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Summary Stress, Coping & Health
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Summary of 12 pages for the course Social Psychology at U of W (includes diagrams)
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CHAPTER TWELVE: STRESS, COPING, & HEALTH● Questions that are crucial to the study of stress, coping, and health:
○ What happens after we live through a disaster or experience a traumatic event?
○ How do people fare following a brush with death?
○ Do the effects reverberate long afterward, producing lasting psychological or
physical illnesses?
○ Can many people manage to cope, even thrive, in the aftermath of harrowing
circumstances?
● Stress-producing events are widespread among all sectors of society:
○ Groups at especially high risk for stressful events include young and unmarried
people, immigrants, BIPOC individuals, and people of low socioeconomic status.
○ Women are more likely than men to experience sexual assault and child abuse,
but less likely to experience nonsexual assaults, accidents, disasters, fires, and
wartime combat.
● Clinician’s Illusion: an error regarding physicians’ overestimation of people’s fragility and
the underestimation of their resilience.
● Stress: a type of response consisting of tension, discomfort, or physical symptoms that
arise when a stressor strains our ability to cope effectively. Originally used by engineers
to describe stresses on materials and building structures; in 1944, stress found its way
into psychology literature.
● Stressor/Strain: a stimulus in the environment.
● Traumatic Event: a severe stressor that can produce long-term psychological or health
consequences.
● Three Interrelated and Complementary Ways to Approach Stress
○ 1) Stressors as Stimuli: focus on identifying different types of stressful events (ie.
job loss to combat); pinpointed categories of events that most of us find
dangerous and unpredictable.
■ Examples:
● First-year college and university students show a greater response
to negative life events than older men and women do.
● Pregnant women, who experience more anxiety and negative life
events during pregnancy, are more likely to deliver babies early.
● Retirees are more likely to develop lung cancer, suggesting that
stressful events like receiving a low income combined with having
physical disabilities, can produce cumulative effects.
● Victims of natural disasters can suffer collective trauma or
collective strain that damages their bonds or unifies communities;
can increase social awareness and cement interpersonal bonds.
, ○ 2) Stress as a Transaction: examines how people interpret and cope with
stressful events; as stress is subjective, people’s varied reactions to the same
event suggest that stress can be viewed as a transaction between people and
their environments. Richard Lazarus and colleagues identified that a critical
factor influencing how the experience of an event is determined as stressful or
not through appraisals:
■ Primary Appraisal: after encountering a potentially threatening event, we
decide whether the event is harmful.
■ Secondary Appraisal: how well we can cope with an event.
■ If we believe we can’t cope, we experience a full-blown stress reaction.
■ Problem-Focused Coping: tackling life’s challenges head on – example:
receiving a disappointing grade, analyzing why we fell short, and devising
a plan to improve performance on the next exam.
■ Emotion-Focused Coping: placing a positive spin on our feelings or
predicaments and engaging in behaviours to reduce painful emotions –
example: self-assurance and re-entering the dating arena after a breakup.
○ 3) Stress as a Response: assessment of people’s psychological and physical
reactions to stressful circumstances. Scientists expose subjects to
stress-producing stimuli or study people who’ve encountered real-life stressors,
then measure a host of outcome variables
■ Examples of Outcome Variables: stress-related feelings of depression,
hopelessness, and hostility, or physiological responses such as increased
heart rate and release of corticosteroids (stress hormones) that activate
in the body and prepare us for stressful circumstances.
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