PSYCHOSOCIAL ASPECTS OF STRESS:Cognition and Stress, Emotions and Stress

<< FACTORS THAT LEAD TO STRESSFUL APPRAISALS:Dimensions of Stress

SOURCES OF STRESS:Sources in the Family, An Addition to the Family >>

Health Psychology PSY408

Lecture 15

PSYCHOSOCIAL ASPECTS OF STRESS

At this juncture, we can begin to see how interwoven our biological, psychological, and social systems are in

the experience of stress. Stressors produce physiological changes, but psychosocial factors also play a role.

To give a more complete picture of the interplay among these systems, we will now examine the impact of

stress on people's cognitive, emotional, and social systems.

Cognition and Stress

Many students have had this experience. While taking a particularly stressful exam in school, they may

neglect or misinterpret important information in a question or have difficulty remembering an answer they

had studied well the night before. It is infuriating to know that an answer is on the tip of your tongue;

especially since you will probably remember it after the test is over. High levels of stress affect people's

memory and attention. Let's see how.

Stress can impair cognitive functioning, often by distracting our attention. Noise can be a stressor, which

can be chronic for people who live in noisy environments, such as next to train tracks or highways. How

does chronic noise affect people's cognitive performance? Many people try to deal with this kind of stress

by changing the focus of their attention from the noise to relevant aspects of a cognitive task--they "tune

out" the noise. Research evidence suggests that children who try to tune out chronic noise may develop

generalized cognitive deficits because they have difficulty knowing which sounds to attend to and which to

tune out.

But stress can also enhance our attention, particularly toward the stressor. For instance, researchers had

people watch a series of pictures while listening to a story about a boy and his mother who go to a hospital.

For some subjects, the story was emotional: the boy had a terrible accident, his feet were severed, and

surgeons reattached the Feet. For other subjects, the story was neutral: the boy went to the hospital to

watch activities there. Before this experience, the subjects with each type of story received an injection of

either a placebo or a drug that stops the action of epinephrine and nor-epinephrine. When tested a week

later, the subjects who heard the emotional story remembered more details of it if they had gotten the

placebo rather than the drug. But the drug had no effect on subjects' memory of the neutral story. These

findings suggest that epinephrine and nor-epinephrine enhance the memory of stressors we experience.

Not only can stress affect cognition, but the reverse is true too, in the opening story about Sonia, she kept

imagining that her fiancé was seeing other women, which was very distressing for her. Her thinking was

making the stress chronic. Andrew Baum (1990) has studied this kind of thinking in individuals who were

living near the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania when a major nuclear accident

occurred. He found that some of these people still experienced stress from the incident years later, but

others did not. One of the main factors differentiating these people was that those who continued to feel

this stress had trouble keeping thoughts about the accident and their fears out of their minds. It seems likely

that these thoughts perpetuated their stress and made it chronic.

Emotions and Stress

Long before infants can talk, they display what they feel by their motor, vocal, and facial expressions. You

can test this with a little experiment: place a bit of a bitter food, such as unsweetened chocolate, in a

newborn's mouth and watch the baby's face--the eyes squint, brows drop and draw together, the mouth

opens, and tongue juts out. This is the facial expression for the emotion of disgust. Each emotion has a

specific facial pattern.

According to researcher Carroll Izard (1979), newborn babies do not display all the emotional expressions

they will develop, but they do express several emotions, such as disgust, distress, and interest. Using

procedures like the one with bitter food, he and his colleagues studied 2- to 19-month-old infants'

Health Psychology PSY408

emotional reactions to the stress of receiving their regular inoculations. The facial expressions following

needle penetration were mainly of distress and anger, but the younger infants' principal emotion was

distress, and the older infants' immediate and dominant emotion was anger. As babies develop, they

become more able to try to act for themselves, such as by pushing at the nurse's hand, Anger spurs this kind

of defensive action; distress merely signals the need for help.

Emotions tend to accompany stress, and people often use their emotional states to evaluate their stress.

Cognitive appraisal processes can influence both the stress and the emotional experience (Lazarus. 1999;

Schachter & Singer, 1962: Scherer, 1986). For example, you might experience stress and fear if you came

across a snake while walking in the woods, particularly if you recognized it as poisonous. Your emotion

would not be joy or excitement, unless you were studying snakes and were looking for this particular type.

