Download Stress and Health (1)

Stress and Health
• Brainstorm 2-3 different stressors you
encounter in a regular school day. Come
up with at least two ways to cope.
Stress and Causes of Death
Prolonged stress combined with unhealthy
behaviors may increase our risk for one of
today's four leading diseases.
Behavioral Medicine
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) claim that half
of the deaths in the US are due to people’s
behaviors (smoking, alcoholism, unprotected sex,
insufficient exercise, drugs, and poor nutrition).
Psychologists and physicians have thus
developed an interdisciplinary field of behavioral
medicine that integrates behavioral knowledge
with medical knowledge.
Health Psychology
Health psychology is a field of psychology that
contributes to behavioral medicine. The field
studies stress-related aspects of disease and asks
the following questions:
1. How do emotions and personality factors
influence the risk of disease?
2. What attitudes and behaviors prevent illness
and promote health and well-being?
3. How do our perceptions determine stress?
4. How can we reduce or control stress?
FEAR
●Learned through conditioning and observation
o Conditioning – associating emotions
with specific situations
o Observation – watching others display
fear in response to certain events or
surroundings
●Biology of fear
o We are biologically predisposed to learn to
fear particular items because the fear response
helps us survive
o Amygdala – key role in associating emotions with
specific situations
 If damaged, emotion is NOT associated with the situation, so the
ANGER
●What makes us angry?
oMany different factors…anything from
misdeeds of loved ones to aches and pains
●Is anger good or bad?
oChronic hostility is linked to heart disease
oControlled expression of anger can be
good…better than pent up anger or irrational
anger
ANGER
●Catharsis Hypothesis – releasing aggressive
energy relieves aggressive urges
o Research has shown that expressing anger can be
temporarily calming, yet it usually does not clear the
feelings of rage
 Need to be careful of how much rage is expressed and how
often…expression of anger can lead to more hostility and
cruelty due to reinforcement we experience (expression of
anger can become a habitual behavior)
Happiness
●People who are happy perceive the world
as safer, make decisions more easily, are
more cooperative and live happier, more
satisfied lives
o Feel-good, do-good phenomenon – people tend to be
helpful to others when they are in a good mood
Happiness
o Adaption-level phenomenon – our tendency to judge
various stimuli as relative to those we have previously
experienced
 We adjust our neutral levels and then notice and react to
variations up or down from these levels
 So if you won the lottery tomorrow, according to this principle,
you would have a sere of happiness initially, but then you
would adapt to the new lifestyle and come to consider it as
your “new” normal and require something even better to give
another surge of
The Stress Response System
Canon proposed that
the stress response
(fast) was a fight-orflight response marked
by the outpouring of
epinephrine and
norepinephrine from the
inner adrenal glands,
increasing heart and
respiration rates,
mobilizing sugar and
fat, and dulling pain.
The Stress
Response
System
The hypothalamus
and the pituitary
gland also respond to
stress (slow) by
triggering the outer
adrenal glands to
secrete glucocorticoids
(cortisol).
General Adaptation Syndrome
EPA/ Yuri Kochetkov/ Landov
A stress response to any kind of
stimulation is similar. The stressed individual goes
through three phases.
Stress and Physical Health
• Psychophysiological Illness:
– Stress which creates physical illness.
(Hypertension and headaches).
• Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI):
– The study of how psychological, neural, and
endocrine processes together affect the
immune system and health.
Stress and Heart Disease
• Frequent or chronic stress can cause damage to
the heart and blood vessels
• Type A personality
– Competitive, hard-driving, impatient, verbally
aggressive, and anger-prone people
– Respond to life events with impatience and hostility
– Correlated with development of heart disease
• Type B personality
– Relaxed and easygoing
Stress and the Immune System
Lennart Nilsson/ Boehringer Ingelhein International GmbH
B lymphocytes (white blood cells) fight bacterial
infections, T lymphocytes attack cancer cells and
viruses, and microphages ingest foreign
substances. During stress, energy is mobilized
away from the immune system making it
vulnerable.
Stress and Colds
People with the highest life stress scores were also
the most vulnerable when exposed to an
experimental cold virus.
Stress and AIDS
Stress and negative emotions may accelerate the
progression from human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV) to acquired immune deficiency syndrome
(AIDS).
UNAIDS/ G. Pirozzi
Stress and Immune Conditioning
If the immune system can be suppressed through
conditioning, researchers believe that immuneenhancing responses can be inculcated to combat
viral diseases.
Little Albert Reading/Reflection
20 PTS
• Read the Little Albert study and
summarize the study in a paragraph.
• In a second paragraph connect this study
to your life. Using our understanding of
emotion and our fear response,
summarize how you experience fear.