1. PowerPoint® Presentation by Jim Foley
Emotions, Stress and Health
PowerPoint® Presentation
by Jim Foley
© 2013 Worth Publishers

2. Module 38: Stress and Health

3. Topics that hopefully won’t become stressors
Stress: a Process of perceiving and responding to stressors
Stressors:
Catastrophes,
Life Changes,
Daily Hassles
The stress response system: General Adaptation Syndrome
Psychoneuroimmunology:
Stress and Illness
Stress and AIDS, cancer, Heart Disease
Personality Factors and stress: Type A, pessimism
The role of hormones and inflammation
No animation.

4. Health Psychology the phases of stress response and adaptation
how stress and health are affected by
appraisal of stressors
severity of stressors
personality types
perceived control
emotion or problem focus
optimism
social support
exercise
relaxation
religious faith and participation
Emotions, as well as personality, attitudes, behaviors, and responses to stress, can have an impact on our overall health.
Health psychology studies these impacts, as part of the broader field of behavioral medicine.
Topics of study in health psychology include:
Click to reveal bullets and topics of study.

5. Stress: A Focus of Health Psychology
Many people report being affected by “stress.”
Some terms psychologists use to talk about stress:
Stress refers to the process of appraising and responding to events which we consider threatening or challenging.
a stressor is an event or condition which we view as threatening, challenging, or overwhelming.
Examples include poverty, an explosion, a psychology test, feeling cold, being in a plane, and loud noises.
appraisal refers to deciding whether to view something as a stressor.
stress reaction refers to any emotional and physical responses to the stressor such as rapid heartbeat, elevated cortisol levels, and crying.
Click to reveal bullets.

6. Clarifying the Components of Stress
Stress isn’t something that happens to you; it’s a process in which you participate.
The process includes the stressor (event or condition), cognitive appraisal, body response, and coping strategies.
The advantage of breaking “stress” into these components is that we can see options for altering each of these different factors.
Click to reveal bullets.
The answer to the slide question will develop over the course of the this section. However, what we’re looking for here is student’s ability to separate the factors, to see that the stressor (whatever’s on his laptop) could be addressed, or his appraisal and other parts of his stress reaction could be changed.
What could this person do to reduce his level of suffering from stress?

7. Appraisal: Choosing How to View a Situation
Questions to ask yourself when facing a possible stressor: Is this a challenge, and will I tackle it? Is it overwhelming, and will I give up?
There are few conditions* that are inherently and universally stressful; we can often choose our appraisal and our responses. *extreme, chronic physical threats or challenges (such as noise or starvation)
No animation.

8. Beneficial and Harmful Stress Effects
A brief experience of stress can be beneficial:
improving immune system response
motivating action
focusing priorities
feeling engaged, energized, and satisfied
providing challenges that encourage growth, knowledge, and self-esteem
Extreme or prolonged stress, causes problems:
mental and physical coping systems become overwhelmed and defeated rather than strengthened
immune functioning and other health factors decline because of damage
Click to reveal bullets.
The key factor is whether there is a chance for recovery and healing.

9. Stressors
Stressors refer to the events and conditions that trigger our stress response, because they are perceived/ appraised as overwhelmingly challenging, threatening, and/or harmful.
There may be a spectrum of levels of intensity and persistence of stressors.
We can also see stressors as falling into one of four* categories:
catastrophes.
significant life changes.
chronic daily hassles.
low social status/power.
Click to reveal bullets.
Instructor: the fourth category refers to the daily challenge of managing poverty, powerlessness, being a persistent target for injustice, discrimination, bullying, other low social/economic freedom, or facing oppression as a society or as a subgroup. For example, some readers of this text live under regimes or with competing groups that monitor and control their lives, lacking freedom and risking unexpected violence.
*the text focuses on the first three.

10. Catastrophic Events/Conditions
Short-term effects include increased heart attacks on the day of the event
Long term effects include depression, nightmares, anxiety, and flashbacks.
Bonding: both the trauma and the recovery are shared with others.
Appraisal is not essential in a catastrophic event. Most people agree that the event is harmful and overwhelming
Examples include earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, war/combat, and wildfires.
It can be one single event or chronic harmful conditions.
Click to reveal bullets.

11. Major Life Events/Changes
Even supposedly “happy” life changes, such as marriage, starting college or a new job, or the birth or adoption of a child, can bring increased challenge and stress.
Change is often challenging.
New roles, new priorities, and new tasks can put a strain on our coping resources.
The challenge, and the negative impact on health, increases when:
the changes are painful, such as a death in family, loss of job, or heart attack.
the changes are in a cluster, and there are too many at once.
Click to reveal bullets.

12. Chronic Daily Difficulties
Daily difficulties can be caused by facing too many tasks, too little time, and too little control.
Daily difficulties can be caused by the lack of social power and freedom:
being bullied
living in poverty
living under oppressive political conditions
Click to reveal text boxes.
Instructor: here again is a more complete list of the proposed fourth category, which has been combined with “Daily Hassles” to become “Chronic Daily Difficulties.” The fourth category refers to the daily challenge of managing poverty, powerlessness, being a persistent target for injustice, facing oppression as a society or as a subgroup, discrimination, bullying, or other low social/economic freedom.

13. The Body’s Stress Response System
When encountering a sudden trauma or other stressor, our body acts to increase our resistance to threat and harm.
Phase 1: The “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous system responds, reducing pain and increasing the heart rate.
The core of the adrenal glands produces norepinephrine and epinephrine (adrenaline).
This system, identified by Walter Cannon ( ), gives us energy to act.
Phase 2: The brain sends signals to the outer part of the adrenal glands to produce cortisol and other stress hormones. These focus us on planning adaptive coping strategies and resisting defeat by the stressor.
Hans Selye ( ) indentified this extended “resistance” phase of the stress response, followed by:
Click to reveal the three phases.
Phase 3: Exhaustion.

