Stress, Health, and Coping
KEY POINTS
Introduction: Stress and Health Psychology
According to the cognitive appraisal model, stress is defined as a negative emotional state that occurs in response to events that are appraised as taxing or exceeding a person’s resources.
Health psychologists study stress and other psychological factors that influence health, illness, and treatment. Health psychologists are guided by the biopsychosocial model.
Stressors are events or situations that produce stress. According to the life events approach, any event that requires adaptation produces stress. The Social Readjustment Rating Scale measures the impact of life events. The life events approach assumes that any change, whether good or bad, produces stress. Daily hassles, work stress, and burnout can be significant sources of stress.
Social factors, such as crime and racism, can produce chronic stress. Acculturative stress can also result when people encounter different cultural values.
Physical Effects of Stress: The Mind–
Stress can affect health indirectly, by influencing health-related behaviors, and directly, by influencing the body’s functioning.
Walter Cannon identified the endocrine pathway involved in the fight-or-flight response. This pathway includes the sympathetic nervous system, the adrenal medulla, and the release of catecholamines.
In studying the physical effects of prolonged stressors, Hans Selye identified the three-stage general adaptation syndrome, which includes the alarm, resistance, and exhaustion stages. Selye found that prolonged stress involves a second endocrine pathway, which includes the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, the adrenal cortex, and the release of corticosteroids.
Chronic stress may lead to premature aging by shortening the length of telomeres, the protective tips found at the end of chromosomes.
Stress affects the functioning of the immune system. The most important elements of the immune system are lymphocytes. Psychoneuroimmunology studies the interactions among psychological processes, the nervous system, the endocrine system, and the immune system.
Stressors that affect immune system functioning include both unusual and common life events, along with everyday pressures. Although stress may increase susceptibility to infection and illness, many other factors are involved in physical health.
Individual Factors That Influence the Response to Stress
The impact of stressors is reduced when people feel a sense of control over the stressful situation. Feelings of control have both physical and psychological benefits.
The way people explain negative events often determines whether they will persist or give up after failure. People with an optimistic explanatory style use external, unstable, and specific explanations for negative events. People with a pessimistic explanatory style use internal, stable, and global explanations for negative events. A pessimistic explanatory style contributes to stress and undermines health.
Chronic negative emotions are related to the development of some chronic diseases. People who frequently experience negative emotions experience more stress than other people. Transient negative moods have also been shown to diminish immune system functioning.
The Type A behavior pattern can predict the development of heart disease. The most critical health-compromising component of Type A behavior is hostility. Hostile people react more intensely to stressors and experience stress more frequently than do nonhostile people.
Social isolation contributes to poor health. Social support improves the ability to deal with stressors by modifying the appraisal of a stressor, decreasing the physical reaction to a stressor, and making people less likely to experience negative emotions. When the quality of relationships is poor, or when social support is inappropriate or unwanted, relationships may increase stress.
Women are more likely than men to be the providers of social support and tend to be more vulnerable to the stress contagion effect. Men are less likely to be upset by negative events that happen to people outside their immediate family.
Coping: How People Deal with Stress
Coping refers to the way in which people try to change either their circumstances or their interpretations of circumstances in order to make them more favorable and less threatening. Coping may be either maladaptive or adaptive.
When people think that something can be done to change a situation, they tend to use problem-focused coping strategies, which involve changing a harmful stressor.
When people think that a situation cannot be changed, they tend to rely on emotion-focused coping strategies, which involve changing their emotional reactions to the stressor.
Problem-focused coping strategies include confrontive coping and planful problem solving.
Emotion-focused coping strategies include escape–
Culture affects the choice of coping strategies. People in individualistic cultures tend to favor problem-focused strategies. People in collectivistic cultures are more likely to seek social support, and they emphasize emotion-focused coping strategies more.
Match each of the terms on the left with its definition on the right. Click on the term first and then click on the matching definition. As you match them correctly they will move to the bottom of the activity.
Walter B. Cannon (1871–
Richard Lazarus (1922–
Martin Seligman (b. 1942) American psychologist who conducted research on explanatory style and the role it plays in stress, health, and illness. (p. 547)
Hans Selye (1907–