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How does stress work? - Chapter 11
This chapter explores the sources of stress, the factors that can make the experience of stress easier or more difficult, and the ways that stress influences someone's physical and mental health. The difference between distress and eustress will be explained. It will be explained what stressors are, and some stressors will be mentioned. Health psychology will be described. This chapter will also explain how personality types and attitudes can influence people's reaction to stress. Lastly, this chapter will focus on ways to cope with stress through social-support systems, cultural differences, and religious beliefs.
What is the relationship between stress and stressors?
Stress is the term used to describe the physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses to events that are appraised as threatening or challenging. There are a lot of different symptoms of stress, such as fatigue, sleeping problems, frequents colds, chest pains, and nausea. There are also behavioral symptoms of stress, such as eating too much, crying a lot, smoking, and drinking. Emotional symptoms can be anxiety, depression, anger, and frustration. Mental symptoms of stress include problems in concentration, memory, decision making, and sense of humor. Most people experience some stress on a daily basis.
Stress-causing effents are called stressors. There are two kinds of stressors:
- Stressors that cause distress. These are unpleasant stressors.
- Stressors that cause eustress. These are positive events that still make demands on a person to adapt or change.
Stressors can come from within a person or be external. External stressors are for instance environmental stressors, major life changes, but also hassles. Hassles are the daily little annoyances. We think of causes of stress as big events, but most of the time, our stress comes from little frustrations, delays, irritations, or disagreements. There are different reasons for why something is a stressor/gives us stress:
- It puts pressure on us. Time pressure is one of the most common forms of pressure.
- It is uncontrollable. Lack of control increases stress.
- It frustrates us. People are frustrated when they are blocked or prevented from achieving a desired goal or fulfilling a perceived need.
- It brings us in conflict between two or more competing and incompatible desires, goals, or actions.
What are physiological factors or stress?
When the human body is subjected to stress, the sympathetic nervous system reacts. This system is better known as the 'fight-or-flight' system. Endocrinologist Hans Selye studied the sequence of physiological reactions that the body goes though when adapting to a stressor. This sequence is called the general adaptation syndrome (GAS) and
.....read more How do stress, coping, adaptation and health affect personality? - Chapter 18
Health psychology focuses on the influence of psychological and behavioral factors on health, often in combination with the environment. Stress is central to this.
What models of personality are there?
What is the interactional model?
The interactional model suggests that personality factors determine the impact of events, because they determine how someone deals with the situation. Personality would thus influence coping. How someone deals with an event determines the degree of stress caused by that event. However, a limitation of this model is that stable coping strategies have never been found.
What is the transactional model?
The transactional model does things differently. According to this model, personality has three potential effects:
- Personality can influence coping.
- Personality can affect how the person interprets an event.
- Personality can influence the event itself.
It is not the event that causes stress here, but rather how it is dealt with. This model is called transactional because of the person's influence on the event and the person's appreciation. There is mutual influence.
What is the health and behavior model?
A third model is the health and behavior model. This assumes that personality does not directly influence the degree of stress or illness, but that it indirectly influences stress or illness through certain behaviors, such as unsafe sex or overeating. The less healthy someone is, the greater the chance of experiencing more stress.
What is the disease and behavior model?
Another model is the disease and behavior model. In this model, disease is explained as the presence of an objectively measurable abnormal physiological process, such as fever, high blood pressure, or a tumor. Abnormal or sick behavior is about the way people behave when they think they are sick. Personality determines the degree of sick behavior, whether or not in combination with a real illness.
According to the predispositional model, associations exist between personality and illness because of a third variable that affects both, namely predisposition. The predisposition can exist for stable individual personality differences and for specific illnesses.
What is stress?
Stress is a subjective feeling that is the result of uncontrollable and threatening events (stressors). These are often extreme situations with unpleasant consequences that cannot be influenced. Stress can be divided into low sources of stress in daily life (daily hassles) and important life events (major life events). Major life events are associated with intensity, conflict and uncontrollability. Positive things can also be very stressful, for example a marriage, a move or a promotion. People with a lot of stress in their lives have many psychological and physiological symptoms. Possible responses to stress
.....read more How can stress be managed? - Chapter 13 (4th edition)
What theories about stress are there?
Stress management training is the general term for interventions developed to teach participants how to handle stress. These interventions are based on cognitive-behavioral theories of stress, which consider stress as the result of an outcome of various environmental and cognitive processes. Stress is seen as a negative emotional and physiological state that is the result of cognitive responses to events that happen to us. That is why stress is seen more as a process than an outcome.
