PSYC 11 Flashcards
The process by which we perceive and respond to certain events, called stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging.
Stress
Selye’s concept of the body’s adaptive response to stress in three phases - alarm, resistance, exhaustion.
General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS)
Under stress, people (especially women) often provide support to others (tend) and bond with and seek support from others (befriend).
Tend and Befriend
A subfield of psychology that provides psychology’s contribution to behavior medicine.
Health Psychology
The study of how psychological, neural, and endocrine processes together and affect the immune system and resulting health.
Psychoneuroimmunology
The clogging of the vessels that nourish the heart muscle; the leading cause of death in many developed countries.
Coronary Heart Disease
Friedman and Rosenman’s term for competitive, hard-driving, impatient, verbally aggressive, and anger-prone people.
Type A
Friedman and Rosenman’s term for easygoing, relaxed people.
Type B
In psychology, the idea that “releasing” aggressive energy (through action or fantasy) relieves aggressive urges.
Catharsis
Alleviating stress using emotional, cognitive, or behavioral methods.
Coping
Attempting to alleviate stress directly - by changing the stressor or the way we interact with that stressor.
Problem-Focused Coping
Attempting to alleviate stress by avoiding or ignoring a stressor and attending to emotional needs related to one’s stress reaction.
Emotion-Focused Coping
The hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events.
Learned Helplessness
The perception that chance or outside forces beyond your personal control determine your fate.
External Locus of Control
The perception that you control your own fate.
Internal Locus of Control
The ability to control impulses and delay short-term gratification for greater long-term rewards.
Self-Control
Sustained exercise that increases heart and lung fitness; may also alleviate depression and anxiety.
Aerobic Exercise
People’s tendency to be helpful when already in a good mood.
Feel-Good, Do-Good Phenomenon
The scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to discover and promote strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to flourish.
Positive Psychology
Self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life. Used along with measures of objective well-being (for example, physical and economic indicators) to evaluate people’s quality of life.
Subjective Well-Being
Our tendency to form judgments (of sounds, of lights, of income) relative to a neutral level defined by our prior experience.
Adaptation-Level Phenomenon
The perception that one is worse of relative to those with whom one compares oneself.
Relative Deprivation
