All right, everyone. Let's get started. So today, we're beginning the last chapter before test number three.
So, I'm hoping to finish most of the chapter in one day. I have less to say about it than I do some of the other chapters. Probably there will be a little bit left to talk about on Tuesday for exam review.
But, as I say, I'm hoping to finish most of it. One announcement, I found out yesterday that I am going to be teaching oral psychology in the fall. So, if any of you are interested, the prerequisites will be PSY 104, PSY 105, and at least one 200 year course, which you have to take in the spring. There are none offered in the summer.
Some of you have expressed interest in this, I make the occasional comment on my research, so I'll be talking about that in the fall. So there's a little announcement. But as I say, we'll get started on Chapter 15. Chapter 15 is kind of a bucket chapter.
They crammed a few different things in there. The title is Stress, Coping, and Health. And it also includes a section at the end on positive psychology, which is about the psychology of happiness. Before we get to that good stuff, the first bit is on stress.
Many of you know a lot about this. In terms of around efforts. Some of you.
One distinction that you need to know is the distinction between a stressor and stress or sometimes called a stress reaction. Pretty simple distinction, a stressor is an event that causes stress, so like the midterms that some of you have coming up. And then the stress reaction is the set of bodily, cognitive, and other reactions to the stressor.
So as the book says, they typically include a cognitive component, so an evaluation of the event as being a threat or anxiety-inducing. A physiological response, we'll be talking about that in a later section. And various behavioral tendencies, including different coping strategies. There have been various attempts to quantify how much stress people are going through. One that the book mentions is the Holmes-Rawhe scale, or at least mentions their names.
This scale, I'll zoom in on this in a second, talks about stressors in terms of life-change units. Holmes and Rawley thought that change is what's stressful. Whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, it's the degree of change that matters. So, zoom in a bit here.
The whole scale here, each event has a number of life-changing units associated. So you go through and you will circle any of them that you've gone through in the last year. So the bottom you have things like major holidays which that would be a pleasant thing but it still involves change so it's going to count towards your total stress score. Changing to a new school a bit more that's 20 points. Towards the top, top is death of a spouse and below that divorce.
So those are kind of the most stressful things that you can go through based on this scale. They found in their studies that people's score on this scale could be used to predict how likely you were to go through a major health breakdown. So the more units you have, the more likely you are.
So if you have less than 150, you have a relatively low chance. 150 to 300, about a coin flip, about a 50% chance of a major health breakdown in the next two years. And if you go above 300, it's more like 80% chance.
And later we'll be seeing some of the mechanisms there. There are various things that happen in your body when you go through prolonged stress, and they can be bad for you. So that's the Holmes-Brocky scale. Recently I was watching the movie Tommy Boy, and I had such a good laugh watching it. How many of you have seen Tommy Boy?
It's an older movie. Bonus marks for both of you. One of you. And I thought, I've got to find an excuse to put a clip in.
So I found an excuse. So Tommy Boy, as I thought about the movie, did go through a number of life change units. He graduated college. and moved back to his hometown. He started a new job at his father's auto company.
And then his father got remarried and then died. So lots of change in a very short window of time. Tommy Boy gets promoted at work.
His name's Tommy, but he's called Tommy Boy. So Tommy gets promoted and has to go on a road trip selling auto parts to save his father's company. And this is very stressful because he is not very good at selling car parts.
The main thing he's trying to sell is brake pads. So I'll show you a clip of him failing at his job and then a clip of him having a breakdown as a result of his stress. The second clip, personally, I found very therapeutic.
journal masters. Just watching him have a breakdown, I felt hurt. Maybe some of you will benefit from this as you enjoy the film.
One of the highest quality movies ever made. Okay, so that's the Holmes-Rawkey scale. The book mentions that there was some pushback to this. Some evidence indicated that it was not just change that mattered, but whether the event was negative or positive.
Which is more intuitive, right? It's more intuitive to find negative. The book mentions some studies that find that only negative life changes predict health breakdowns. As I mentioned, one component of the stress reaction is cognitive, right? How we interpret the events.
The book distinguishes between primary appraisal and secondary appraisal. Appraisal means like interpretation or an evaluation of an event. The primary appraisal is the appraisal of the event itself.
Is it positive or negative? And if so, how positive or negative? So there's a midterm coming up.
How hard will it be? Is this a good or bad thing that's coming up? The secondary appraisal is the appraisal of your capacity to deal with the stressor.
So, you ask yourself, do I have the resources to deal with this? That's the secondary appraisal. So that's the cognitive element. As I mentioned, there is also a bodily component.
One widely studied aspect of our body's reaction to stress is the General Adaptation Syndrome, or GAS. The GAS is a pattern of bodily reactions to stress. So, there's the initial stressor, when it occurs, and then you go through what's called alarm, or alarm reaction. This curve is, you can think of it as sympathetic nervous system activation.
