chapter 11 Notes

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Stress, Health and Human Flourishing Notes from the textbook

STRESS AND HEALTH

- Stress often strikes without warning

Stress: Some Basic Concepts - To psychologists a STRESSOR is a stressful situation or event

- A stress reaction is someones physical and emotional response

- Stress is the process of appraising and responding to a threatening or challenging event

- Stress arises less from events themselves than from how we appraise them

- When short-lived or when thought of as a challenge, stressors can have positive effects

- A momentary stress can mobilize the immune system for fending off infections and healing wounds

- Stress arouses and motivates us to conquer problems

- Some stress early in life is conducive to later emotional resilience

- extreme or prolonged stress can harm us

- Children who suffer severe or prolonged abuse are later at risk of chronic disease

- Troops with PTSD later suffered greatly elevated rates of circulatory, respritory, digestive, and infectious diseases

- People who lose their jobs, especially later in their working life, are at increased risk of heart problems and death

Stressors: Things That Push Our Buttons

- Stressors can be categorized into three main types: Catastrophes, Significant Life Changes, and Daily Hassles

Catastrophes are unpredictable largescale events, like wars, earthquakes and famines. After such events, damage to emotional and physical health can be significant

- For those who respond to catastrophes by relocating to another country, the stress is twofold. The trauma of uprooting and family separation combine with the challenges of adjusting to the new culture's language, ethnicity, climate and social norms

- In the first half-year, before their morale begins to rebound, newcomers often experience culture shock and deteriorating well-being

Significant Life Changes can be things like leaving home, divorcing, losing a job, having a loved one die, getting married, can be stressful

- Many of these transitions happen during young adulthood

- A cluster of crises such as losing a job, home, and partner all at once means that people will be more at risk

Daily Hassles include rush-hour traffic, aggravating housemates, long lines at the store, many things to do, family frustrations, etc.

- In 2008/9, Americans more often said stressors related to money, work, and the economy. In impoverished areas, such stressors are part of daily life.

- Prejudice and racism can also be stressors

The Stress Response System

- Medical interest in stress dates back to Hippocrates.

- In the 1920s, Walter Cannon confirmed that stress response is part of a unified mind-body system.

- He observed that extreme cold, lack of oxygen, and emotion arousing events all trigger an outpouring of the stress hormones eipinephrine and norepinephrine from the core of the adrenal glands.

- When alerted by any of a number of brain pathways, the sympathetic nervous system arouses us, preparing the body for Fight or Flight. It increases heart rate and respiration, diverts blood from digestion to the skeletal muscles, dulls feelings of pain, and releases sugar and fat from the body's stores

- Canadian scientist Hans Selye's research extended Cannon's findings.

- Selye proposed that the body's adaptive response to stress is so general that it sounds no matter what intrudes.

- He named this response the General Adaption Syndrome (GAS), and stated that it had three phases

- Phase 1 is called the Alarm Reaction. Your sympathetic nervous system is suddenly activiated. Your heart rate zooms. Blood is diverted to your skeletal muscles. You feel the faintness of shock

- Phase 2 is the Resistance. Your temperature, blood pressure, and respiration will remain high while your adrenal glands pump hormones into your bloodstream. You are fully engaged, summoning all your resources to meet the challenge.

- Phase 3 is called Exhaustion. It occurs after time passes when your body's reserves have dwindled. You will become more vulnerable to illness, collapse, and death.

- Selye's basic point is that although the human body copes well with temporary stress, prolonged stress can damage it.

- Even stressed rats have been shown to die sooner than more confident siblings

- There are 3 other options when dealing with stress. 1) become paralyzed with fear 2) withdraw, pull back, and conserve energy 3) tend-and-befriend which is found especially among women

- When facing stress, men often withdraw socially, turn to alcohol or become aggressive

- Women often nurture and band together

- This may be in part due to oxytocin, a stress-moderating hormone associated with pair-bonding in humans and released by cuddling, massage, and breast-feeding in humans.

- When stress is momentary, the cost is small. When stress persists, we may pay a much higher price, with lowered resistance to infections and other threats to mental and physical well being.

Stress and Illness - To study how stress and healthy and unhealthy behaviors influence health and illness, psychologists and physicians have created the interdisciplinary fields of behavioral medicine, integrating behavioral and medical knowledge. One sub field, health psychology, provides psychology's contribution to behavioral medicine. another, psychoneuroimmunology, focuses on mind body interactions.

- Our psychological states have physiological effects

- Stress can leave you less able to fight off disease because your nervous and endocrine systems influence your immune system

- Our four major types of cells are:

B lymphocytes (white blood cells) mature in the bone marrow and release antibodies that fight bacterial infections

T lymphocytes (white blood cells) that mature in the theymus and other lympathic tissue and attack cancer cells, viruses, and foreign substances

Macrophages identify, pursue, and ingest harmful invaders and worn-out cells

Natural Killer cells pursue diseased cells

- Your age, nutrition, genetics, body temperature, and stress all influence your immune systems activity

- Your immune system and err in two directions: 1. Responding too strongly, the immune system may attack the body's own tissues, causing an allergic reaction or a self-attacking disease like lupus, multiple sclerosis, or some forms of arthritis. Women are more susceptible to self-attacking diseases. 2. Underacting, the immune system may allow a bacterial infection to flare, a dormant virus to erupt, or cancer cells to multiply. When transplanting organs, surgeons may deliberately suppress the patient's immune system.

- Stress can also trigger immune suppression by reducing the release of disease-fighting lymphocytes. This has been observed when animals were stressed by physical restraint, electric shocks, etc.

- One six-month study monitored immune responses in 43 monkeys. Half were left in a stable group. The others were stressed by being housed with new roommates, 3 or 4 new monkeys each month. By the end of the study, the socially disrupted studies had weaker immune systems.

- Surgical wounds heal more slowly in stressed people

- Stressed people are more vulnerable to colds.

- This is because stress uses up your body's energy stores and doesn't allow them to work in your immune system

- Stress does not make us sick, but it does alter our immune functioning which leaves us less able to resist infection.

- AIDS has become the world's fourth-leading cause of death and Africa's number-one killer

- If a disease is spread by human contact and if it kills slowly, it will be lethal to more people

- Those who aquire HIV often don't know it for a few weeks. Worldwide, 2.7 million people (slightly more than half are women), became infected without their awareness

- Years after the initial infection, people have difficulty fighting off other diseases such as pneumonia

- More than 25 million people have died of AIDS

- HIV-infected men who experience stressful events exhibit somewhat greater immune suppression and travel a faster disease course

- Efforts to reduce stress would help to control the disease, but the benefits are small compared with available drug treatments. Preventing HIV infection is a far better option

- The focus of many educational programs are the ABCs standing for Abstinence, Be faithful, and use Condoms) they have had seeming success in Uganda

- To explore a possible connection between stress and cancer, experimenters have implanted tumor cells/given rodents carcinogens. They then exposed the rodents to stress (like electrical shock) which weakened their immune systems. Those rodents were indeed more prone to developing cancer

- The results are mixed on it this applies to humans

- Some studies have found that peope are at increased risk for cancer within a year after experiencing depression, helplessness, or bereavement. In one large Swedish study, the risk of colon cancer was 5.5 times greater among people with workplace stress than others without it

- Other studeis have found no link. Concentration camp survivors and former POW do not have elevated cancer rates

- A danger in hyping reports on emotions and cancer is that some patients may then blame themselves for their illness

- Stress does not create cancer cells. At worst, it may affect their growth by weakening the body's natural defenses against ultiplying malignant cells

- Research consistently indicates that psychotherapy does not extend cancer patients' survival

- Stress is closely linked to coronary heart disease

- Coronary heart disease is North America's #1 killer

- Hypertension and a family history of the disease increase the risk of coronoary heart disease

- Behavioral factors that increase risk are smoking, obesity, high-fat diet, physical inactivity, physiological factors: an elevated cholesterol level, and psychological factors: an elevated choloestoral level, and psychological factors: stress responses and personality traits

- In a classic study, Friedman & Rosenman tested the idea that stress increases heart disease risk by measuring the blood cholesterol level and

Tips on Handling Anger COPING WITH STRESS

Personal Control

Optimism Versus Pessimism, Social Support Friends Are Pets, Too REDUCING STRESS

Aerobic Exercise Relaxation and Meditation Faith Communities and Health HAPPINESS

Positive Psychology What Affects Our Wellbeing? What Predicts Our Happiness Levels? Want to Be Happier?