Week 11 - Stress Health and Wellbeing Flashcards
Health psychology
The study of physical health and illness by psychologists from various areas of specialisation.
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.
General adaptation syndrome
A three-stage process (alarm, resistance and exhaustion) by which the body responds to stress.
Type A personality
A pattern of behaviour characterised by extremes of competitive striving for achievement, a sense of time urgency, hostility and aggression.
Type B personality
A pattern of behaviour characterised by being easy-going, relaxed and laid-back.
Immune system
A biological surveillance system that detects and destroys ‘non-self’ substances that invade the body
Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI)
A subfield of psychology that examines the links among psychological factors, the brain and nervous system, and the immune system.
Appraisal
The process by which people make judgements about the demands of potentially stressful events and their ability to meet those demands.
Learned helplessness
A phenomenon in which experience with an uncontrollable event creates passive behaviour in the face of subsequent threats to wellbeing.
Depressive explanatory style
A habitual tendency to attribute negative events to causes that are stable, global and internal.
Self-efficacy
A person’s belief that he or she is capable of the specific behaviour required to produce a desired outcome in a given situation.
Coping
Efforts to reduce stress.
Problem-focused coping
Cognitive and behavioural efforts to alter a stressful situation.
Emotion-focused coping
Cognitive and behavioural efforts to reduce the distress produced by a stressful situation
Proactive coping
Up-front efforts to ward off or modify the onset of a stressful event.
Social support
The helpful coping resources provided by friends and other people.
Four models for measuring social support
number
diversity
intimacy
perceived availability
explicit social support
disclosing one’s distress to others and seeking their advice, aid or comfort
implicit social support
merely thinking about or being with close others without openly asking for help
Subjective wellbeing
One’s happiness, or life satisfaction, as measured by self-report.
adaptation-level theory
our satisfaction with the present depends on the level of success to which we are accustomed
e.g. hedonic adaption: receive a new improved car, you adapt to it eventually, desire improvement relative to that car