Remember from 104 that... The sympathetic system is the fight or flight system. So, it's our body's reaction to something threatening.
Which is very adaptive when you're in the savannah of Africa and there's a lion nearby. It's an evolved reaction that redirects resources away from the immune system, away from digestion, away from healing wounds. All that stuff doesn't matter anymore.
All the resources go to the heart, lungs, and muscles. So you're ready to fight or run away. So that's the sympathetic system, and you can think of this as how activated is it? So in the alarm reaction, sympathetic activation goes up, you get stressed out, you have this tense reaction.
Resistance, sympathetic activation goes up. activation stays high and plateaus and then exhaustion it plummets. Exhaustion occurs when your body's resources are depleted. You can't stay stressed forever. Eventually your body just kind of gives up.
That is when you are most likely to get sick, during the exhaustion stage. This is why it's time to get a cold after a prolonged period of stress and studying too much and worry. Your body's resources are depleted and you are more vulnerable to disease.
Another reason for this is... A hormone called cortisol, some of you may have heard of, is released during stress and this hormone competes with the immune system. So prolonged releasing of cortisol is bad for your immune system. The book mentions some other hormones that are released. I think cortisol is good enough.
As long as you know that one, you should be okay. One specific type of disorder that relates to this, some books put this some books put this in the Mental disorders chapter, or this book puts it in this big bucket chapter. The disorder I'm talking about is PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm sure many of you have heard this term, so if you just break it down, post means after, traumatic means relating to trauma, so some traumatic event, terrorist attack, you're a soldier in war, sexual assault, anything like that, kind of extreme event would count as a trauma.
And there are various symptoms that go along with this. Severe anxiety, uncontrolled flashbacks. You'll be going about your business and you'll have a very vivid flashback of the event in question. It's often associated with survivor guilt.
So like if you're in war and some of your buddies die but you don't, you may feel guilty that you made it, which of course can be emotionally very complicated. There's a section on the neurobiology of PTSD. I won't go through all of it. One that's been widely studied is the amygdala. which is a part of the brain that's implicated in several emotions, but the link seems to be strongest for fear and aggression.
So there's been a lot of work done on the association between PTSD and dysregulation in amygdala activity. The amygdala is structurally very much connected with the hippocampus too. I won't test you on that, but the hippocampus is of course involved in memory creation and memory retrieval, so that may be related to the uncontrolled flashbacks. And now I have the video.
I have a video of someone that is a very good representation of PTSD. I'll give a bit of the... The background of this scene, so this is from the show called The West Wing. I'd be surprised if any of you have seen The West Wing.
Has anyone seen The West Wing? Awesome. It's a great show.
Oh, more than Tommy Boy. Interesting. So it's a political drama.
It's about a fictional president of the United States and his staff. So, as those of you who have seen the show will know, there's an assassination attempt on the president. And one of his staff gets shot and develops PTSD. Now, the scene has three things going on.
There's one part of it, which is him in the therapy office talking to the therapist. There's him talking about, as I should say, while he's in the therapy office, he's talking about himself being at a concert. Because one element of his particular version of PTSD is whenever he hears music, it makes him think of sirens, and then he has a flashback.
So while he's in the concert, he has flashbacks to the shooting. And he's describing this while in the therapy office. So you have to keep track of these three things, but it's a very nice representation of what having PTSD looks like.
Okay, so that's a good visualization of what PTSD looks like. Now, two related conditions that I'll briefly talk about are rape trauma syndrome and residential school syndrome. Probably most of these people could be classified as having PTSD as well, but some have argued that the particular symptomology of PTSD-like symptoms after rape should be its own kind of diagnosis. It has its own unique symptoms. is true with survivors of residential schools.
They have their own particular set of symptoms and some argue that that should also be a separate diagnosis. And yes, I have another video Someone describing their experience in a residential school. There's a whole conversation to be had about this.
In my 405 class which I'm teaching in the spring, which probably none of you could take, you have to have a third year course. I'll be bringing this up there too. There's a conversation to be had about framing. I had a professor who used to work with an indigenous statistician who argued that it's a little bit strange to call this a disorder. Like it's a mental illness or something.
being upset and stressed out, et cetera, after being oppressed or after being, you know, ripped from your family's arms and locked away, is that a mental illness? Isn't that just normal? So that's an interesting conversation to have.
But just to give you a sense of what symptomology can be like, I'll be showing you a video about residential symptoms. Okay, so that's the end of the section before what to do about it. So we've talked about the cognitive aspect of stress, the physiological aspect, and some specific syndromes that result from specific kinds of stress.
The next section is on vulnerability and protective factors. So, not everyone who goes to war develops PTSD. Not everyone who goes through stressful experiences develops PTSD.
develops a disorder. So what are the individual differences between people that determine whether they have these extremely negative reactions? So vulnerability factors would be any trait or situation that increases the likelihood of a very negative reaction, whereas a protective factor is any individual or situational variable that helps you, that makes it less likely.
that you'll have an extremely negative reaction. The first one that the book has a nice discussion of is social support. We are a deeply social species, and having strong social connections with family, friends, etc. is a very strong protective factor.
