Stress, Illness and Coping Flashcards
How is stress related to disease?
Stressed people alter their behaviour, which affects their health eg by taking up risky behaviour like smoking as a coping mechanism
Stress may influence perception of symptoms and complaint behaviour leading to higher levels of medical consultations and detection of disease.
What is the definition of stress?
Stress: a physical and emotional response to a situation that may be perceived as threatening or exceeding the person’s ability to cope with it.
Stress depends on specific psychobiological determinants that trigger a stress response in each individual
stress is subjective
Give definitions for stressors, stress responses and strain
Stressors - external events that may cause stress (e.g. life events, chronic stressors).
Stress responses – can be behavioural, emotional, cognitive, physiological
Strain - the effect of stress on a person.
What are the 3 models of stress?
Stress response: General Adaptation Syndrome
Stress stimuli: Life Change Model
Stress as a process: Transactional Model
Describe general adaptation syndrome (GAS) model
3 stages of response:
Alarm: the fight or flight response mobilises the body to defend against the stressor
Resistance: if stress continues, the body goes into a stage where alert remains high and the body tries to adapt to the stressor
Exhaustion: physiological resources are very low, the ability to resist may collapse. Disease/death may result
What are the limitations of the GAS model?
- Assumes an automatic response to an external stressor – pain, heat, cold etc - variation.
- All stressors do not produce the same uniform, physiological responses.
Describe the life Change Model
Stress = the amount of adjustments a person is faced within a certain timeframe e.g. moving house, bereavement,
a new job.
Accumulation of life events and continuous adjustment is then thought to have an effect on health.
To measure stress, count the number of events that have occurred in a period to an individual.
Research has found that life events are associated w heart disease, cancer, depression
What are limitations of the life Change model?
- People react differently to similar events - Can we say a stimulus (e.g. new job) is inherently stressful?
- Recall - People who are ill are more likely to look for a cause and attribute it to stress.
Describe the transactional Model
Transactional Model – focuses on stress as an interaction between the person and the stressor
Demand of the stressor can be balanced by person’s ability to cope.
Ability to cope can inc coping strategies, personality or support changes.
When demands outweigh resources it causes psychobiological stress responses. The individual then tries to cope and these efforts may affect the stressor, or the perceived demands.
What is coping and what are the 2 coping styles?
Coping→ An attempt to manage perceived demands that cause stress
- Problem-focused coping: coping with the stressor itself.
- Emotion-focused coping: coping with the emotional reaction to the stressor.
What is work stress?
Work stress: objective and subjective factors involved in work that generate stress reactions.
- The experience of high levels of work stress is strongly associated w sickness absence, CV health, depression and anxiety.
Describe the work stress model
The DCS model (demand-control-support): job strain is likely when someone faces high job demands in combo w low job control and low social support from colleagues/managers.
The job control variable itself has 2 components:
1) decision authority (being able to choose when and how tasks are completed)
2) skill discretion (if a job is boring, and the extent to which skills can be developed).
What is the key assumption of the work stress model?
A key assumption:
job stress variables are inherently pathogenic and can be separated from the personal characteristics of the individual worker
What is the problem with the DCS model?
The job strain variables in the DCS model are mainly concerned w psychological stress, anxiety and depression, which may present themselves as physical symptoms and so measurable as physiological changes.
However, crucially they also involve assessment on the part of the subject (which is not so straightforward to objectively measure).
