Personality part 6 Flashcards
(26 cards)
What is 🌐 Interactional Model
Objective events → Coping responses (influenced by Personality) → Physiological arousal → Illness
🔑 Core idea:
“Personality factors determine the impact of events by moderating (influencing) the relationship between stress and illness through the coping response.”
🧠 Analogy:
Imagine stress like a traffic jam. The event (traffic) is the same for everyone, but how people cope depends on their personality:
A calm person might put on music and chill (healthy coping).
A high-strung person might yell and stress out (unhealthy coping).
The calm person’s physiological arousal (heart rate, hormones, etc.) stays low, reducing the risk of stress-related illness. The anxious person’s arousal skyrockets, increasing illness risk.
🧪 Example (from the slide):
“Healthy participants were all exposed to the same virus (via nasal drops), but those who scored higher in sociability showed stronger immune responses.”
🧬 Being sociable likely helped these individuals manage stress more effectively, which in turn boosted their immune system — a clear illustration of how personality influences illness through coping mechanisms.
Explain 🔁 Transactional Model
🧩 Key flow:
Objective events → Appraisal (interpretation) → Coping responses & Physiological arousal → Illness
🔑 Core idea:
“The interpretation of the event plays a very important role in this model (cognitive theories), and also the selection, evocation… of environments (behavioural theories).”
🧠 Analogy:
Think of your brain as a filter. Two people stuck in the same traffic jam:
One thinks “It’s okay, I’ll listen to a podcast.”
The other thinks “This is ruining my day!”
They experience the same stressor, but their appraisal (mental interpretation) changes how their body reacts and how they cope. Personality influences this appraisal.
So:
Cognitive theory = your thoughts change your stress level.
Behavioural theory = your personality might cause you to end up in more or fewer stressful environments.
______________________________________
🧠 Cognitive theory = how you interpret a situation influences how stressful it feels to you.
🏃♂️ Behavioural theory = your personality traits shape the kinds of environments or situations you tend to face — which can increase or reduce your stress exposure.
Explain 🧍♀️ Health Behaviour Model
🔄 Key flow:
Personality → Health behaviours, Appraisal, Coping responses → Illness (via Physiological arousal)
🔑 Core idea:
“This model adds that personality does not directly influence the stress–illness relationship but that personality affects the health indirectly through health-promoting or health-degrading behaviours. Mediating the relationship between personality and illness (these health behaviours).”
🧠 Analogy:
Personality is like a lifestyle compass. A conscientious person might:
Sleep well
Eat healthy
Exercise
Avoid alcohol
While someone more impulsive might:
Eat junk food
Avoid exercise
Smoke
Even if they both get stressed, their health behaviours (mediated by personality) make one more likely to stay healthy.
Explain 🧬 Predisposition Model
🧠 Key flow:
Predisposition → Physiological responsiveness → Personality & Illness
🔑 Core idea:
“Personality and illness as expressions of an underlying predisposition. (Different from previous models)”
🧠 Analogy:
Imagine your genetics like a foundation of a building. If there’s a flaw in the foundation (e.g., high SNS activation — sympathetic nervous system), it can cause:
Cracks in the wall = personality traits like neuroticism
Plumbing leaks = illness like hypertension
So here, both personality and illness stem from the same cause (predisposition), rather than personality causing illness.
🧪 Example:
“Amplified activation of the SNS, cause of behaviours and emotions that lead a person to be called neurotic and may be the cause of subsequent illnesses.”
Explain the 🧠 Illness Behaviour Model
🔁 Key flow:
Ordinary bodily sensations → Increased sensitivity and attention → Interpreted as illness → Influences health behaviours and shaped by personality → Can lead to actual illness
_____________________________
🔑 Core ideas:
“Illness as the presence of an objectively measurable abnormal physiological process (such as fever, high blood pressure…).”
“Illness behaviour as the action that people take when they think they have an illness (Different ways of paying attention to the same sensations).”