14. General Adaptation Syndrome [GAS] (Identified by Hans Selye): Our stress response system defends, then fatigues.
No animation.

15. Effects of Prolonged Stress
The General Adaptation Syndrome [GAS] works well for single exposures to stress.
Repeated and prolonged stress, with too much Phase 3 time, leads to various signs of physical deterioration and premature aging:
the production of new neurons declines
neural circuits in the brain break down
DNA telomeres (chromosome tips) shorten,  cells lose ability to divide,  cells die,  tissue stops regenerating,  early aging and death
Click to reveal bullets.

16. Female and Male Stress Response
In response to a stressor such as the death of a loved one, women may “tend and befriend”: nurture themselves and others, and bond together.
The bonding hormone oxytocin may play a role in this bonding.
Women show behavioral and neurological signs of becoming more empathetic under stress.
Men under stress are more likely to socially withdraw and numb themselves with alcohol.
Men are also more likely to become aggressive under stress.
In either case, men’s behavior and brains show LESS empathy and less tuning in to others under stress.
Click to reveal bullets under each picture.

17. Studying the Stress-Illness Relationship
How does stress increase our risk of disease?
This is the subject of a new field of study: psycho- neuroimmunology, the study of how interacting psychological, neural, and endocrine processes affect health.
Psychologists no longer use the term “psychosomatic” because it has come to mean an imagined illness.
We now refer to psychophysiological illness, a real illness caused in part by psychological factors such as the experience of stress.
Click to reveal bullets.

18. How the immune system works, before stress plays a role:
No animation.

19. Stress Increases The Risk of Illness
Stressors
Appraisal
Thoughts
Feelings
Brain signals
Hormonal action
Immune suppression
Risk of illness
Stress Increases The Risk of Illness
Here we see psycho- neuroimmunology in action:
psychological factors, such as appraisal, thoughts, and feelings.
neurological factors, such as brain signals engaging the stress response system.
immunology, such as stress hormone exposure which suppresses the immune system.
Click to reveal bullets.

20. Psychoneuroimmunology Example: The Impact of Stress on Catching a Cold
In a group exposed to germs, those experiencing stress were more likely to catch a cold.
This tradeoff between stress response and immune response may help our bodies focus energy on managing stress.
No animation.
Stress exposure has also been found to delay the healing of wounds.

21. This does NOT mean that stress causes cancer or AIDS.
Stress, AIDS, and Cancer
AIDS = Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
Cancer: the stress link is not as clear
Because the stress response suppresses the immune response, exposure to stress obviously worsens the development of AIDS in those exposed to HIV.
Reducing stress slows the progression of AIDS.
Stress may weaken the body’s defenses against the replication and spread of malignant cells
Click to reveal bullets.
By next edition of this text, there will probably also be a slide about stress and neurological decline; research in 2011 and 2012 shows an impact of stress on factors related to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
Implication of the relationship between stress and AIDS: reducing fearful avoidance of people with AIDS and discrimination against populations seen as being at risk of AIDS might reduce the stress of these populations and prevent or slow the progression of the disease. This is something to consider when one’s fearful or discriminatory impulses kick in, for those people not part of these populations.
This does NOT mean that stress causes cancer or AIDS.

22. Stress and Heart Disease
Many factors contribute to heart disease.
Biological: genetic predisposition to high blood pressure and high cholesterol
Behavioral: smoking, inactivity, and high-fat diet
Psychological: chronic stress, and personality styles that worsen the experience of stress
In coronary heart/artery disease, the blood vessels that provide oxygen and nutrients to the heart muscle itself become clogged, narrowed, and closed.
Click to reveal sidebar bullets.
Stress increases the risk of heart disease over decades and causes immediate heart attacks. However, stress can also increase cholesterol levels and artery clogging factors in the space of weeks (the accountant study in the text) and prevent the liver from filtering cholesterol and fat from the blood.
Clogging of the coronary artery

23. Type A PersonalityStress Heart Disease
Some personality traits tend to cluster into personality types.
People with a type A personality are impatient, verbally aggressive, and always pushing themselves and others to achieve.
People with a type B personality are more relaxed and go with the flow.
In one study, heart attacks ONLY struck people with Type A traits.
Click to reveal bullets.
Accomplishing goals is healthy, but a compulsion to always be working, with little time spent “smelling the flowers,” is not.

24. Pessimism and Heart Disease
It can be helpful to realistically anticipate negative events that may happen, and to plan how to prevent or cope with them.
Pessimism refers to the assumption that negative outcomes will happen, and often facing them by complaining and/or giving up.
Click to show text boxes.
Suppressing negative emotions only worsens the risk of heart disease. Reducing risk comes from a genuine change in attitude and treatment of factors related to negative emotions.
Men who are generally pessimistic are more likely to develop heart disease within ten years than optimists.

25. Depression and Heart Disease
Why does depression appear so often with heart disease? Does one cause the other?
One possible answer is that the two problems are both caused by chronic stress.
There may be an intervening variable: excessive inflammation.
Click to reveal bullets.
The role of this intervening variable may explain why increasing levels of Omega-3 fatty acids seems in some reports to have an impact on the incidence of both depression and heart disease.

26. Health Consequences of Chronic Stress: The Repeated Release of Stress Hormones
The stress hormone cortisol helps our bodies respond to brief stress.
Chronically high cortisol levels damage the body.
No animation.