Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Social Psychology and Health Social...

Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Social Psychology and Health

Social Psychology in Action 2


Overview

• Stress and human health• Coping with stress• Prevention: promoting healthier

behavior


Stress and Human Health

1. When people undergo a major upheaval in their lives, such as losing a spouse, declaring bankruptcy, or being forced to resettle in a new culture, their chance of dying increases.

2. Soon after a major earthquake in the Los Angeles area, the number of people who died suddenly of heart attacks increased.

3. Many people experienced psychological and physical problems after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

How do these stress effects occur?How can we learn to cope most effectively?


Resilience

Resilience Mild, transient reactions to stressful

events, followed by a quick return to normal, healthy functioning.

Although life's traumas can be painful, many people have the resources to recover quickly.

Surprisingly few people show prolonged, negative reactions to the most terrible events.


Effects of Negative Life Events

Hans Selye (1956, 1976) defined stress as the body’s physiological response to threatening events.

StressThe negative feelings and beliefs that

arise whenever people feel unable to cope with demands from their environment.


Selye focused on how the human body adapts to threats from the environment, regardless of the source, whether psychological or physiological.

• Later researchers have examined what it is about a life event that makes it threatening.



• Holmes and Rahe (1967), for example, suggested that stress is the degree to which people have to change and readjust their lives in response to an external event.

• This definition of stress applies to happy events as well, if the event causes big changes in one’s daily routine.



• Holmes and Rahe (1967) developed a measure called the Social Readjustment Rating Scale.

• Participants get a list of life events, such as "divorce" and "trouble with boss," each of which has been assigned a certain number of points, depending on how stressful it is.

• People check the events that have happened to them in the past year and add up the points associated with these events, to get an overall "life change" score.

• Several studies have found that the higher the people’s score, the worse their mental and physical health.



Being raped; or Finding out that you are HIV-positive 100

Being accused of rape 98

Death of a close friend 97

Death of a close family member 96

Contracting a sexually transmitted disease (other than AIDS) 94

Concerns about being pregnant 91

Finals week; or concerns about your partner being pregnant 90

Oversleeping for an exam; or flunking a class 89

Having a boyfriend or girlfriend cheat on you; ending a steady date relationship; or serious illness in family 85

Financial difficulties 84

Writing a major term paper; or being caught cheating on a test 83

Drunk driving; or sense of overload in school or work 82

Two exams in one day 80

Cheating on your boyfriend or girlfriend 77

Getting married 76

Negative consequences of drinking or drug use 75

Depression or crisis in your best friend; or difficulties with parents 73

Talking in front of a class 72

Lack of sleep ; change in housing (hassles, moves); competing or performing in public 69

Getting in a physical fight; or difficulties with a roommate 66

Job changes (applying, new job, work hassles); declaring a major or concerns about future plans 65

Drinking or use of drugs 61

Confrontations with professors 60


Starting a new semester 58

Going on a first date 57

Registration; or maintaining a steady dating relationship 55

Commuting to campus or work, or both 54

Peer pressures; or being away from home for the first time 53

Getting sick; or concerns about your appearance 52

Getting straight As 51

A difficult class that you love 48

Making new friends; getting along with friends; or fraternity/sorority rush 47

Falling asleep in class 40

Attending an athletic event (e.g., football game) 20

The College Life Stress Inventory Instructions: Copy the "stress rating"

number into the last column for any event that has happened to you in the past year, then add these scores.


Perceived Stress and Health

Measures such as the College Life Stress Inventory have problems:•Subjective situations have more impact on people than objective situations.•Individuals vary in response to different situations.•Most studies on stress effects use correlational findings, not experimental.


Adapted from Cohen, Tyrrell & Smith, 1991.


Feeling in Charge: The Importance of Perceived Control

Internal-External Locus of Control The tendency to believe that things happen

because we control them versus believing that good and bad outcomes are out of our control.

Perceived ControlThe belief that we can influence our

environment in ways that determine whether we experience positive or negative outcomes.

College students are becoming convinced that good and bad things in life are outside their control.


Adapted from Twenge, Zhang & Im, 2004.


Increasing Perceived Control in Nursing Homes

• Even a small boost in feelings of control can prolong life.

• Eighteen months after nursing home residents were given simple control over a movie night and watering a plant, 15% had died compared to 30% not given choices.


Adapted from Rodin & Langer, 1977; Schulz & Hanusa, 1978.


Disease, Control, and Well-Being

1. The relationship between perceived control and distress is more important to members of Western cultures than members of Asian cultures.

2. Even in Western societies, there is a danger in exaggerating the relationship between perceived control and health.


Knowing You Can Do It: Self-Efficacy

Self-EfficacyThe belief in one’s ability to carry out

specific actions that produce desired outcomes.

Believing that we have control over our lives is one thing; believing that we can actually execute the specific behaviors that will get us what we want is another.



People’s level of self-efficacy has been found to predict a number of important health behaviors, such as the likelihood that they will:

– quit smoking– lose weight– lower cholesterol– exercise regularly



Self-efficacy helps in two ways.1. It influences our persistence and

effort at a task. 2. Self-efficacy influences the way our

bodies react while we are working toward our goals.



In short, self-efficacy operates as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

The more you believe that you can accomplish something, such as quitting smoking, the greater the likelihood that you will.

Other people can help us gain self-efficacy.


Adapted from Blittner, Goldberg & Merbaum, 1978,


Learned Helplessness

The state of pessimism that results from attributing a negative event to stable, internal, and global factors.

Stable Attribution

The belief that an event is caused by factors that will not change over time (e.g., your intelligence), as opposed to factors that will change over time (e.g., your effort).