Both situations would involve stress, but you might experience fear if your appraisal was one of threat, and

excitement it your appraisal was one of challenge.

Fear is a common emotional reaction that includes psychological discomfort and physical arousal when we

feel threatened. Of the various types and intensities of fears people experience in everyday life,

psychologists classify many into two categories: phobias and anxiety. Phobias are intense and irrational

fears that are directly associated with specific events and situations. Some people are afraid of being

enclosed in small rooms, for instance, and are described as claustrophobic. Anxiety is a vague feeling of

uneasiness or apprehension--a gloomy anticipation of impending doom--that often involves a relatively

uncertain or unspecific threat. That is, the person may not be aware either of the situations that seem to

arouse anxiety or of exactly what the "doom entails. Patients awaiting surgery or the outcome of diagnostic

tests generally experience high levels of anxiety. In other situations, anxiety may result from appraisals of

low self-worth and the anticipation of a loss of either self-esteem or the esteem of others.

The things children fear tend to become less concrete or tangible and more abstract and social as they get

older. In early childhood, many children develop fears of concrete things, such as animals, doctors, and

dentists, often because of negative experiences with these things. Cognition can also play a role in these

fears. A study of children's fears of dental treatment found that the most fearful children were those who

had not experienced invasive procedures, such as having a tooth pulled, during the prior few years. Not

having had these experiences probably allowed the children to imagine that invasive procedures are worse

than they are. Later in childhood, concrete fears tend to decline while anxieties relating to school, individual

competence, and social relations become pronounced. Children who see themselves as less able than their

age-mates are likely to appraise their own resources as insufficient to meet the demands of stressors.

Stress can also lead to feelings of sadness or depression. We all feel depressed at times, although we may call

the feeling something else, like sad, or blue," or unhappy.' These feelings are a normal part of life for

children and adults. The difference between normal depression and depression as a serious disorder is a

matter of degree. Depression becomes a psychological disorder when it is severe, frequent, and long-

lasting. People with this disorder tend to:

· Have a mostly sad mood nearly every day

· Appear listless, with loss of energy, pleasure, and interest

· Show poor appetite and sleeping habits

· Have thoughts of suicide, feeling hopeless about the future

· Have low self-esteem, often blaming themselves for their troubles.

Having long-term disabling health problems, such as being paralyzed by a stroke, often leads to depressive

disorders.

Another common emotional reaction to stress is anger, particularly when the person perceives the situation

as harmful or frustrating. You can see this in the angry response often shown by children whose favorite toy

Health Psychology PSY408

was taken away and by adults who are stuck in a traffic jam. Anger has important social ramifications--it

can produce aggressive behavior, for instance.

Social Behavior and Stress

Stress changes people's behavior toward one another. In some stressful situations, such as train crashes,

earthquakes, and other disasters, many people may work together to help each other survive. Perhaps they

do this because they have a common goal that requires cooperative effort. In other stressful situations,

people may become less sociable or caring and more hostile and insensitive toward other individuals.

When stress and anger join, negative social behaviors often increase. Research has shown that stress-

produced anger increases aggressive behavior and these negative effects continue after the stressful event is

over. This increased aggressive behavior has important implications in real life, outside the laboratory. Child

abuse is a major social problem that poses a serious threat to children's health, physical development, and

psychological adjustment. Studies have found a connection between parental stress and child abuse. Prior to

an act of battering, frequently the parent has experienced a stressful crisis, such as the loss of a job. A parent

under high levels of stress is at risk of losing control. For example, the child runs around the house making

a racket, a stressed parent may become very angry, lose control, and start beating the child.

Stress also affects helping behavior. This was shown in an experiment conducted in a shopping center.

After each subject completed either a difficult shopping task or an easy one in either a crowded or un-

crowded shopping center, he or she walked through a deserted hallway to meet with the researcher. In the

hallway, the subject encountered a woman who feigned dropping a contact lens--a situation in which the

subject could provide help. Those subjects who had just experienced the most stress, having completed the

difficult shopping task in crowded conditions, helped less often and for less time than those who had

completed the easy task in un-crowded conditions.

