Week 7 - Stress Flashcards
What is Stress?
Something that involves the body responding to biochemical, physiological, behavioural, and psychological changes.
- Could be seen as damaging (distress) or positive (eustress)
- Can be acute or chronic
- It is a response to external factors.
what is the Lazarus & Launier 1978 definition of stress?
“stress a transaction between people and environment in terms of “person-environment fit”
What is Cannon’s fight and flight described as?
The term fight or flight to describe an animal’s response to threats in Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage
what is the fast track response?
Fast track old-brain by-passes conscious brain: body reacts and sends emergency messages to new brain
What is the slow track response?
Slow track new-brain becomes aware of body reaction: feels fear then makes sense of what has been seen
whats Negative Bias?
The negative bias is our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell on these events.
What is Seyles Model?
Alarm –> Resistance –> Exhaustion
What are the Problems with the Selye and Cannon Models?
+ Both use a Cause and effect framework
+ Individual seen as passive and therefore at the mercy of the external stimulus
What are the problems with the Life Events model?
\+ A stressful situation to one person may not be stressful to another \+ Memory and retrospective reporting \+ The tapestry of life events \+ Outcomes from life events \+ Duration of stressful event
What events are appraised as stressful?
+ Salient events: personally relevant
+ Overload: Multitasking
+ Ambiguous events: unclear tasks
+ Uncontrollable events: if task is not predicted
What are the stress and changes in physiology?
+ Sympathetic activation: release of catecholamines (adrenalin and nor adrenalin) results in feeling or arousal
+ Hypothalamic pituatary adrenocorticoid activation (HPA): increased levels of cortisol. Cannot be felt but changes carbohydrate management and inflammation
What are the variability in stress response?
+ Stress reactivity: people vary in their sweating, pupil dilation and changes in heart rate when stressed.
+ Stress recovery: People vary in the speed with which they return to normal after being stressed.
+ Allostatic load: Over time the allostatic load gets greater as a stressed body is left depleted
Stress resistance: People vary in their stress responses due to coping, social support etc
Measuring Stress place
+ Laboratory setting: use acute stress paradigm: completing a task (eg. Intelligence test) and measuring stress response
+ Naturalistic setting: Measuring stress response after real stressors eg. Exam, physical activity, marital conflict
Measuring stress method
+ Physiological measures: using monitors and taking fluids to measure heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, catecholamine and cortisol levels
+ Self report measures: using scales to assess life events, perceived stress, daily hassles
What are the three brains?
+ Human prefrontal-cortex
Thought, language, planning, [making sense of experience, regulating of emotional responses]
+ Mammalian mid-brain
Remembering, feeling, tending and befriending behaviours
+Reptilian-brain stem
Heart rate, breathing, blood
pressure, alertness, sleepiness