_____________________________
🔑 Core ideas (rephrased):
“Illness refers to a biologically measurable dysfunction in the body (like high blood pressure or a fever).”
“Illness behaviour describes the actions people take when they believe they are sick — based on how they pay attention to and interpret bodily signals.”
🧠 Analogy:
Picture you and a friend both notice a mild flutter in your chest:
You shrug it off.
Your friend worries, searches symptoms online, and books a doctor’s visit.
Even though the sensation was the same, how you each perceived and responded to it — shaped by personality — led to different outcomes.
This model highlights how personality affects what sensations mean to us and how we behave because of them.
Stress – The Concept
🔸 Definition of Stress (highlighted):
“The subjective feeling triggered by events that are perceived as uncontrollable and threatening to one’s goals. It is a response to the perceived demands of a situation.”
Intuitive analogy: Imagine trying to juggle flaming swords on a tightrope while someone keeps adding more swords and shaking the rope. Stress is the feeling you get when you think you’re about to fall and can’t control the situation.
🔸 Main Concept:
“A feeling of being overwhelmed by events that you cannot seem to control and that threaten an important goal.”
This is a subjective experience — it’s about how your brain interprets a situation, not necessarily the actual difficulty of the situation.
🔸 Stressors:
“This feeling is caused by stressors with several common attributes:”
They tend to be extreme (overwhelming or overloaded).
They threaten an important goal.
They are perceived as uncontrollable or beyond your influence.
Explain the Stress Response
🔸 Fight-or-Flight:
“Pattern of emotional and physiological reactions accompanying stress (the fight-or-flight response).”
Think of it like your body hitting the panic button: your heart races, breathing quickens, and muscles tense — ready to fight or run.
🔸 Acute vs Chronic:
Key distinction: stress responses to a specific stimulus (like being honked at) versus chronic stimuli (ongoing stressors).
🔸 General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS):
A model with 3 stages:
Alarm stage: Immediate fight-or-flight reaction.
Endurance stage: You keep using energy to handle the stress, even if the danger is gone.
Exhaustion stage: Resources are depleted — this is where illness is most likely.
Analogy: Imagine sprinting to escape a lion (alarm), running a marathon to stay ahead (endurance), then collapsing from exhaustion (exhaustion stage).
🔸 General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS):
A model with 3 stages:
A model with 3 stages:
Alarm stage: Immediate fight-or-flight reaction.
Endurance stage: You keep using energy to handle the stress, even if the danger is gone.
Exhaustion stage: Resources are depleted — this is where illness is most likely.
Analogy: Imagine sprinting to escape a lion (alarm), running a marathon to stay ahead (endurance), then collapsing from exhaustion (exhaustion stage).
Explain Major Life Events in stress
“Events that require people to make major adjustments in their lives and are likely to evoke stress.”
🔸 The greater the stress, the greater the likelihood of illness.
E.g. People exposed to a virus have a weaker immune response if they’re already under high stress.
🔸 Daily Hassles:
Small, annoying things that pile up over time:
“These may accumulate and evoke a similar response.”
Imagine having a pebble in your shoe. One isn’t bad, but 100 pebbles? That’s daily hassles — and they wear you down.
Explain Varieties of Stress
Types of Stress:
Acute stress: This is your body’s fast, automatic response to a sudden challenge or threat — like slamming on the brakes to avoid a car accident. It kicks in quickly and ends quickly. It’s your “emergency mode.”
Episodic acute stress: This is like having mini-emergencies over and over again — constant last-minute homework, repeated arguments, or nonstop deadlines. Each one is short, but they keep coming back, and that wears you out.
Traumatic stress: This comes from a single, very intense, often life-threatening event — like being in a natural disaster or serious accident. It can leave lasting effects on the brain and body, sometimes leading to PTSD.
Chronic stress: This is stress that doesn’t go away — like ongoing financial problems, a toxic relationship, or a long illness. It keeps pushing on you day after day until you’re completely drained.
Important Notes:
🔸 Stress adds up over time.
