Reading: Sapolsky Chapter 15 - Personality, Temperament, and Their Stress- Related Consequences

Question 1

What is an affective style in terms of stress?

Answer 1

• How an individual perceives, responds to and copes with external pressure

-It’s like their personality or temperament and has a large reliable impact on their risk of stress-related illness.

Question 2

Factors related to social competition that influence risk of stress related diseases in baboons (after controlling for rank)

Answer 2

• Being able to discern when they are at threat i.e. if every social provocation produces overactivation of the stress response then the baboon carries greater cardiovascular risk.
• Response to real threat i.e. if sit passively usually have much higher glucocorticoid levels than those who take control of the situation.
• After a fight can the baboon tell if he has won or lost? If they can’t generally have much higher glucocorticoid levels.

Question 3

Other than social competition what is the other factor in baboons that predicts stress -related disease risk?

Answer 3

Male baboons most capable of developing friendships i.e. spend the most time grooming females in a non-sexual way and spending time with young tend to best off in terms of risk of stress related disease —> i.e. social isolation = increased risk for stress-related illness.

Question 4

How is personality/ temperament deemed to arise for baboons?

Answer 4

• Hard to track the same baboon over time to discern how personality differences arise but thought to be a mixture of genetic and environmental components.

Question 5

Depressive response to stress

Answer 5

• About half of depressives have glucocorticoid levels dramatically higher than in other people often causing problems with immunity and metabolism.
• Learned hopeless = in the face of stressful challenges depressives don’t even attempt to mount a coping response.

Question 6

Anxiety/ Fear distinction

Answer 6

• Fear is about the need to escape from something real.

-Anxiety is about dread and foreboding (your imagination running away from you).

Question 7

Anxiety and it’s relationship to stress

Answer 7

• With an anxiety disorder life consists of constantly mobilizing resources in attempt to solve problems that other people might not even have to consider.
• Response is sympathetic overactivation i.e. overabundance of circulating epinephrine and norepinephrine.

Question 8

Anxiety/ depressive difference in stress response

Answer 8

• Glucocorticoid excess = indicates giving up on attempt to cope (depression)

-whereas excess catecholamines (epinephrine and norepinephrine) = attempt to cope (anxiety).

Question 9

Anxiety and learning

Answer 9

• Some anxiety responses are innate but humans/ monkeys are particularly good at learning to response anxiously to certain things (i.e. implicit learning/ fear condition).

Question 10

Why is the anxiety a function of the amygdala and not the hippocampus?

Answer 10

Major stressors and glucocorticoids disrupt hippocampal function but do the opposite to the amygdala i.e. synapses become more excitable and neurons more connected –> underlies why you can have an anxious response to something but don’t really remember what it is about it that makes you anxious/ what negative experience you associate with it.

Question 11

Type A

Answer 11

• Type A = immensely competitive, overachieving, time-pressured, impatient, hostile
• Prospective studies done to show that Type A preceded heart disease as opposed to the link being the other way around —-> type A carries just as much risk as smoking or high cholesterol levels!

Question 12

What part of Type A is actually important according to Redford Williams (Duke University)?

Answer 12

hostility —> hostility is the true predictor of cardiovascular illness

Question 13

Is it clear what aspects of hostility are important in cardiovascular outcomes

Answer 13

Some studies suggest frequent expression of the anger you fell predicts heart disease while others say it’s the bottling up of anger.

Question 14

Some confounding factors in the hostility heart disease relationship…

Answer 14

• Are hostile individuals just more likely to engage in poor health behaviours like smoking?

-Is it just that hostile people tend to have poor support systems because no one wants to spend time with them?

Question 14

What part of the brain is associated with anxiety?

Answer 14

• Anxiety and fear conditioning are the province of the amygdala not the hippocampus
• The amygdala gets pain information, sensory information, autonomic nervous system information.
• The amygdala communicates using CRH as a neurotransmitter

Question 15

Is all lost for people who are hostile?

Answer 15

• You can reduce hostility in type-A people through therapy.

Question 16

Interior decorating as Scientific Method

Answer 16

• Friedman and Rosenman owned a cardiology practise in the mid-1950s and kept having to re-upholster the chairs.
• Damage was it very specific places (edge of seat and on arm rests)
• The patients were sat on the edges of their seats, clawing the armrests
• Patients in other clinics not related to cardiology did not do this i.e. there is something special about cardiology patients.
  —-> link between type A and cardiovascular risk (note: they made this link after the fact, at the time Friedman ignored the upholster who kept complaining about the wear and tear pattern!)

Question 17

Repressive personality

Answer 17

-Everything seems so easy to them, they are successful, don’t report any anxiety or depression. They live rule bound lives and strive to set the world up as black and white.

-They are stoic, regimented , hardworking, productive, solid folks who never stand out in the crowd unless you begin to wonder at the unconventional nature of their extreme conventionality.

-Tests show these people are not depressed or anxious but reveal an extreme need for social conformity, they dread disapproval and hate ambiguity.

-They lack emotional expression and have little recognition of it in others. If report emotional response to event it tends to be absolute/ black and white i.e. will say one primary emotion instead of a range.

• The interesting thing is these individuals by all accounts are fine and don’t feel stressed (and often are the envy of others) but they show an overactive stress response —> sometimes it can be enormously stressful to construct a world without stressors i.e. these individuals control their world so much they are not stressed or surprised by anything BUT the mere act of having to do this is stressful and takes its toll on health.