Gender and Socio-cultural Differences in Stress

Does the experience of stress depend on a person's gender and socio-cultural group membership?

Apparently it does. Women generally report having experienced a greater number of major and minor

stressors than men do. Although this difference may result partly from women's greater willingness to say

they experienced stress, it probably also reflects real variations in experiences. Because in today's two-

income households, mothers still do most of the chores at home, they often have heavier daily workloads

than men and greater physiological strain than women without children.

Being a member of a minority group or being poor appears to increase the stressors people experience.

Research in the United States has shown that individuals with these socio-cultural statuses report having

experienced a disproportionately large number of major stressors. For example, black Americans report far

more stressors than Hispanics, who report more stressors than do non-minority people.

We have seen that the effects of stress are wide ranging and involve interplay among our biological,

psychological, and social systems. Even when the stressor is no longer present, the impact of the stress

experience can continue. Some people experience more stress than others do, but we all find stress

somewhere in our lives. Stress arises from a countless variety of sources.

Sources of Stress throughout Life

Babies, children, and adults all experience stress. The sources of stress may change as people develop, but

the condition of stress can occur at any time throughout life. Where does stress come from, and what are its

sources? To answer this question, we will examine sources that arise within the person, in the family, and in

the community and society.

Health Psychology PSY408

Sources within the Person

Sometimes the source of stress is within the person. Illness is one way stress arises from within the

individual. Being ill creates physical and psychological demands on the person, and the degree of stress

these demands produce depends on the seriousness of the illness and the age of the individual, among other

things. Why is the person's age important? For one thing, the ability of the body to fight disease normally

improves in childhood and declines in old age. Another reason is that the meaning of a serious illness for

the individual changes with age. For example, young children have a limited understanding of disease and

death. Because of this, their appraisal of stress that arises from their illness is likely to focus on current,

rather than future, concerns--such as how well they feel at the moment and whether their activities are

impaired.

Stress appraisals by ill adults typically include both current difficulties and concerns for the future, such as

whether they may be disabled or may die.

Another way stress arises within the person is through the appraisal of opposing motivational forces, when

a state of conflict exists. Suppose you are registering for next semester and find that two courses that you

need meet at the same time. You can take only one. Which will you choose? You have a conflict-- you are

being pushed and pulled in two directions. Many conflicts are more momentous than this one. We may

need to choose between two or more job offers, or different medical treatments, or houses we are thinking

of buying, for instance. Conflict is a major source of stress.

The pushes and pulls of conflict produce two opposing tendencies: approach and avoidance. These two

tendencies characterize three basic types of conflict:

1. Approach/approach conflict arises when we are attracted toward two appealing goals that are

incompatible. For example, people who are trying to lose weight to improve either their health or their

appearance experience frequent conflicts when delicious, fattening foods are available. Although individuals

generally resolve an approach/approach conflict fairly easily, the more important they perceive the decision

to be, the greater the stress it is likely to produce.

2. Avoidance/avoidance conflict occurs when we are faced with a choice between two undesirable

situations. For example, patients with serious illnesses may be faced with a choice between two treatments

that will control or cure the disease, but have very undesirable side effects. People in avoidance/avoidance

conflicts usually try to postpone or escape from the decision. A patient might delay or discontinue

treatment or change physicians in the hope of getting choices that are more appealing. When delaying or

escaping is not possible, people often vacillate between the two alternatives, changing their minds

repeatedly. Sometimes they get someone else to make the decision for them. People generally find

avoidance/avoidance conflicts difficult to resolve and very stressful.

3. Approach/avoidance conflict arises when we see attractive and unattractive features in a single goal or

situation. This type of conflict can be stressful and difficult to resolve. Consider, for instance, individuals

who smoke cigarettes and want to quit. They may be torn between wanting to improve their health and

wanting to avoid the weight gain and cravings they believe will occur.

As you may realize, conflicts can be more complicated than the examples we have considered. People often

have to choose between two or more alternatives, recognizing that each has multiple attractive and

unattractive features, as in buying a new house or car. In general, people are likely to find conflict stressful

when the choices involve many features, when opposing motivational forces have fairly equal strength, and

when the "wrong" choice can lead to very negative and permanent consequences. These conditions often

apply when people face major decisions about their health.

Table of Contents: