Psychology Stress Introduction, Stress and Stressors & Coping
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Introduction
We all experience stress, but we don’t all find the same situations stressful. Some people find flying in planes highly stressful, while others take up skydiving as a hobby. Some people thrive in fast-paced, deadline-heavy careers, while others prefer less stimulating work. Stress means different things for different people, and everyone has their own way of coping with it. In some cases, people can worry themselves sick—literally—and some research links stress directly to illness.
Today, most researchers use a biopsychosocial model to explain disease. According to the biopsychosocial model, physical illness results from a complicated interaction among biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors. In recent decades, the recognition that psychological factors can affect health has given rise to a new branch of psychology called health psychology. Health psychologists study ways of promoting and maintaining health. Their research focuses on the relationship between psychosocial factors and the emergence, progression, and treatment of illness.
Stress and Stressors
Stress is difficult to define because researchers approach it in different ways. Some use the term stress to refer to circumstances that threaten well-being or to refer to the response people have to threatening circumstances. Others think of stress as the process of evaluating and coping with threatening circumstances. Yet others use the term to refer to the experience of being threatened by taxing circumstances. This chapter will use the term stress in the last sense: the experience of being threatened by taxing circumstances.
Appraisal
Researchers agree that stress is subjective. People don’t have the same response to the same circumstances. Instead, stress depends on how people appraise or evaluate environmental events. If people believe that a challenge will severely tax or exceed their resources, they experience stress.
Types of Stressors
Stressors are psychologically or physically demanding events or circumstances. Research links stressors to increased susceptibility to physical illnesses such as heart disease as well as to psychological problems such as anxiety and depression.
Stressors don’t always increase the risk of illness. They tend to affect health more when they are chronic, highly disruptive, or perceived as uncontrollable. Researchers who study stress usually distinguish among three types of stressors:
- Catastrophic events: Large earthquakes, hurricanes, wars
- Major life changes, positive or negative: Marriage, divorce, death of a parent, beginning a new job, starting college
- Minor hassles: Standing in line, traffic jams, noisy environments
Health, Wealth, and Power
People who live in conditions of poverty and powerlessness have an increased risk of poor health. Many factors make such people more susceptible to illness. For instance, poor people tend to have low access to preventive care. When ill, they often do not have access to good medical care. Their nutrition tends to be poor, since high-fat, high-salt foods are cheaper and more easily available than many healthy foods. They also encounter many chronic environmental stressors, including high crime rates, discrimination, and poor housing conditions.
Internal Sources of Stress
Exposure to difficult circumstances doesn’t produce stress by itself. Rather, stress occurs when people experience frustration, conflict, or pressure:
- Frustration is the experience of being thwarted when trying to achieve a goal.
Example: A student worked very hard on a term paper with the hope of getting an A but ends up with a B.
- Conflict occurs when people have two or more incompatible desires or motives. Conflict can occur in three forms:
- The approach-approach conflict, the least stressful, occurs when people try to choose between two desirable alternatives.
Example: A student tries to decide between two interesting classes.
- The approach-avoidance conflict, typically more stressful and quite common, occurs when people must decide whether to do something that has both positive and negative aspects.
Example: A boy invites a girl to a party. She finds him attractive, but going to the party means she won’t have time to study for one of her final exams.
- The avoidance-avoidance conflict, also typically stressful, occurs when people have to choose between two undesirable options.
Example: Because of his financial situation, a man might have to choose whether to keep his nice-looking car, which breaks down frequently, or buy a badly dented, but reliable, used one.
- Pressure occurs when people feel compelled to behave in a particular way because of expectations set by themselves or others.
Example: A high school student wants to be accepted by the popular crowd at school, so she tries hard to distance herself from her old friends because the popular crowd considers them geeky or undesirable.
Coping
Coping refers to efforts to manage stress. Coping can be adaptive or maladaptive. Adaptive coping strategies generally involve confronting problems directly, making reasonably realistic appraisals of problems, recognizing and changing unhealthy emotional reactions, and trying to prevent adverse effects on the body. Maladaptive coping includes using alcohol or drugs to escape problems.
Some researchers believe that people have characteristic ways of coping, even in different sorts of situations. Other researchers believe that people use different coping styles in different situations and that people’s ways of coping change over time.
Coping Strategies
There are many different coping strategies. Some common ones include:
- Relaxation
- Humor
- Releasing pent-up emotions by talking or writing about them
- Exercise
- Getting social support
- Reappraising an event or changing perspective on the problem
- Spirituality and faith
- Problem solving
- Comparing oneself to others who are worse off
- Altruism or helping others
- Using defense mechanisms
- Aggressive behavior
- Self-indulgent behavior, such as overeating, smoking, and excessive use of alcohol or drugs
The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis
Several years ago, some researchers proposed the frustration-aggression hypothesis, which states that aggression is always caused by frustration. Today, researchers believe that frustration doesn’t always lead to aggression and that it can lead to other responses, such as apathy. However, frustration does sometimes lead to aggressive behavior.
Factors That Improve Coping
Some people cope more effectively than others. Some important factors that influence coping are social support, optimism, and perceived control:
- Social support: Many studies show that having good social support correlates with better physical and mental health. Researchers believe that supportive social networks buffer the effects of stressful circumstances. In stressful situations, a social network can provide a person with care and comfort, access to helpful resources, and advice about how to evaluate and manage problems.
- Optimism: A tendency to expect positive outcomes, optimism is associated with better physical health. Optimistic people are more likely to find social support, appraise events in less threatening ways, take good care of themselves when sick, and use active coping strategies that focus on problem solving.
- Perceived control: The term locus of control refers to people’s perception of whether or not they have control over circumstances in their lives. People with an internal locus of control tend to believe they have control over their circumstances. People with an external locus of control tend to believe that fate, luck, or other people control circumstances. Having an internal locus of control is associated with better physical and emotional health.
Primary and Secondary Control
Some researchers have pointed out that people in different cultures have different kinds of perceived control. The Western approach emphasizes the importance of primary control. When faced with a problematic situation, people in Western cultures tend to focus on changing the situation so that the problem no longer exists. A different approach, seen in many Asian cultures, emphasizes secondary control. When faced with a problematic situation, people in these cultures focus on accommodating the situation by changing their perspective on it. Both kinds of control can be beneficial.
