CH. 5 Diverse Understandings of Stress Flashcards
Stress
STRESS:
TELEPRESURRE** – 86% of Americans constantly check their electronic devices, a new form of stress called “**telepressure”
- At its most extreme, stress can kill, severely hamper health, or drive someone to behave in risky, unhealthy ways.
What Is Stress?
WHAT IS STRESS?:
- Not all negative events are stressful, and not all positive events are automatically free from stress.
- Most researchers argue that the best way to know when a person is stressed is to look at how his or her body responds to a situation.
- If the sympathetic nervous system activates in response to an event, then the person is under stress.
- This activation results in elevated heart rate, respiration, and circulation.
PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES – Defined stress as the result of perceived demands on the organism that exceed the resources to meet those demands.
- Although these different definitions have all been well supported, the easiest way to define stress is as the upsetting of homeostasis.
HOMEOSTASIS – Is the ideal level of bodily functions. Each of our bodies has an optimal level of functioning for blood glucose level, body temperature, rate of circulation, and breathing.
- Stress to our systems can thus be seen as something that upsets our ideal balance.
STRESSOR – Anything that disrupts the body’s homeostatic balance.
STRESSOR RESPONSE – Is what is done to reestablish the homeostatic balance.
- Stressors can vary among individuals.
- If an event does not activate your stress response or disrupt your system, it is just another event.
- If an event disrupts you, it is a stressor.
Measuring Stress
MEASURING STRESS:
- The easiest way to measure whether someone is stressed is to ask.
LIFE EVENTS – Early stress research focused primarily on major events in people’s lives.
- Most measures take the form of questionnaire checklists containing a number of different events.
- Totaling the number of events that the person experienced provides an estimate of the demands placed on the individual and hence the level of stress.
- Small hassles add up:
THE HASSLES SCALE – Consists of 117 events. Small hassles have been shown to negatively affect health and aggravate the damage done by major life events.
- Other questionnaires assess major chronic stressor.
- Chronic stress or burden and low SES were significant predictors of increased depression for African American women and Latina women, respectively.
Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) – Trier Inventory of Chronic Stress, different type of assessment focuses on perceived stress relies on what the individual feels.
- Asks respondents how often they had certain thoughts or feelings in the preceding month.
- Asking if someone is stressed can be a good indicator of how stressed they really are. However, our perceptions of stress are not always accurate.
- To compensate for these physiological measures can be used.
- Measure a person’s blood pressure.
- Take a person’s temperature.
- Heart rate.
- When we become stressed, sympathetic activation increases all these physiological measures.
- Galvanic skin responses.
- Blood samples are assessed for the levels of different chemical markers.
- The levels of STRESS CHEMICALS** in the blood, such as **CORTISOL**, **EPINEPHRINE**, and **NOREPINEPHRINE, increase when we are stressed.
- The number and types of different immune system cells vary when we become stressed.
Stress Over Time
STRESS OVER TIME:
- Stressors today differ from what was perceived as stressful in the past.
- A list of common stressors most of the examples are psychological in nature. They are not tangible threats such as impending invasion by a powerful army or being mauled by a wildcat, but instead are things that we worry about or stress over.
- There is also a range of stressful events that are tangible, such as living in a high-crime neighborhood or a very cold environment.
- The cumulative effects of stress and living a disadvantaged life influence how young children react to stress.
- Our current stress response is hypothesized to have developed in response to the stressors faced by primitive humans.
ACUTE – physical in nature and short term or acute.
- Most of the early stressors were acute.
- The body had to be able to get ready to mobilize for sudden action in this fashion (e.g., run from an animal).
- With an acute physical stressor, your stress response either worked—you escaped the beast or defeated the ravaging tribes—or that was the end of your story.
- Those humans with better stress responses lived to reproduce.
- As civilization proceeded, humans started to live longer and experience more long-term, or CHRONIC, stressors.
- For much of human history, especially through the Middle Ages when millions died of the plague (e.g., bubonic, septicemic, and others), the main stressors and causes of death were physical in nature.
- Medicine was not a successful cure of disease until the past hundred years, and diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, and influenza caused great physical stress and death.
- Today, stressors are very different. Psychological in nature.
Cannon’s Fight-or-Flight Theory
CANON’S FLIGHT-OR-FLIGHT THEORY:
- Applied the concept of homeostasis to the study of human interactions with the environment.
- Specifically, he studied how stressors affect the SYMPATHETIC NERVOUS SYSTEM (SNS).
- All these reactions that prepare our body for action are caused by the SNS.
- Activation of the SNS increases circulation, respiration, and metabolism, all factors that fuel your body to ready it to either fight or flee. The higher respiration rate gets more oxygen into your lungs, the increased heart rate and blood pressure get the oxygenated blood to the muscles, and the increased metabolism breaks down energy for use by the fighting/fleeing muscles.
