Chapter 11: Stress and Psychological Health

Daily hassles lead to feelings of:

1. Pressure
2. Frustration caused by delay, losses, failure, lack of resources, discrimination
3. Conflict
There are three types of conflict:
1. Approach/approach
2. Avoidance/avoidance
3. Approach/avoidance
Evaluative processes of events require:
1. Primary appraisal (how relevant)
2. Secondary appraisal (is it controllable)
3. Coping response (regulatory flexibility: the way we respond to stressful situations)
People that are better able to cope with stress:
1. Optimists
2. People with an internal locus of control
3. People with hardiness
4. People with resilience
Coping strategies:
1. Direct coping
2. Defensive coping
Direct coping:
1. Confrontation
2. Compromise
3. Withdrawal
Defensive coping:
1. Denial
2. Repression
3. Projection
4. Identification
5. Regression
6. Intellectualization
7. Reaction formation
 8. Displacement
9. Sublimation
Hans Selye claims that we react to physical and psychological stress in 3 stages.
General adaptation syndrome:
1. Alarm reaction
2. Resistance
3. Exhaustion

Staying Healthy through

I. Reduce stress:
1. Calm down:
 Exercise
 Expressive writing: expressing one’s feelings in writing
 Relaxation training
 Breathing exercises
2. Reach out (social support):
 Informational support: giving good advice
 Emotional support: help them feel better about themselves
 Tangible support: providing assistance in chores…
 Belonging support: hanging out
3. Religion and altruism
4. Learn to cope effectively
 Proactive coping
 Positive reappraisal
 Humor
II. Adopt a healthy lifestyle:
1. Diet (well balanced and nutritious)
2. Exercise (regular aerobic exercise)
3. Quit smoking:
 Prescription antidepressant medications
 Nicotine substitutes: chewing gums, patches, inhalers
 Modifying the environment that they have come to associate with smoking
 Quitting cold turkey
4. Avoid high-risk behavior
Sources of extreme stress:
1. Unemployment
2. Divorce and separation
3. Bereavement
 First myth: people should be intensely distressed when a loved one dies
  Second myth: people need to work through their grief
 Third myth: people who find meaning in the death, who come to a spiritual or
existential understanding of why it happened, cope better than those who do not.
 Fourth myth: people should recover from the loss within a year or so
4. Catastrophes:
 Shock phase
 Suggestible stage
 Recovery stage
5. Combat and other threatening personal attacks
 Chapter 12: Psychological Disorders
Perspective on psychological disorders:
1. Society
2. Individual
3. Mental health professional
Models of abnormal behavior:
1. Biological model: the view that psychological disorder has a physiological basis usually
stemming from hereditary factors.
2. Psychodynamic model: the view that psychological disorders are due to unresolved
unconscious conflicts traced back to the childhood and infancy.
3. Cognitive-Behavioral model: the view that psychological disorders are learnt
4. Diathesis-Stress model: diathesis + stressful situation = predisposition to mental disorders
5. Systems approach (biopsychosocial): biological factors, psychological stresses, social
pressure and expectations all lead to disorders. Psychological problems result from
several risk factors that influence one another.

Mood disorders
1. Depression:
 Major Depressive Disorder: a depressive disorder characterized by an episode of
intense sadness, depressive mood, or marked loss of interest or pleasure in nearly
all activities that could last for several months.
 Dysthymia (persistent depressive disorder): a depressive disorder where the
symptoms are generally less severe than for MDD but are present most of the
days and persist for at least 2 years.
2. Suicide
3. Mania and bipolar disorder
Causes of mood disorders:
1. Biological factors
2. Psychological factors
3. Social factors

Anxiety disorders
1. Specific phobias:
 Social phobia
 Agoraphobia
  Claustrophobia
2. Panic disorders
3. Other anxiety disorders:
 Generalized anxiety disorder
 Obsessive compulsive disorder (to keep anxiety under control).
 Body dysmorphic disorder
 Acute stress disorder
 Posttraumatic stress disorder
Causes of anxiety disorders:
 Learning
 Biological predisposition for humans to associate certain potentially dangerous
objects with intense fears (evolutionary perscpective)
 Heredity (biological perspective)
 Perception of having no control of one’s life (cognitive perspective)
 Internal psychological conflicts (unconscious) (psychoanalytic perspective)