Explaining Negative Events:Learned Helplessness




Internal Attribution

The belief that an event is caused by things about you (e.g., your own ability or effort), as opposed to factors that are external to you (e.g., the difficulty of a test).






Global Attribution

The belief that an event is caused by factors that apply in a many situations (e.g., your intelligence,) rather than specific factors that apply in only a limited number of situations (e.g., your musical ability).



Coping with Stress


Coping Styles

The ways in which people react to threatening events.


Fight-or-Flight ResponseResponding to stress by either attacking

the source of the stress or fleeing from it.

Tend-and-Befriend ResponseResponding to stress with nurturant

activities designed to protect oneself and one’s offspring (tending) and creating social networks that provide protection from threats (befriending).


Gender Differences in

Coping with Stress Shelley Taylor and her colleagues (2000)

pointed out a little-known fact about research on the fight-or-flight syndrome: Most of it has been done on males.

Tending has a number of benefits for a mother and her child (e.g., a quiet child is less likely to be noticed by predators, and nurturing behavior leads to lower stress and improved immune functioning in mammals).

Befriending involves the creation of close ties with other members of the species, which also confers a number of advantages.


Social Support: Getting Help from Others

Social SupportThe perception that others are responsive

and receptive to one’s needs.

People who have someone to lean on deal better with life’s problems and show improved health.



People who live in cultures that stress interdependence and collectivism suffer less from stress-related diseases than people who live in cultures that stress individualism, possibly because it is easier for people in collectivist cultures to obtain social support.



Interestingly, it is not just receiving social support but giving it that is beneficial: A recent study of people 65 and over found that those who gave support to others, such as helping family members with child care or doing errands for a neighbor, lived longer than people who did not.



According to the buffering hypothesis, we need social support only when we are under stress.

• Social support can help us interpret an event as less stressful than we otherwise would.

• Even if we do interpret an event as stressful, social support can help us cope.


Personality and Coping Styles

• Evidence indicates optimistic people react better to stress and are generally healthier than pessimists.

• Most people feel bad events are less likely to happen to them than to other people.

• Unrealistic optimism, however, can leave people unprepared for problems.



Type A PersonalityThe type of person who is typically

competitive, impatient, hostile, and control-oriented, when confronting a challenge.



Type B PersonalityThe type of person who is typically

patient, relaxed, and noncompetitive when confronting a challenge .



Type A people’s hard-driving, competitive approach to life pays off in some respects:1.They tend to get good grades in college and to be successful in their careers.

However, this success comes with some costs.2.Type A individuals spend relatively little time on nonwork activities and have more trouble in balancing their work and family lives.3.Further, numerous studies show that Type A individuals are more prone than Type B people to developing coronary heart disease.



Subsequent studies have tried to narrow down what it is about the Type A personality that is most related to heart disease.

The most likely culprit is hostility.Competitiveness and a fast-paced life

might not be so bad by themselves, but for a person who is chronically hostile, they increase the risk for coronary disease.



You are more likely to be Type A if• You are male,• Your parents are Type A, and• You live in an urban rather than a

rural area.



There is a higher rate of coronary disease in many Western cultures than in many Asian cultures, such as Japan.

• In Western cultures, where individualism and competitiveness are prized, personality types more like Type A might be encouraged.

• People who live in cultures that stress collectivism might have more support from other people when they experience stress, and as we have seen, such social support is a valuable way of making stress more manageable.


Opening Up: Making Sense of Traumatic Events

• Opening up about traumatic events can create more stress in the short turn.

• It can help alleviate some stress in the long run.

• On the other hand, it can also make stressful events more memorable in cases in which they would have been generally forgotten.


Opening Up: Making Sense of Traumatic Events

• Trying to suppress negative thoughts can lead to a preoccupation with those very thoughts, because the act of trying not to think about them can actually make us think about them more.

• Writing about or confiding in others about a traumatic event may help people gain a better understanding of the event and thus move forward with life.


Prevention: PromotingHealthier Behavior


Preventable Health Problems

Many serious health problems are preventable, if people adopted different habits and avoided risky behaviors.

For example, more than 40 million people are currently infected with the HIV virus, and in 2004, more than three million people died of AIDS.

As seen in the next slide, most cases are in Sub-Saharan Africa, though no continent is free of the disease.



People could improve their health behaviors in many other areas as well, such as:

– alcohol consumption– smoking– overeating



Binge drinkers are more likely to have a number of life-threatening problems:•high blood pressure•heart disease•meningitis•sexually transmitted diseases

• car accidents• drowning• domestic

violence


Social Psychological Interventions: Targeting Safer Sex

A review of the more than 350 interventions designed to promote safer sex confirmed that it works to increase people's self-efficacy about condom use.

Other approaches work as well, such as interventions based on the theory of planned behavior, which try to increase:(a) desirability of condom use(b) perceived normative pressures to use condoms(c) perceptions that condom use is controllable


From: NIMH Multisite HIV Prevention Trial Group (1998, June 19). The NIMH Multisite HIV Prevention Trial: Reducing HIV Sexual Risk Behavior. Science, 280, 1889-1894.



Another type of intervention that has been successful is one that frames the message in terms of gains (e.g., “If you use condoms, you can stay healthy and avoid sexually transmitted diseases”) instead of losses (e.g., “If you don’t use condoms, you could get AIDS”).



1. When trying to get people to behave in positive ways that will prevent disease, it is best to use a “gain frame,” emphasizing what they have to gain by engaging in these behaviors.

2. When trying to get people to detect the presence of a disease, it is best to use a “loss frame,” emphasizing what they have to lose by avoiding this behavior.

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