred in the past month and rate them on a severe scale.
2. Uplift scale: events that have made hassles more bearable and reduce their impact over a 9 months period.

Question 20

Distress vs eustress

Answer 20

• There is a threshold as to where stress becomes detrimental (distress)
• Individuals differ in their susceptibility to the effects of stress.

Question 21

The stress response:

Answer 21

When the body is exposed to harm or threat, the result is a cluster of physiological changes.

• Short-term stress: adaptive changes that help respond to the stressors.
• Long-term stress: maladaptive changes, ex: enlarged adrenal glands.

Question 22

The stress response: HPA axis

Answer 22

The activation of the Anterior-Pituitary Adrenal-cortex system.

• Stressors stimulate the release of Adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) from the anterior pituitary.
• ACTH triggers the release of glucocorticoids from the adrenal cortex.
• The HPA axis is often long-term and if not terminated, the body runs out of resources and enters the stage of exhaustion = chronic stress.

Question 23

The stress response: Sympathetic nervous system Adrenal-medulla system

Answer 23

The Sympathetic Nervous System Adrenal-Medulla system

• Stressors active the system and release epinephrine and norepinephrine form the adrenal medulla.
• Often short-term stress = fight or flight response.

Question 24

Influence of emotion on learning - implicit learning

Answer 24

Pavlovian learning (NS acquires aversive properties when paired with aversive event = fear conditioning).

• Conditioned respones = implicit knowledge
• Stimulus-reponse relationship = explicit knowledge.

Question 25

Influence of emotion on learning: Hippocampus

Answer 25

If damaged, explicit narrative knowledge about an association between stimulus and response is lost and implicit knowledge remains intact.
Important for the acquisition of explicit or declarative knowledge of the emotional properties of a stimulus.

Question 26

Influence of emotion on learning: Amygdala

Answer 26

The amygdala is a limbic structure that is involved in fear regulation = damage prevents conditioned fear responses but pairing events remain intact.

• Investigating the amygdala is important = necessary for implicit expression of emotional learning but not for all forms and critical for the acquisition and expression of an implicitly conditioned fear response.
• It has two pathways

Question 27

High vs low roads of learning in the amygdala

Answer 27

1. Low road:

• From the thalamus to the amygdala within 15ms.
• Not filtered by conscious control.
• Information is crude.
• Provides the fight-or-flight response.
• Unconditioned path.

2. High road:

• From the thalamus to the sensory cortex for a finer analysis to the hippocampus and finally the amygdala within 300ms.
• Thorough and complete analysis of the stimulus.
• Provides the learning aspect of a stimulus.
• Conditioned path.

Question 28

Why is cortisol sometimes effective in reducing stress?

Answer 28

1. Trauma memory retrieval: It has an inhibitory effect on the retrieval of traumatic memories.
2. Cognitive processing: cortisol leads to overall better and early cognitive processing of threatening information from the environment.

• It reduces automatic processing of task-irrelevant emotional stimuli.
• It prevents anxious moods and maintains positive moods.
• It causes approach-avoidance responses = reward-driven or goal-relevant actions.

Its involved in cognitive processing via the PFC and limbic system:

• PFC = executive functions
• Limbic system = emotion regulation.