Psychosomatic and somatoform disorders

Somatoform disorders:
1. Somatization disorder
2. Conversion disorders
3. Hypochondriasis
4. Body dysmorphic disorder

Dissociative disorders
1. Dissociative amnesia: loss of memory
2. Dissociative fugue: when people with amnesia leave their house and assume a totally new
identity
3. Dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder)
4. Depersonalization disorder

Sexual and gender-identity disorder

1. Sexual dysfunction:
 In men, it takes the form of erectile disorder or erectile dysfunction (impotence)
 In women, it takes the form of female sexual arousal disorder (frigidity)
 Sexual desire disorder
  Orgasmic disorders
 Premature ejaculations/ vaginismus
2. Paraphilias:
 Fetishism
 Voyeurism
 Exhibitionism
 Frotteurism
 Transvestic fetishism
 Sexual sadism
 Sexual masochism
 Pedophilia
3. Gender-identity disorder

Personality disorders
1. Schizoid personality disorder
2. Paranoid personality disorder
3. Dependent personality disorder
4. Avoidant personality disorder
5. Narcissistic personality disorder
6. Borderline personality disorder

Schizophrenic disorders
1. Disorganized schizophrenia
2. Catatonic schizophrenia
3. Paranoid schizophrenia
4. Undeferential schizophrenia
Causes of schizophrenia:
1. Genetic component
2. The faulty regulation of the neurotransmitter like dopamine and glutamate in the CNS
3. Pathology in various structures of the brain
4. A form of early prenatal infection or disturbance

Childhood disorders
1. ADHD: psychostimulants are used to treat children with ADHD
2. Autistic disorder
 Echolalia is the speech pattern developed by autistic children
  Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) is the wide title in which autism is entitled
 Asperger’s disorder: mild form of autistic disorder, age-appropriate language and
cognitive skills and often obtain high scores on IQ tests, do not develop the
capacity to understand others’ thoughts, feelings, and motivations (highly
functioning children with ASD)

Gender and cultural differences

More men: substance abuse and antisocial personality disorder
More woman: depression, agoraphobia, OCD, and somatization disorder.
Equal: bipolar disorder and schizophrenia
 Chapter 14: Social Psychology

Social cognition
1. Forming impressions:
 Schemata
Primacy effect
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Pygmalion effect
 Stereotypes
2. Attribution:
 Haidar: internal and external causes
 Kelley:
o Distinctiveness
 Low distinctiveness = internal cause
 High distinctiveness = external cause
o Consistency
 High consistency = internal cause
 Low consistency = external cause
o Consensus
 High consensus = internal cause
 Low consensus = external cause
 Biases:
Actor-observer bias/ Fundamental attribution error
Defensive attribution: self-serving bias/ just-world hypothesis

3. Interpersonal attraction
 Proximity
 Physical attractiveness
 Similarity
 Intimacy: gradual self-disclosure
 Exchange: reward theory of attraction

