Stress and Coping Flashcards
What is stress?
Stress is any circumstance that threatens, or is perceived to threaten one’s wellbeing and tax one’s coping abilities
What are the major types of stress?
Frustration - occurs as a result of thwarting (prevention from accomplishing something)
Conflict - related to indecision, approach-approach, avoidance-avoidance, approach-avoidance
Pressure - involves expectations or demands that one behave in a certain way, pressure to perform or conform
Change - any notable alterations in one’s living circumstances
According to Lazarus, what is cognitive appraisal and what are the stages of appraisal?
Cognitive appraisal is the driving force in whether people experience stress
Primary appraisal
- Is the situation relevant and threatening? -> secondary appraisal
- Or irrelevant and harmless? -> no stress
Secondary appraisal
- Evaluation of coping resources and options for dealing with stress
Individual differences - stressful events for one person can be routine for another.
What are some of the physiological responses to stress?
Hormonal response: cortisol levels increase with stress, increases energy and inhibits tissue inflammation
Sex differences: men have greater stress responses than women. May be linked to oestrogen which protects against the detrimental effects of repeated stress on emotion and cognition
Behavioural response: indulging oneself, stress can lead to reduced impulse control. Striking out at others, frustration-aggression hypothesis - aggressive behaviour is not healthy and blowing off steam does not work.
What are the positive effects of stress?
- Resilience in the face of stress
- Promote personal growth or self-improvement - learn new skills, acquire strength, re-evaluate priorities
- Improves coping abilities and reduces future stress
What are the moderating factors of stress?
Social support: various types of aid and emotional sustenance provided by members of one’s social network
- Explicit: the amount of social support somebody receives in their day to day lives
- Implicit: knowledge or awareness that social support is available, should they need it
Coping: efforts to master, reduce or tolerate the demands created by stress
- Problem-focused coping - dealing with the problem directly
- Emotion-focused coping - emotional support in difficult, stressful situations
- Avoidance coping - avoid the stressor
Goodness of Fit (Lazarus)
- Controllable stressor - problem-focused coping most effective
Uncontrollable stressor - emotion-focused coping is most effective
What is the stress bucket metaphor?
A successful writing based intervention which promotes actively thinking about way to lower stress. Draw a bucket and the idea is to stop the bucket from overflowing. What is raining in are all the thing causing stress. It’s starting to overflow so we have to do things to stop it form overflowing. Small tasks such as exercising, relaxing, turning off
Describe the Model of Irrational Beliefs (Elliot, 1977).
Goal is to change irrational beliefs to more rational ones. Encourages people to identify their general and irrational beliefs and persuades the person to challenge these false beliefs
- Stress -> irrational appraisal -> emotional turmoil
- Stress -> rational appraisal -> emotional calm
What is classified as a chronic illness?
- Symptoms last for more than 6 months
- There are no effective treatments
- No real end in sight for the stress
What are some of the challenges associated with living with a chronic illness?
- Symptoms
- Uncertain future
- Change in self-image
- Loss of autonomy and dignity
- Loss of employment
- Changes in relationships and life goals
Describe the stage model of response to diagnosis.
- > Uncertainty - understand the meaning of the symptoms
- > Disruption - realisation of symptoms and severity, intense stress and high level of dependence on others
- > Striving for recovery - attempts to gain some control over illness via active coping
- > Restoration of wellbeing - acceptance of the illness and consequences
Criticisms: Not generalisable to all illnesses, not linear, occurrence, not all are experiences
What are some of the consequences of denial of chronic illness?
Initial denial can be positive and may help at the start, if the symptoms aren’t severe they can be easy to ignore.
Long-term denial and avoidance can be problematic. It can lead to poor responding to symptoms, seeking help, ignoring the problem, patient delay, period between first awareness of the symptoms and seeking help
What are three processes that result from chronic illness diagnosis?
- Cognitive appraisal: what are the implications, individual, family, social
- Adaptive tasks: what tasks need to be performed, deal with symptoms, changing relationships, emotions
- Coping skills: what coping strategies are used?