- The SNS also turns off certain systems in response to stress.
- Your body cannot be wasting resources and energy on these things.
- The SNS down-regulates (turns down) the digestive system and the reproductive system in times of stress.
PARASYMPATHETIC NERVOUS SYSTEM (PNS)** – The complete reversal of this process (the activating of some systems and the deactivating of others) is what helps your body recover from a stressor and is managed by the **parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).
- PNS decreases circulation and respiration and increases digestion and reproduction.
- Stress management techniques work to activate your PNS and slow down breathing and heart rate.
AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM – Coordinated by higher brain structures such as the hypothalamus. The PNS and SNS are both parts of the autonomic nervous system.
When faced with a stressor, the SNS is activated and in turn it activates the adrenal glands that secrete a class of hormones called CATECHOLAMINES.
- Two major CATECHOLAMINES:
- EPINEPHRINE – Also is known as adrenaline.
- NOREPINEPHRINE
- “My adrenaline was flowing,” to suggest that someone was stressed or ready for action.
Canon’s FIGHT-or-FLIGHT THEORY of STRESS** describes stress as leading to_SYMPATHETIC- ADRENAL-MEDULLARY (SAM) ACTIVATION._**
This fight-or-flight system has eight clear-cut effects – Blood pressure, blood flow to large muscles, total energy consumption, blood glucose concentration, energy release in the muscles, muscular strength, mental activity, and the rate of blood coagulation all increase.
- Epinephrine is what increases both the heart rate and blood pressure.
- Epinephrine is present in greater amounts when we are scared.
- Norepinephrine is present in greater amounts when we are angry.
- The basic fight-or-flight idea has been modified to include the option of freezing
Taylor et al.’s Tend-and-Befriend Theory
TEND-AND-BEFRIEND THEORY:
- Shelley Taylor and colleagues suggested that women tend-and-befriend in addition to fighting or fleeing.
- Essentially, women create social networks to provide resources and protection for themselves and their infants (i.e., befriending).
- This relatively new theory builds on the brain’s attachment/caregiving system that counteracts the metabolic activity associated with the traditional fight-or-flight stress response—increased heart rate, blood pressure, and cortisol levels—and leads to nurturing and affiliative behavior.
OXYTOCIN – Underlies both the tending and the befriending.
- Spraying oxytocin into someone’s nose via a nasal spray can improve how accurate people are at recognizing feelings in others, a critical part of befriending.
- Research is even exploring the potential of oxytocin nasal spray treatment for specific mental health problems that involve impairments in engaging comfortably with other people.
- Oxytocin is also related to trustworthiness and oxytocin plays a key role in maternal bonding.
- More oxytocin in early life is also related to later tending and befriending in both animals and humans.
- Tending is observed in many animals.
- In clear support of the tend-and-befriend model, Repetti and Wood (1997) showed that after a stressful day on the job, men want to be left alone and often fight with their spouses and kids, while women who felt stressed tended toward spending more time with their kids and having more physical contact with them.
Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome
GENERAL ADAPTATION SYNDROME:
HYPOTHALAMIC-PITUITARY-ARENAL HPA) AXIS** – Hypothesized that no matter what the stressor, the body would react in the same way and theorized that these responses were driven by the **hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.
Selye argued that organisms have a general way of responding to all stressors, what he called the GENERAL ADAPTATION SYSNDROME.
- The body first goes into a state of alarm.
- HPA axis activation takes place, and the body attempts to cope with the stressor during a period of resistance.
- The body attempts to cope with the stressor during a period of resistance.
Our SNS and the HYPOTHALAMUS** – Coordinate a physiological stress response that involves the **PITUITARY** and **ADRENAL GLANDS** and the secretion of **CATECHOLAMINES** and **CORTICOSTEROIDS.
- Organisms had threshold levels and that if stressors were below these limits, the fight-or-flight response did not activate.
- Mental processes played some role.
- That events had to be recognized as threatening to activate the response.
Lazarus’s Cognitive Appraisal Model
LAZARUS”S COGNITIVE APPRAISAL MODEL – Saw stress as the imbalance between the demands placed on the individual and that individual’s resources to cope.
- Devised the first psychological model of stress, which is still actively used in stress research.
- The experience of stress differed significantly across individuals, depending on how they interpreted the event and the outcome of a specific sequence of thinking patterns called APPRAISALS.
- The main cognitive process at work here is making appraisals.
- Lazarus suggested that we make two major types of appraisals when we face any potentially stressful event.
PRIMARY APPRAISALS – We ascertain whether the event is positive, negative, or neutral; if negative, we ascertain if it is harmful, threatening, or challenging.
- Harm (or harm–loss) appraisal is made when we expect to lose or actually do lose something of great personal significance.