Beck and Ellis assumed that our cognitive responses to events - not the events themselves - determine our mood and that feelings of stress or other negative emotions are the result of wrong or irrational thinking. This means that the emotions are the result of misinterpretations of events or cognitions.
Beck has identified different categories of thinking that lead to negative emotions, namely:
Catastrophic thinking: if an event is considered negative and possibly dangerous.
Over-generalization: when a negative conclusion is drawn as a result of just one incident.
Arbitrary inference: draw a conclusion without sufficient evidence.
Selective abstraction: focus on a detail outside the context.
What does stress management training entail?
The stress response model suggests a series of factors that can be changed by reducing the stress of an individual. Examples of this are:
Environmental events that trigger the stress response.
Inappropriate behavioral, physiological, or cognitive responses that occur in response to the event.
Most stress management programs focus on changing people's responses to events that happen around them. Triggers can be identified and modified using problem-solving strategies. In addition, wrong thoughts can be identified and changed by a number of cognitive techniques, such as cognitive restructuring. Hereby automatic negative or catastrophic thoughts are brought up to bring them more in line with reality.
Changing triggers
The triggers that lead to stress are different for each person. A good approach to combat stress is therefore to investigate which triggers lead to stress in a person and how these triggers can be reduced. One of the most commonly used approaches to identify and change triggers is that of Egan. Stress triggers are identified and changed through three phases:
Problem exploration and clarification: what are the triggers that lead to the stress?
Goal setting: which triggers does the person want to change?
Facilitating
“DSM-5. Posttraumatic stress disorder.” – Article summary
The clinical presentation of PTSD varies. It is not entirely clear what is seen as a traumatic event and what is not. A life-threatening illness or medical condition is not seen as trauma but medical incidents can qualify as traumatic events (e.g. waking up during surgery), same as a medical catastrophe in one’s child.
Intrusive recollection is not the same as depressive rumination. Intrusive recollection applies to involuntary and intrusive distressing memories. It can be short (e.g. flashback) but can lead to prolonged stress and heightened arousal.
In PTSD, there often is a heightened sensitivity to threats. Developmental regression (e.g. loss of language) may occur in children. PTSD can lead to difficulties in regulating emotions or maintaining stable interpersonal relationships.
The lifetime prevalence of PTSD is 8.7% in the United States and the twelve-month prevalence is 3.5%. These estimates are lower in many other countries (e.g. European countries). Different groups have different levels of exposure to traumatic events. The conditional probability of developing PTSD following a similar level of exposure may differ between groups.
Cultural syndromes (e.g. ataques de nervosia) may influence the expression of PTSD. The risk of onset of PTSD and severity may differ across cultural groups as a result of:
- Variation in the type of traumatic exposure (e.g. genocide).
- The meaning attributed to the traumatic event.
- The ongoing sociocultural context.
- Other cultural factors.
PTSD appears to be more severe if the traumatic event is interpersonal and intentional (e.g. torture). The highest PTSD rates are found among rape survivors (1), military combat and captivity survivors (2) and ethnically and politically-motivated internment and genocide survivors (3). Young children and older adults are less likely to show full-threshold PTSD.
The symptoms and relative predominance of symptoms may vary over time. Symptom recurrence and intensification may occur in response to reminders of the original trauma (1), ongoing life stressors (2) and newly experienced traumatic events (3). PTSD symptoms may exacerbate as result of declining health (1), worsening cognitive functioning (2) and social isolation (3).
Individuals who continue to experience PTSD into older adulthood may express fewer symptoms of hyperarousal (1), avoidance (2) and negative cognitions and moods (3) compared with younger adults. However, adults exposed to traumatic events during later life may display more avoidance (1), hyperarousal (2), sleep problems (3) and crying spells (4) than younger adults exposed to the same traumatic event.
There are several pre-trauma risk factors for the development of PTSD:
- Temperamental
This includes childhood emotional problems by age 6 and prior mental disorders. - Environmental
This includes lower socioeconomic status (1), lower education (2), exposure to prior trauma (3), childhood adversity (4), cultural characteristics (5), lower intelligence (6), minority status (7) and family psychiatric history (8). - Genetic and physiological
This includes being female and being younger at the time of trauma exposure.
There are several peritraumatic
.....read more 
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