Stress And Health- Week 4 Flashcards
Defining stress
‘The concept of stress is somewhat like the illusion concept of love: everyone knows what the term means, but no two people would define it in the same way
2 poles of opinion(Marmot 1986)
• the concept is too vague and general to be useful; it cannot be defined or measured adequately and thus can not be studied
• standard psychosocial instruments CAN be used, results entered in to multivariate analyses and casual inferences drawn
Stress can be: (3)
- stimulus
- response
- transaction
Stress as events, the social readjustment rating scale classic study- Holmes and rahe1967
1) death of a spouse 100
2) divorce. 73
3)marital separation. 65
4) vacation. 13
Life Events theory : limitations (5)
- LCU assigned regardless of desirability of event
- Age bias in likelihood of life event experience
- events may simply not occur
- intertwined life events may cancel out a LCU
- fails to address the moderators of stress
The Hassles scale (Kanner et al 1981)
- concerns about weight
- health of a family member
- rising prices of common goods
- home maintenance
- too many things to do
- misplacing or losing things
- missing a bus
Uplifts for stress (5)
- good conversation with friends/ partner
- finishing off some task
- eating out
- visiting a friend
- gaining something/ losing weight
What did Kanner find
Kanner found age/ life stage effects in weightings of life events
- the event alone is insufficient explanation of the stress response
The three waves of the stress response
1) activation of the symphathetic nervous system
2) Endocrine response
3) Immune response
The fight or flight response (8)
1) external event seen as a threat by individual
2) flight/ fight response activated
3) Adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol released
4) heart rate increased, breathing increased, fats and glucose released for energy, blood flow diverted from non-essential body areas to muscle and brain, perspiration increased, immune system suppressed
5) threat removed
6) Acetylcholine released
7) Adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol levels lower
8) body returns to normal
What does the sympathetic nervous system do (6)
• relaxes bronchi
- accelerates heart beat
- strengthens heart contractions
- inhibits stomach activity
- stimulates glucose release by liver
- secretion of catecholamines
What does the parasympathetic nervous system do
- constricts bronchi
- slows heart beat
- decreases blood pressure
- stimulates stomach activity
Endocrine(hormonal) responses to stress: 2 main systems
- Sympathoadreno-medulary system (SAM)
- Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-cortical system (HPAC)
Sympathpadreno-medulary system
Stress-> sympathetic nervous system-> adrenal medulla
Sympathoadreno-medullary system, secretion of catecholamines (6)what does the body do?
1) heart rate increases
2) blood pressure increases
3) blood is diverted to muscle tissue
4) breathing rate increases
5) digestion slows down
6) pupils of eyes dilate
*shortlived responses
Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal cortical system (HPAC)
Stress-> sympathetic nervous system-> hypothalamus-> pituitary gland-> adrenal cortex
Hypothalamic- pituitary-adrenal cortical system. What does the body do? (4)
Secretion if corticosteroids
1) increases protein and fat mobilisation
2) increases access to bodily energy storage
3) inhibition of antibody formation and inflammation
4) regulates sodium retention
What is ‘The general adaptation syndrome of Hans Selye(1950’
In 1936, discovered that the human body shows a non- specific, typical response to any toxic substance
- the nonspecific response of the organism to any kind of demand was defined as stress
The general adaptation system chain
Stressor-> alarm-> resistance-> exhaustion-> diseases of adaptation
Problems with Selye’s approach(5)
- doesn’t acknowledge that’s one stressors simply do elicit stronger responses
- doesn’t acknowledge role of cognitive appraisal I.E a persons perceptions of situation mediate their response
- it treats food or bad stressors in the same way
- only allows stress to lead to disease if the adaptive responses are required for long periods of time
- people are not as passive as Selye suggests
Models of stress (two approaches)
Bottom up approach
Top- down approach
What is the bottom-up approach
Eg, exercise produced pronounced cardiovascular and endocrine responses =physical stress
Top down approach
Eg, mental arithmetic task, top-down activation due to intense mental effort - decreases vagal tone to the heart and increases sympathetically mediated cardiac activity, which in turn increases HR-psychological stress
Lovallo and the psychological model
“The total physiological response to a behavioural challenge results from activation associated with the demands of a situation and the emotions it evokes”
Primary appraisal
• demand may be
- threat
- loss/harm
- challenge
The significance of primary appraisal classic- speisman et al study
- college students shown gruesome video- tribal initiation rites included genital surgery
- 4 groups/ experimental conditions
• heard an intellectual anthropological description of the rites
• heard a lecture that de-emphasised the pain the initiates were experiencing and emphasised the excitement they were feeling
• heard a description that emphasised the pain and trauma the initiates were undergoing
• no introductory information and no sound track
Measures of speisman
• autonomic arousal
• self-report
Speisman results
Groups 1 and 2 significantly less stress than group 3; group 3 the most stressed