Think of it like carrying weight — one bag is manageable, but more bags get heavier and heavier until you can’t hold them anymore.
🔸 Everyone handles stress differently.
One person might break down over a single stressful event, while another might manage several and still keep going. It depends on your personality, history, biology, and resources.
Explain Primary and Secondary Appraisal
“Stress as a subjective reaction to potential stressors.”
This means stress isn’t caused just by what happens — it’s about how you see it. The same event can be stressful for one person and not stressful at all for another.
“Stress is not an inherent feature of the event, but a response-dependent feature.”
In other words, a situation doesn’t come with stress built in — your response is what creates the stress. Like a test: the test isn’t stressful on its own — it becomes stressful depending on how you think about it.
🌱 Lazarus’ Cognitive Appraisal Theory
For stress to happen, your brain must go through two thought steps:
Primary Appraisal – “Is this a threat to me or my goals?”
You’re checking: Is this bad? Is this dangerous? Could I fail?
Secondary Appraisal – “Can I handle it?”
You’re checking: Do I have enough time, knowledge, energy, or support to deal with it?
You feel stressed when the answer to both is YES:
“Yes, it’s a threat” + “No, I can’t handle it.”
🧠 Example: Same Test, Different Thoughts
Student A: “I’m totally unprepared and I’ll fail.”
→ Sees the test as a threat, and thinks they don’t have the resources to cope → Stress.
Student B: “It’s a hard test, but I studied and can handle it.”
→ Sees the test as manageable, even if it’s tough → No stress.
Coping Strategies and Styles
Coping strategies are the different ways people respond to and manage stress. Just like people have different personalities, they also have different ways of dealing with hard situations.
Explain The Attributional Style
This is about how we explain why things happen to us — it’s about the “story” we tell ourselves after a stressful event.
➤ “Attributional Style”
“A way of reformulating or framing Learned Helplessness.”
It explains whether someone sees a bad event as something they can control or not. There are 3 dimensions:
Internal vs. External: Is it my fault or someone else’s?
Stable vs. Unstable: Will this always happen or was it just this time?
Global vs. Specific: Does it affect everything in my life, or just one area?
These 3 dimensions combine to form two general styles:
🟢 Optimistic Attributional Style
“Good predictor of good health, fewer visits to the doctor…”
Bad things are seen as temporary, specific, and not your fault.
E.g., “I failed the test because I didn’t sleep well. Next time I’ll do better.”
🔴 Pessimistic Attributional Style
“Some tendency to die at a younger age.”
Bad things are seen as permanent, widespread, and your fault.
E.g., “I failed the test because I’m stupid and I always fail.”
👉 Your attributional style shapes how you deal with stress — and even your long-term health.
Explain The Dispositional Optimism
“The expectation that good events will be plentiful in the future, and that bad events will be rare in the future.”
Think of this as your default mindset about the future.
🔬 Research Findings:
Optimists heal faster and handle pain better.
“Who healed faster?”
Optimism leads to better health behaviours (e.g., eating well, exercising).
“Stressful events are less stressful for optimists, who are also less biologically reactive…”
That means their bodies stay calmer under pressure — less heart strain, lower inflammation, etc.
“Good predictor of good health, fewer visits to the doctor…”
“Even in epidemiological studies, less likelihood of developing coronary heart disease or dying from any cause.”
The Management of Emotions in stress
Sometimes emotions help us, and sometimes they control us.
“Sometimes we have emotions, and sometimes emotions have us.”
Emotional Inhibition
“This can be normal and adaptive, but also…”
Inhibition means holding emotions in — like pretending you’re fine when you’re not. This can be helpful short-term (like staying calm in a crisis), but harmful if done too often.
Evolutionary perspective:
“As a very useful skill learned in childhood.”
Imagine a toddler throwing a tantrum in public. They learn over time to control emotions — that’s useful! But…
“The repression of emotion requires an effort and therefore a physiological cost (greater activation of the ANS or, if it is constant, chronic activation), greater stress.”
So always bottling up emotions makes your body work harder = more stress.