Attitudes
1. Evaluative belief
2. Feelings
3. Behavior tendencies
Attitudes and behavior: self-monitoring
Prejudice:
 Beliefs: negative stereotypes.
Ultimate attribution error: the tendency for a person with stereotyped beliefs about a
particular group of people to make internal attributions for their shortcomings (they lack
ability or motivation) and external attributions for their successes (they were given
special advantages)
 Feelings: strong negative emotions
 Behavioral tendencies: negative
Sources of prejudice:
1. Frustration-aggression theory (the victims are scapegoats)
2. Bigoted or authoritarian personality
3. Cognitive sources: oversimplification (cognitive misers)
4. Conformity: peer pressure/ in-group bias
5. Racism (innately inferior)
Reducing prejudice and discrimination:
1. Recategorization
2. Controlled processing
3. Improving group contact
Changing attitudes:
1. The process of persuasion
 Acting on emotions
 Humor
 Involving in a narrative
 Annoying ads
 Steps for persuading:
 Seizing attention
 Comprehending
 Acceptance
2. The communication model:
Four main elements:
 The source: sleeper effect
 The message itself
 The medium of communication:
 Written documentations for complex arguments
 Videotaped or live presentations for an audience that already grasp the
gist of an argument
 Face to face interactions or the lessons of our own experiences
 Characteristics of the audience (most difficult to influence):
  Discrepancy between the content of the message and the person’s present
attitude
 Self-esteem and intelligence of the audience
3. Cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger): two contradicting cognitions at the same time
To reduce dissonance:
 Change the attitude
 Increase the number of consonant elements (thoughts that are consistent with one
another)
 Reduce the importance of one or both dissonant cognitions
Reasons behind dissonance:
1. Choosing between two desirable alternatives
2. Being enticed to do so (reward)
 Small reward  dissonance  change of attitude
 Large reward  little dissonance  temporary change of behavior  no
change in attitude

Social influence
1. Cultural influence:
 Culture dictates how you dress
 Culture specifies what you eat and do not eat
 People in different cultures seek different amounts of personal space
 Cultural truism
 Norms
 Cultural assimilator
2. Conformity: (response to pressure by norms)
It is the voluntary yielding to social norms, even at the expense of one’s preferences.
 Characteristics of the situation: size of the group, degree of unanimity, task nature
 Characteristics of the person: fear of rejection
3. Compliance: (direct order)
 Foot-in-the-door effect: once people have granted a small request, they are more
likely to comply with a large one
 Lowball procedure: once the person is committed, he will stay committed till the
end
a. Induce a person to agree to do something for a comparatively low cost
b. Raise the cost of compliance
 Door-in-the-face effect: under certain circumstances, a person who has refused to
comply with one request may be more likely to comply with a second.
4. Obedience: (order from authority)
 Amount of power vested in the commander
 Surveillance
 Proximity to a victim
 Other members decisions
  Shared responsibility increases obedience
 Sense of control over actions

Social action
1. Deindividuation: people respond not as individuals, but as anonymous part of a larger
group
 Mob behavior
 Snowball effect leads to a bigger unthinking mob
2. Helping behavior:
 Perceived self-interest (linked to personal gain)
 Altruistic behavior (not linked to personal gain)
 Helping behavior is influenced by two dets of factors:
 Those in the situation: bystander effect (presence of others), ambiguity
 Those in the individual: personal responsibility, empathy, mood, self-
confidence, observing others act.
3. Groups and decision making:
 Polarization in group decision making:
 The risky shift: Greater willingness of a group than an individual to take
substantial risks
 Polarization: Shift in attitudes by members of a group toward more
extreme positions than the ones held before group discussion.
 The effectiveness of groups:
 Match between the requirements of the tasks and the skills of the group
members
 Interaction between the members
 Group size: large groups may be more likely to encourage social loafing
(the tendency of group members to exert less individual effort on the
assumption that others in the group will do the work)
 Cohesiveness of the group
 Groupthink: A process that occurs when the members of a group like one
another, have similar goals and are isolated, leading them to ignore
alternatives and not criticize group consensus.
4. Leadership:
 Great-person theory: leaders are great people who assume positions of influence
and change the events around them
 The-right-place-at-the-right-time theory: the leader emerges when the right person
is in the right place at the right time
 Contingency theory: focus on leader’s traits, aspects of the situation and the
members-leader responsiveness
 Types of leaders:
  Task oriented
 Relationship oriented
 Situational factors:
 Nature of the task: clearly structured vs ambiguous
 Relationship between leader and the group: good or bad personal relations
 The leader’s ability to exercise great or little power over the group
 WICS (Sternberg’s theory of effective leadership) is a system approach that
stresses the synthesis of:
 Wisdom
 Intelligence
 Creativity