Psychological Control, Social Support, and Stress

NARRATOR: Health psychologists have pinpointed several cognitive factors that might immunize people against the damaging effects of stressful events.

SHELDON COHEN: There are two major components that we talk about as playing a role in psychological response. So one has to do with the predictability of the environment, which is if you know when the train that's right outside your window goes by, and you can predict that as opposed to a sudden unpredictable noise, you do better in response to that. You show less negative psychological response to it. If you perceive that you have some control over the environment, you do better.

SUSAN FISKE: Having a sense of control enables you to feel that there's some contingency between what you do and what happens to you. And people demonstrably suffer when they don't have a sense of control. When they feel that there's a random response to what they do, it's very distressing for them.

So in hospitals, I could push the nurse call button to relieve my pain. I may or may not, but it makes me feel better if I know I could do it. Whereas if I know that I'm all alone, and I'm in pain, and there's people out there but they won't respond to me, that makes people desperate.

Meghan Gunnar did this experiment years ago. You show a one-year-old a little toy monster, you know, some creature that makes a lot of noise, and his flailing arms, and legs, and whatever. This is a very frightening stimulus for a young child that age. And what she showed was that if half of the infants are given the opportunity to actually turn this monster off relative to the other half of the infants who get presented this monster, but they don't have control over turning it off, the ones who can turn it off come to find it a fun stimulus and their fear of it goes away. Whereas those who have no control over it continue to find it a very frightening stimulus.

SHELDON COHEN: Feelings of control over your life seems to operate as a stress buffer. But most of our work in that area has been with social support.

JOHN CACIOPPO: Social support refers to individuals being able to rely on others around them for resources, whatever those resources might be. One type of resource might be emotional. If you are bereaved, having others around there to provide sympathy and comfort can be quite valuable. There's tangible support, sometimes called instrumental support. Think of that as, you know, I need to take my car to the dealer and I'm not going to have a ride.

If somebody can give me that ride from the dealer to my office, that really removes the stressor that for other people would have been a stressor. And so social support refers to these kinds of aides that are provided to people are available to people. Oftentimes, you don't need to call on them. You simply need to know that they're there.