Freud’s talking cure was based on “the expression of these inhibited negative emotions (‘the talking cure’)”.
Bottom line: expressing emotion = better health!!!!!!
Explain Disclosure in stress
“If keeping things to ourselves can be a source of stress and be harmful…”
Then the opposite helps:
“Telling someone about a private aspect of oneself… can be a healing process.”
Trauma & Health:
“One of the main goals of emergency psychologists is to get people to talk, to narrate what they feel and not to withdraw into themselves (better prognosis, fewer health problems).”
Even in experiments:
“Participants who narrated or wrote about traumatic or very stressful situations had better health outcomes… than those who narrated or wrote about trivial topics.”
“Reinterpretation and understanding of the event.”
You heal by giving meaning to what happened.
“Moreover, apparently it makes no difference how we put our feelings into words, be it talking to a parent, a friend, the priest, or if we write it down…”
What is a Personality Disorder?
🔑 Definition:
“Maladaptive variations of all the individual differences discussed.”
Think of personality traits as flavors in ice cream. A bit of bitterness might be okay — some people like it (e.g., introversion). But if it’s so bitter no one can eat it (e.g., extreme introversion + paranoia), then it becomes a maladaptive version — something that causes problems instead of helping you cope.
🔁 Maladaptive = traits or behaviors that don’t help someone adapt to life or social environments.
📈 There’s a visual of a normal distribution curve — this is to show that extreme values on a spectrum of personality traits may signal a disorder. Personality Disorders = extreme, inflexible traits.
The Concept of (Psychological) Disorder (Clinical)
🔑 Key Definition (important for exams):
“A pattern of behaviour or experience that is distressing and painful to the person, that leads to disability or impairment in important life domains, and that is associated with increased risk for further suffering, loss of function, death, or confinement.”
This definition is from the DSM-5-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) — the standard used by clinicians to diagnose mental disorders.
Historical context:
Philippe Pinel: “manie sans délire” = madness without loss of reason
Kurt Schneider: Statistical rarity — disorders are behaviors that are rare and harmful to individuals and society.
These were early attempts to define “abnormality.”
🔑 Key Terms: What is abnormal in (Psychological) Disorder?
Statistical definition = how rare a behavior is.
Imagine most people are between 5’0”–6’5”. Someone 8 feet tall would be statistically rare — like extreme behaviors are in psychology.
Social norm definition = what society accepts.
Wearing pajamas to a wedding might not be “ill” but it’s socially weird. Same idea with behavior society finds “unacceptable.”
Psychological definition = how it feels and works inside the person:
Subjective feelings = like always feeling hopeless or afraid.
Thoughts = like thinking your food is poisoned without reason (disorganized).
Behaviors = like avoiding all people out of fear (maladaptive).
“Key role of culture, gender, age!!!”
What counts as abnormal depends on the situation.
For example, hearing voices might mean schizophrenia in one country, but be seen as talking to ancestors in another.
🧭 Categorical vs Dimensional Model (critical for tests)
“Traditionally, the DSM had a categorical view (there is a qualitative break between people who have a disorder and those who do not).”
Imagine flipping a light switch — it’s either on or off. That’s the categorical view: you either have a disorder or you don’t — like being pregnant, there’s no “kind of.”
But…
“The scientific community accepts a dimensional view rather than a categorical view.”
Now think of a dimmer switch — the light gets brighter or dimmer, not just on or off. Mental traits work the same: more or less, not yes/no.
“What does this perspective imply?”
It means disorders come in degrees — mild, moderate, severe — and traits can overlap across disorders.
🔬 The Dimensional Model of Psychological Disorders
“Take a little bit of this trait, a pinch of the other, push it to the extreme and… a personality disorder.”
Think of it like cooking a bad dish:
A spoon of introversion
A lot of neuroticism
A pinch of paranoia
🍲 Result? Avoidant Personality Disorder — too extreme to function well.
“The difference between normal and abnormal is not qualitative but a question of degree.”
