Week Nine Flashcards
Stress
The psychological and physical response you experience when you perceive a discrepancy between the demands of a situation and your capacity to cope.
What does stress impact upon which can in turn affect communication?
Perceptions
Mood
Memory
Attitudes
Acute stress
Quick to appear, fairly intense, quick to pass
Chronic stress
Prolonged, insidious, lower intensity
What are the two ways in which stress can be perceived as?
A stimulus or a response
Stress as a stimulus
When your environment (or something about that environment) is stressful
E.g. Bushfires, car crash, diagnosis of major illness
Stress as a response
Your reaction to something in your environment is to experience stress. psychological - body is under strain (long hours, no sleep)
physical - behaviour, thought or emotion
Strain
Stress as a response and stimulus combined
Describe stress as a transactional process
The process of continuous interactions and adjustments between the person and the environment. In this process you assess your resources and the discrepancies between your resources and the demands you perceive to be placed on them.
Cognitive appraisals of the transactional process
The appraisal process has 2 stages
Primary - refers to whether or not the situation is perceived to threaten your wellbeing
Secondary - refers to your assessment of recourses available to cope with a perceived threat to you wellbeing
Eustress
Stress that is healthy or gives positive feelings or results
Define trauma…
Threat to ones safety or to the stability of ones world.
Involves death, or the threat of death serious injury, that causes, physical, emotional, psychological distress or harm.
Pathogenic model
Traditional victim-based model
Focus on negative outcomes and how to alleviate these outcomes
Outcomes - depression, withdrawal, PTSD, anxiety, poor communication
Salutogenic model
Survivor based model
Focus on strengths a person has and uses to survive extraordinary challenges
Vicarious trauma
Through another’s eyes
Emergency services
Adaptive coping strategies
Strategies that assist a person in negotiating the emotions, behaviours and thoughts that are associated with a stressful situation
2 types of coping: emotion focused and problem focused
Maladaptive coping strategies
Strategies that do not assist a person to come to a resolution of a problem.
Avoidance, frustration, self-indulgence
Carthatic
The release of the negative emotion that makes you feel better
Displace
When people place their negative feelings onto someone else
Emotion focused coping
The behavioural and cognitive methods people employ to try and control their emotional response to a stressor.
Problem focused coping
Adaptive behaviours and cognition aimed at reducing the demands of a stressful situation when possible
Social support
Perceptions of care, love, comfort, esteem and help that you receive from other people and that you give to others
Two types: instrumental and emotional
Emotional support
Includes expressions of empathy, caring and concern that make a person feel loved and comforted
Instrumental support
The direct assistance someone provides at stressful times
Compassion fatigue
The psychological and physical exhaustion experienced by those who work in positions that require close contact to people who experience trauma
Post traumatic growth
When the struggle with trauma acts as the catalyst for growth and an individual is able to develop beyond their pre-trauma level of functioning.
Resilience
The ability to utilise personal skills and strengths to cope with stressful situations
Resilience leads to better coping
Reframing
Providing a different view or frame of an event or situation
Hope
A protective factor in post traumatic growth