- Threat appraisals are made when we believe the event will be extremely demanding and will put us at risk for damage.
- Primary appraisal can be heavily influenced by the stake we have in the outcome of the event, or how good we are at the challenging task.
SECONDARY APPRAISAL – After we make a primary appraisal, we assess whether we have the necessary resources to cope with the event.
- During SECONDARY APPRAISAL we essentially determine whether we can deal with the event and how we can cope.
- We ask ourselves, “Do I have what it takes to cope?” The answer is critical.
- If the answer is “no,” and we appraised the event as being harmful and threatening and determined that we do not have the resources to cope, then the event is a stressor. I
- f we appraised the event as a challenge and feel that we have the resources to deal with it, the event remains just that—an event.
All along this process there is often COGNITIVE REAPPRAISAL –taking place during which we can change how we view the situation. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet said,
- “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Factors Influencing our Appraisals
FACTORS INFLUENCING OUR APPRAISALS:
DURATION – Acute or short-term events may be appraised differently from chronic or long-term events.
VALENCE – Events can have either a positive or negative.
- The valence of an event often is colored by our emotional memories of similar events.
- We store emotional memories with other details of the event (Feldman Barrett, 2017), and these can influence future appraisals. A negative experience of public speaking in the past can influence our appraisal of doing it again in the future.
CONTROL – When we believe that we have control over a situation, the situation is less likely to be stressful.
- Control can make a difference in how we cope with diseases, such as Type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease.
- Knowing that you can control the course of these diseases (based on your lifestyle choices) makes the diagnosis of coronary heart disease and diabetes less stressful.
PREDICTABILITY – Related to control.
- Think about sitting in a dentist’s chair. If the dentist needs to use the drill but you have no idea how long the drilling is going to last, you will be stressed. Being able to predict how long a drill is going to be used reduces stress.
- Not having all the details about an event, not being able to tolerate ambiguity, or not having the mental resources to understand fully what needs to be done in a certain case may make the outcome of an event unpredictable and stressful.
- Ambiguous events are a lot more stressful than are clear-cut ones.
Role of Culture in Appraisal
ROLE of CULTURE IN APPRAISAL – Culture influences both the appraisal of stress and the experience of stress.
- Different cultural groups have different expectations for various aspects of life, and these different expectations can make a low-threat event to one cultural group be a high-threat event to another group.
- In some cultures, it is impolite for a woman to look a man directly in the eyes and the converse, or even to have the most basic physical contact.
- Some of the most critical differences in the experience of stress are due to race and ethnicity.
- Many minority groups experience high levels of stress because of their ethnicity, race, or religious beliefs.
- Real or not, even a perception of stress is bad for our bodies.
MULTICULTURAL MODELS of the STRESS PROCESS – The appraisal process can be biased by a range of conscious and nonconscious processes, such as cultural and familial norms.
COGNITIVE APPRAISAL MODEL
- The occurrence of potentially stressful events can vary based on minority status, discrimination, or specific cultural customs.
- Furthermore, the primary appraisal of the occurring event can be biased by how the culture interprets the event.
- Similarly, the secondary appraisal, coping efforts, and final outcomes can be modified by the culture of the individual.
- For example, some cultural groups (e.g., Mexican Americans and African Americans) have closer family ties and more-active social support networks that could influence secondary appraisals.
Cultural Differences Can Even Be Seen At The Level of The Family – Some family cultural environments, based on the way parents raise their children, can be a lot more stressful than others. Families in which both parents are always fighting or that experience low socioeconomic levels that lead to hardships can be stressful
Stress and Psychopathology: The Diathesis-Stress Model
Stress and Psychopathology: The Diathesis-Stress Model:
- The relationship between stress and psychopathology has been well documented. Yet, not everyone who experiences stressful life events and chronic stress develops psychological disorders.
DIATHESIS-STRESS MODEL – The theory posits that stress may serve as an activator of the diathesis, leading to the development and manifestation of psychopatholog.
- One of the main frameworks in which the etiology of psychopathology is described.
- This multidimensional model, first described in the context of schizophrenia, involves a relationship between vulnerable predispositions (DIATHESIS) and stress as contributors to the development of psychopathology.
- Individuals with a diathesis (a vulnerability) who are exposed to significant stress may be more likely to develop mental disorders than individuals who do not have similar predispositions.
- For individuals suffering from a mental disorder, the occurrence of stressful life events may act to further sensitize the individual to subsequent stressful life events and may initiate future episodes or relapses of the mental disorder, as seen with major depressive disorder and schizophrenia.
Culture as a Critical Stressor
CULTURE as a CRITICAL STRESSOR – Culture may act as a stressor in the diathesis-stress model of psychopathology, activating certain vulnerabilities and predispositions that may lead to the emergence of psychopathology.
