Chapter 15

Health, Stress, and Coping

Health Psychology

• Study of ways to use behavioral principles to prevent illness and promote health

• Unhealthy behavior leads to half of all deaths in North America

Smoking

• Largest preventable cause of death

• Single most lethal behavioral risk factor

• 1 in 10 smokers have long-term success in quitting

Treatment Strategies

• Refusal skills learning: role-play refusal/resistance to peer pressure

• Life skills training: practice in stress reduction, self-protection, decision-making, social skills, self-control

Stress

• Problem if prolonged or severe

• Stressor – Event that challenges or threatens a person– Unpredictable events increase stress– Pressure increases stress– Lack of control increases stress

Burnout

• Emotional exhaustion

• Fatigued, apathetic, cynical, detachment from job

• Common in helping professions

• Helped with support systems

Threatening Situations

• Problem-focused coping: managing or altering the distressing situation itself

• Emotion-focused coping: people try to control emotions or reactions to the situation

• These can occur together

Frustration

• Negative emotional state when prevented from reaching desired goals

• External frustration: condition outside of individual (delays, rejection, loss)

• Personal frustration: based on personal characteristics (too short for basketball, poor grades for med school)

Reactions to Frustration

• Aggression: response made with intent of harm to person or object

• Displaced aggression: targets are safer, less likely to retaliate (unemployment increases and so does child abuse)

• Scapegoating: blaming person or groups for conditions not of their making (layoffs lead to increase in violence

• Escape: examples: dropping out of school, using drugs

Conflict

• Must choose between contradictory needs, desires, motives, or demands

• Approach-Approach Conflict: choose between 2 positive, desirable alternatives (e.g., 2 desserts); easiest to resolve

• Avoidance-Avoidance Conflict: choose between 2 negative alternatives (e.g., bad job vs. unemployment)

• Approach-Avoidance Conflict: attracted to and repelled by same goal (e.g., marry someone your parents don’t like)

Defense Mechanisms

• Denial: refuse to accept (death, illness)

• Repression: unconsciously prevent painful thoughts from entering awareness

• Reaction formation: exaggerate behavior opposite to what you feel (overprotective toward unwanted child)

• Regression: return to earlier, less demanding situations

Defense Mechanisms

• Projection: see own impulses, feelings in others• Rationalization: justify actions by giving false

reasons for them• Compensation: use against feeling of inferiority• Sublimation: work off frustrated desires through

socially accepted activities (channel aggression through boxing, lying through writing novels)

Learned Helplessness

• Seligman• Acquired inability to overcome obstacle and

avoid aversive stimuli• Divided box, dogs learn to jump to escape

shock; with warning, learn to leap to avoid shock; if prevented from escape first, don’t try to escape

• Model for depression: both have despondency, helplessness, powerlessness

Depression

• Consistent, negative opinion of self

• Frequent self-criticism and blame

• Negative interpretation of events that normally don’t bother you

• Future looks bleak

• Responsibilities feel overwhelming

Biofeedback

• Information given about ongoing bodily functions

• Leads to control of these functions

• Treatment for migraine

Cardiac Personality

• At high risk for cardiac disease• Type A personality: twice as much heart

disease as Type B• Type A: ambitious, competitive, achievement-

oriented, time urgency, • Hostility strongly correlated with increased risk of

heart attack, especially if it is bottled up.• Helped with decrease in mistrust, decreased

anger, increased consideration

Hardy Personality

• Resistanct to stress

• Sense of personal commitment to self, work, family, and other stabilizing values

• Feel control over their lives and the work

• See life as challenges rather than threats or problems