It’s about how much of the trait you have, not whether it’s “normal” or “not.”
“This allows a person to present ‘peaks’ in the traits corresponding to more than one disorder (as opposed to differential diagnoses).”
Like mixing flavors, people can show traits from different disorders at once — not fit neatly into one label.
Mention the 3 clusters of Specific Personality Disorders
🟣 Cluster A: The Eccentric Cluster (different, odd…)
🔴 Cluster B: The Erratic Cluster (unpredictable, emotional, violent)
🔵 Cluster C: The Anxious Cluster (restless, fearful, distressed…)
🟣 Cluster A: The Eccentric Cluster (different, odd…)
Schizoid Personality Disorder:
(Related to schizophrenia
(related to disconnection from
reality, hallucinations, loss of
interest in areas of life, apathy,
perceptual errors, delusions…).
These are people who feel detached from reality or others — like they’re always on the outside looking in.) –> Schizoid and Schizotypal
🧊 Schizoid Personality Disorder:
Like a person who prefers to live in a quiet cabin, far from society.
No desire for intimate relationships
Apathy, detachment
–> No desire for intimate relationships (including friendships), lack of
meaning attached to social life, inclination to apathy, socially
awkward, passive when confronted with unpleasant events.
Socially awkward (but not anxious — just not interested)
–> Anxious in social relations (which does not tend to improve with familiarity with
the group), distant and with a certain tendency to be suspicious of others, odd
or eccentric (believing in superstitions, extrasensory perceptions…).
🌀 Schizotypal Personality Disorder:
Like a wizard who believes in magical energies and talks in riddles.
Disorganized thoughts/language
Unusual perceptions (e.g., “I feel a presence around me”)
Borderline hallucinations, magical thinking
🔐 Paranoid Personality Disorder:
Like someone who always thinks others are spying on them.
Extremely distrustful, thinks people want to hurt them
Prone to jealousy and misinterpretation of others
Hostile, resentful, aggressive in relationships
🔴 Cluster B: The Erratic Cluster (unpredictable, emotional, violent)
These personalities are dramatic, impulsive, and have intense emotions.
😈 Antisocial Personality Disorder
Like a con artist or rule-breaker with no guilt.
Lack of remorse, lying, impulsivity
Disregards others’ rights, often manipulative or reckless
🪞 Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Like someone obsessed with their own reflection.
Need to be admired
Feels superior, lacks empathy
What about self-esteem? Often fragile underneath arrogance
⚡️ Borderline Personality Disorder
Like an emotional rollercoaster that can’t stop.
Instability in:
Relationships (hot/cold, fear of abandonment)
Emotions (extreme mood swings)
Self-image (identity confusion)
Self-harm, suicide attempts (to cope or feel something)
🎭 Histrionic Personality Disorder
Like an actor who always wants to be center stage.
Dramatic, flirtatious, attention-seeking
Easily influenced, superficial — emotions feel exaggerated
Easily influenced, superficial
🔵 Cluster C: The Anxious Cluster (restless, fearful, distressed…)
These people are very sensitive to fear, rejection, or criticism.
😨 Avoidant Personality Disorder:
Like someone too scared to go to a party because they’re sure no one likes them.
(Feeling of inadequacy and sensitivity to criticism from others
(doing everything possible to avoid situations of potential criticism).
Fear of rejection)
Very low self-esteem
Fear of rejection
Avoids social situations → isolation
But avoiding anxiety leads to other problems
related to the avoidance of social situations (loss of
opportunities, difficulties in social interaction).
👶 Dependent Personality Disorder:
Like a person who clings to others like a child to a parent.
Excessive need to be taken care of
Can’t make decisions alone
Stays in abusive relationships
Needs support, avoids conflict to stay “safe”
🧹 Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (not OCD)
Like a boss who cares more about work than birthdays or fun.
Excessively preoccupied with order and perfection
Inflexibility, devotion to work at the cost of friendships or leisure
(Unlike OCD, they don’t have specific obsessions or rituals — just rigid standards)
