psychology chapter 11- stress and health

Type D

(sometimes called distressed personality) is a personality featuring high levels of negative emotions, like depression and anxiety, and a reluctance to share those emotions with others. For example, consider Ronnie: He worries a lot, and tends to feel blue pretty often, but he keeps these feelings to himself rather than talking about them with his friends or family.

Coping

efforts to reduce or manage your experience of stress.

Problem-focused coping

is a style of coping with stress that emphasizes changing the stressors itself. This kind of coping involves tackling the problem head-on in an attempt to solve or minimize it.

emotion-focused coping

is a style of coping with stress that emphasizes changing your emotional reaction to the stressors (rather than changing the stressors itself). With emotion-focused coping, you basically accept the stressors as unchangeable, so you instead focus on changing the way you feel while facing it.

Stress and personality types

In the late 1950s, a cardiologist named Meyer Friedman noticed that in his waiting room, the chairs were showing signs of wear in unusual places—on the front edges of the seats and armrests. He eventually figured out that his patients—who, by definition, had heart trouble—were literally sitting on the edges of their seats and grasping the armrests tensely as they barely tolerated their wait to see the doctor. These impatient patients inspired Friedman and his colleagues to give a formal name to this personality style that predisposed people to heart disease

Psycho physiological illnesses

The physical problems that psychoneuroimmunologists focus on are psycho physiological illnesses: any illness that stress can cause, worsen, or maintain. When research on stress and health was in its early stages, in the mid-1900s, it was considered newsworthy when an illness was discovered to be......?

Type C

This personality type is a personality featuring a low level of emotional expression, a high level of agreeableness with other people, and a tendency to feel helpless. For example, consider Phoebe: Whenever she gets together with her family, she holds her feelings in and goes along with whatever they want to do, but she is bothered by a sense that she doesn't have as much control over her life as she would like.

Flight-or-flight response

Underlying all of these categories of stress is the importance of the fight-or-flight response: an automatic emotional and physical reaction to a perceived threat that prepares us to either attack it or run away from it. Your fight-or-flight response has long been recognized as a product of evolution. Basically, it is your body quickly gearing up to respond to a perceived danger by taking it on (fight) or taking off (flight). (To be specific, it is your sympathetic nervous system gearing up, as we learned in Chapter 2.) Your heart rate speeds up, your breathing quickens, you start to sweat, and your muscles tense. When this fight-or-flight response is followed by actual fight or flight—when you actually take on the threat or take off running—your body spends this energy effectively and then calms down naturally. But when the fight-or-flight response is stifled, the result is stress

stress

What is an unpleasant physical or psychological reaction to circumstances you perceive as challenging. You probably know the reaction well, perhaps too well. Your muscles may tense, your stomach may churn, your pulse may quicken, and your teeth may grind. You may feel anger, irritability, sadness, nervousness, or all of these.

stressor

What is any event or change in your life that causes you stress. Anything can be a stressor, depending upon what you perceive to be challenging. Of course, there are certain events and changes that almost all of us would experience as stressors. Most are big, bad things like the death of a loved one, a divorce or breakup, a serious injury or illness, or a job loss. (There are also a few big, possibly good things on the list of common stressors too, like retiring, getting a new job, finishing school, pregnancy, and starting a romantic relationship.)

Primary appraisal and secondary appraisal

What is determining how stressful an event is to you. Secondary appraisal is determining how capable you are of coping with the event. Think of it this way: Primary appraisal is how hard you think the big bad wolf can huff and puff; secondary appraisal is knowing whether your house is built of straw, wood, or brick.

Immune system

When ongoing stress outlasts your resistance and exhaustion sets in, your immune system gets compromised. Your immune system is your body's innate method of defending against bacteria, viruses, infections, injuries, and anything else that could cause illness or death. Researchers who focus on this phenomenon call their field psychopharmacology (PNI): the study of the relationship between psychological factors, including stress, and the immune system. Specifically, these researchers examine how certain hormones, like cortisol, epinephrine, and nor epinephrine, increase with stress and interfere with the production of antibodies, which are the cells that fight off disease in your body

General Adaptation Syndrome

When stressors persist over time; the response follows a predictable pattern. That pattern, first identified by Hungarian medical researcher Hans Selye in the early and mid-1900s is known as the general adaptation syndrome: a widely accepted understanding of the way bodies respond to ongoing stress, consisting of the sequence of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion. Those first two stages—alarm and resistance—help us to handle short-term stressors. According to Selye's concept of the general adaptation syndrome, our ability to ward off the effects of stress stays strong for a while (during the resistance stage), but eventually plummets (during the exhaustion phase).

Type A

a personality featuring high levels of competitiveness, drive, impatience, and hostility. People with Type A personality find themselves in a "constant struggle to do more and more things in less and less time, and [are] often quite hostile or aggressive in their efforts to achieve them". They are hurried and cutthroat in their attempts to attain their goals—not just when such qualities might be appropriate or necessary, but all the time.

Type B

a personality very much unlike Type A personality, in which the person is noncompetitive, easygoing, relaxed, and rarely angry. People with this personalities are more "chill" than their Type A counterparts. For example, unlike Cole, someone with a Type B personality might choose to park in the distant corner of a crowded parking lot to avoid the competition in the front rows—or might even skip the mall on a crowded day altogether.

Post traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

a psychological disorder lasting at least a month characterized by feeling continuously on edge, avoiding reminders of the traumatic event, having difficulty sleeping and concentrating, and frequently recalling or reliving the event. People with PTSD experience a variety of symptoms. Sometimes, they re-experience the trauma through frightening dreams and flashbacks. They may experience hyper arousal, which means they stay keyed up all the time, making sleep difficult. They are highly sensitive to sights or sounds that remind them of the trauma. In some cases, people with PTSD become emotionally numb and seem to "blank out" for periods of time

Optimism

an attitude toward the future characterized by hope or expectation of a positive outcome. Like hardiness, optimism buffers us from stress. One study of college students found a strongly negative correlation between their optimism levels and the extent to which they experienced about 40 physical symptoms of various kinds. The more optimistic they were, the less they were bothered by headaches, stomachaches, fatigue, aches, and pains

Hardiness

behaviors that reflect resilience under stressful circumstances. Hardy people welcome stress. They see it as an opportunity for improvement and success rather than failure and pain. Hardiness is closely related to the concept of post-traumatic growth that we discussed earlier in the chapter, but it can emerge even when the stress is less than traumatic. Hardiness has three key ingredients, known by psychologists as the "three C's—commitment, controlling, and challenge. Hardiness is a set of behaviors that reflect resilience under stressful circumstances. Hardy people tend to see stress as an opportunity for success rather than a threat of failure.