W11: Health and Well-Being Flashcards
Define stressor.
Anything that causes stress.
Define stress.
An unpleasant state of arousal in which people perceive the demands of an event as taxing or exceeding their ability to satisfy or alter those demands.
How does our body respond to stress?
Through General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS): a three-stage process by which the body responds to stress.
Explain the General Adaptation Syndrome.
General Adaptation Syndrome is a three-stage process by which the body responds to stress. The three stages are shock, resistance, and exhaustion.
During shock, our body mobilizes its resources to ward off the threat. Resistance to stress is low at this point.
During resistance, our body experiences normal levels of resistance to stress. The body maintains mobilizing resources to fight, remaining aroused and alert.
However, if stress persists, our body goes into the exhaustion stage. At this stage, our body becomes vulnerable.
What happens when stress persists?
Our body remains at the exhaustion stage where we overuse our body resources. This increases our risk for illness.
Fill in the blanks: Stress is an ________ _________ reaction to ________.
Stress is an adaptive, short-term reaction to threat.
How many ways are there to cope with stress?
Two: problem-focused and emotion-focused.
What is problem-focused coping?
Cognitive and behavioural efforts to reduce stress by overcoming the source of a problem.
What is emotion-focused coping?
Cognitive and behavioural efforts to manage emotional reactions to stressors rather than trying to change the stressors themselves.
What are the limitations of problem-focused coping?
May cause greater stress.
- Physiologically taxing to exert control.
- Overcontrolling the situation.
- Not all events are within our control or important enough to worry about.
How many types of emotion-focused coping mechanisms are there? What are they?
Three: distraction (shutting down), emotion expression (opening up), and out of (self) focus.
Explain shutting down.
We use focused distraction as opposed to mere suppression of unwanted thoughts.
Explain emotion expression.
We express our inner feelings to ourselves and others around us.
Is emotion expression always useful?
No, it depends on who we confide in. Opening up can cause is even greater distress when we are rejected, get unwanted advice, or when we are betrayed.
What experiment shows emotion expression?
Pennebaker’s Expressive Writing. He asked college students to talk into a tape recorder or talk for 20 minutes about traumas.
Pennebaker found that students who opened up exhibited a decline in visits to health centres over the next 6 months.
Explain out of (self) focus.
We use out of focus when self-focus intensifies negative moods, especially for those with low self-esteem because this brings out personal shortcomings. When self-focused, people with a negative self-concept experience more negative moods than those with a positive self-concept. This results in a self-perpetuation feedback loop: bad mood – self-focus – worse mood.
Difficult tasks can absorb a bad mood when self-focus is detrimental. These tasks can include: exercise, writing, and meditation.
What is social support?
Helpful coping resources provided by friends and other people.
Fill in the blank: social support is a form of _________ coping.
proactive
What is the benefit of having social support?
We can use our social resource to cope with stress. For example:
- Married people are more likely to survive cancer for 5 years (implicitly assumes that married people get higher social support from spouses).
- More socially active men are less likely to die than others of a similar age.
_________ cultures are more likely to seek help from others in times of stress than __________ cultures.
Individualistic; collectivistic.
Why are people from collectivistic cultures less likely to seek out social support?
They do not want to strain relationships by asking for help in a collectivistic society where social groups > self.
People from collectivistic cultures prefer __________ social support.
Implicit.
Define implicit social support.
Thinking about or being close with others without openly asking for help.
In a study by Chen (2012), Americans gave more ________-focused support while the Japanese gave more ________-focused support.
Emotion; problem.