- Hispanic and Asian American teens reported higher levels of social stress, were more likely to experience psychological distress, and had lower scores on resources in the context of family, coping, self-esteem, and SES than European American adolescents.
- Compared to European American teens, Hispanic and African American teens had an increased likelihood of experiencing social stress.
- American Indians have a high risk of developing mental health disorders and have higher numbers of this population in need of mental health services.
- American Indians were significantly more likely to report experiencing recent serious psychological distress and feelings of helplessness compared to all other ethnic groups surveyed.
Perceived Discrimination
PERCEIVED DISCRIMINATION:
- One of the biggest cultural chronic stressors that has serious implications for the development of poor health is perceived discrimination.
- For all races, major discrimination was significantly correlated with psychological distress and major depression, while day-to-day perceived discrimination was significantly associated with the development of emotional problems and mental disorders such as psychological distress, depression, and generalized anxiety disorder.
MICROAGGRESSIONS – Day-to-day discrimination has expanded to events that are so subtle that sometimes they are not seen as problems.
- Everyday insults, indignities, and demeaning messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned White people who are unaware of the hidden messages they are sending.
- The link between perceived discrimination and depression is common.
MODERATING VARIABLES – Of coping, acculturation, and ethnic social support.
- The use of ethnic social support moderated the relationship between perceived discrimination, emotion-focused coping, and depressive symptoms.
- Individuals who used emotionfocused coping frequently and had more ethnic social support had fewer depressive symptoms, as compared to others who had less ethnic social support.
- Perceived discrimination was also associated with depressive symptoms in a sample of American Indians in the upper Midwest. However, participation in traditional activities such as powwows, in addition to familiarity with tribal languages (reflecting measures of cultural identification), decreased the association between discrimination and depression.
- Found gender differences in the relationships among race-related stress, quality of life, and life satisfaction in a sample of elderly African Americans. Men in this sample had significantly higher scores than women for race-related stress in the context of institutional racism and collective racism.
- Discrimination can have biological effects at the microscopic level. A recent large study looked at the association between discrimination and leukocyte telomere length, a biological marker of aging. Both African American men and women who experienced high discrimination showed shorter telomeres.
Individuals in sexual minority groups may be at increased risk for suffering from mental disorders.
- Studies have shown that there is a higher prevalence of mental health disorders among lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations.
- Explanations for the increased prevalence may include sources of minority stress such as prejudice, stigmatization, and discrimination
Stress, Hormones, and Genes
STRESS, HORMONES, AND GENES – The newest contributions to our understanding of stress are in the area of genetic mechanisms determining how stress leads to disease.
GLUOCORTICOIDS – Play an important part in the breakdown of glucose and form in the adrenal cortex. One important mechanism involves a receptor for glucocorticoids.
- Glucocorticoids bind to their receptors, which in turn speeds up the release of antiinflammatory proteins in the cell.
CORTISOL – The most common glucocorticoid.
- A key outcome of Selye’s general adaption syndrome theory of stress.
- Large body of work linking harsh family environments to the modification of children’s genes.
- This reaction could eventually lead to increased sickness over time.
- A similar pattern occurs with the serotonin transporter gene in stressful situations people with a certain variation of the serotonin transporter gene are more likely to be depressed and show increased cardiovascular activity.
Are the Effects of Culture? – Korean nationals and American nationals completed measures of emotion regulation and were genotyped for OXTR. Kim et al. found that among Americans, those with one form of the OXTR gene used emotional suppression less than those with another type of gene allele, whereas Koreans showed the opposite pattern.
We Tend to Focus On Three Main Areas of Stress – Relationships, work, and the environment.
- Physical stressors also are present in today’s world. Millions of people around the world do not have enough food to eat or sufficient shelter.
- Many of us in North America do not experience these stressors but often create our own stressful worlds in our heads as we negotiate our situations of relationships and work.
Relationship Stress
RELATIONSHIP STRESS – Interacting with others can be potentially stressful.
- Adolescence period in particular is a transitional period during which the importance of the peer group increases as the importance of the family decreases.
- An unhealthy close relationship can be particularly problematic not just for your state of mind but for your physiology as well.
- Compared with those who remained together, the stress hormone levels (e.g., epinephrine) of divorced couples were 34% higher during conflict discussions and 22% higher throughout the day, and both epinephrine and norepinephrine levels were 16% higher at night.
FAMILY CYCLE HAS DISTINCT PHASES – Phases—partner selection, marital adjustment, raising and caring for children, having children leave the home, and retirement—each of which can be associated with stressors.
- The ways parents deal with stress can serve as critical models for how children deal with stress and can influence the children’s own health as well.
- A number of stress theories focus on family dynamics, that closely parallel Lazarus’ cognitive appraisal model described above.
- Family violence may be a more common problem for pregnant women than some conditions for which they are routinely screened and evaluated.
