The Psychology of Stress Flashcards
How would you define stress?
A psychological and physiological reaction that occurs in response to a threat, i.e., when an individual perceives that environmental demands tax or exceed his or her adaptive capacity.
What is a stressor?
A stimulus or event that causes a stress reaction. This can be a thought, it doesn’t have to be external.
What is the difference between acute and chronic stress?
Acute: sudden, typically short-lived, threatening event
Chronic: ongoing environmental demand
Do you think that acute stressors are worse for our health than chronic stressors?
No, the fact that they’re short-lived means that our body can recover relatively well and is not as concerning to our health. Sapolsky writes about how our stress-response is more adapted to handle these sorts of stressors.
Why is chronic stress concerning for our health?
These are ongoing demands which repeatedly activate your stress-response. These chronic stressors are much more challenging for our mental and physical health.
Differentiate minor and major life stressors. Historically, what has health psychology focussed on?
Major life events are big events in your life (good or bad).
Minor life events are more the day-to-day hassles.
Health psychology has focused on major life stressors in the past. Now minor life stressors are being recognised.
What’s the main measure of major life stressors?
The Social Readjustment Rating Scale
Describe one of the earliest studies linking major life stressors to disease (Rahe et al., 1964).
Using archival, retrospective data to study major life stressors leading up to the development of TB.
The TB patients had a lot more major life events in the years prior to developing TB, compared to the control group.
Can you determine causality from the study by Rahe et al? (Linking major life stressors to disease)
No, it was using retrospective archival data. We can’t tease out what happened first, their health could have been driving life events. (although this pattern has been demonstrated numerous times e.g. people who had heart attacks also had more life stressors before illness onset)
The accumulation of ____ severe but ____ frequent hassles can be ____ harmful to health as _____ life events.
less…more…more…major
How can we measure major life events in childhood? What do results from this questionnaire correlate to?
One of the most commonly used questionnaires is the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Questionnaire. Greater than 4 typically puts you at higher risk of mental and physical illness.
Those with higher ACE scores were more likely to experience depression, use antidepressant prescriptions, smoke and suffer from alcoholism.
Odgers & Jaffee (2013) believe that exclusive focus on major traumatic events ignores the role of…
…routine or ongoing stressors, which may have equally, or perhaps more, profound effects on children’s development owing to both the frequency and the duration of their exposure.
List 3 examples where routine adversity impacts health.
- Mothers who report more minor hasses are more aggressive and short tempered with their children.
- Environmental hassles are linked to children’s poorer outcomes independently from more major forms of abuse.
- Daily stressors linked to outcomes such as coronary heart disease.
In the lecture, what was the measure of minor stressors?
The Perceived Stress Scale 4. One of the most commonly used stress measures.
There is a clear linear relationship between perceived stress scores and…
…perceived health status.
Stress scores are going __ over time. (comparing to Cohen’s original sample in 1983)
Up
How valid are these stress measures? Are they just measuring out self perceptions of things or are they tied to biological markers of stress?
They do seem to be valid, for example change in perceived stress is correlated to change in amygdala grey matter density, an important structure for threat detection. Amygdalae less active in people with greater reduction in perceived stress after mindfulness intervention.
What’s the word for positive stress?
Eustress