It's even a protective factor for the physiological effects of stress. As you'll see in a minute, I have a lot of videos today, so I have a full TED talk we're going to watch. Having good social connections even makes you live longer.
Partly probably because of what we've seen, right? Stress has a negative effect on your body, and if you're protected against some of that by having good social connections, that may... Or not maybe.
We know that having good social connections does increase your lifespan. You can debate about the mechanism, because of course this is correlational research, but it's okay. Another video.
We're going to watch a full TED Talk. I usually just clip out parts of TED Talks. This one's about 12 minutes, but it's quite good. This is one of the longest longitudinal studies ever done. They follow people from, I think they're late teens, all the way till death.
This is one of those studies. but have had multiple researchers, right? Because one guy retires halfway through, gotta go on to the next one. So we're gonna listen to the study's, I think, third supervisor, and he's gonna talk a bit about the protective benefits of having good social connections.
Yes, sir? How do they vet? That's a good question.
I guess it would be up to the first researcher. It could have been a former graduate student or a collaborator. I mean most...
Most papers in science, whether it's psychology or biology, have multiple authors, have multiple people working on it, so usually there's some natural choices for that. Good question. Okay, so really cool research.
So some of the stuff we've talked about could be possible mechanisms for this, though of course it's important to keep in mind that by definition all of this research is correlational. That's still quite a nice pattern. So that's social support. Another very different kind of protective factor.
It's what the book calls hardiness. This is a term that the book defines as having three components, each of which starts with the letter C. I wanted to make it easy to remember. And the three C's are...
Commitment, control, and challenge. Commitment. Is the idea that you're committed to trying, you're committed to keep going and to keep pursuing your goals. Control relates to something we've seen earlier, which is an internal locus of control.
You have a belief that you are able to control what happens to you. You don't think it's all just the environment, you think, no, there are things I can do to change my life. and challenge. By this they mean when bad things happen you don't view them as a threat you view them as an opportunity or a challenge. You get off on it.
You're not reduced to a panicked mass quiet. You think no this is an opportunity for me to grow and to become stronger. So commitment, meaning you're committed to putting an effort into trying.
Control, meaning you believe that you control what happens to you. And challenge, you view negative events, or apparently negative events, as an opportunity to grow. I have another video. This one's much shorter.
This is a kind of motivational little talk and all three of the C's are hit on. The C's aren't used but the basic idea is there for each of them. Okay so the visuals were a little strange but all three of the points are hit on.
So, commitment. So one thing he says in there is if you have time you can better yourself. And the line towards the end about... And making excuses for why other people are successful and you are not is not the way to better yourself. And obviously it's true that people are born with different advantages or disadvantages, but if you have a hardiness kind of attitude, you focus on the aspects of your life that you can control.
And challenging, we'll talk about towards the beginning, where he talks about the importance of seeking discomfort, not trying to retreat into what's comfortable, but viewing negativity, unpleasantness, as an opportunity for growth. Okay, I'll hammer out some other protective factors. One that's reviewed from a prior chapter mostly is coping self-efficacy. Remember that self-efficacy is belief in your own effectiveness, belief in your own abilities.
So coping self-efficacy is belief in your ability to cope. It's a pretty intuitive idea. So if you have confidence in your own coping strategies, that is also a protective factor. The book has a discussion on optimism.
Optimism is also a protective factor if you have a more optimistic disposition or outlook. That can be helpful. The next section requires a bit more explanation. So there are different ways of classifying personality, as we saw in the last chapter. One that we didn't talk about is the type A versus type B distinction.
Have any of you heard of this distinction? So, these are two clusters of traits. People who are type A are more competitive, more driven, and also more irritable. They're kind of go-go-go type people.
Competitive, driven, and irritable. People who are type B are more chill, more relaxed, maybe a little lazy, easygoing. There are pros and cons to each. The pro of being type A is you achieve more, you get more shit done. Pro of being type B?
Less likely to get heart attacks when you're older. So it turns out being type A is correlated with cardiovascular issues as you age. Because if you're constantly, you know, like this, not so good for your health in the long run. To give us a sense of what the distinction is... We'll do another personality test.
Now this one, I'm just going to guide us through. You can just keep a score on your paper or computer. These are all plus one and minus one. And just for the sake of time, go with your gut. Don't overanalyze it.
Just kind of make a judgment for each. B is minus one, and that's not a value judgment. That's just how it's scored. And A is plus one. So at the end, you'll add them up.
and obviously if you're above zero then you're leaning towards being more type A if you're below zero you're leaning more towards type B. When exercising I try to keep a steady pace B minus one. I push myself to go harder A plus one.
So just make a judgment call which one is more you. In conversations, I tend to interrupt other people, A plus one, you're the interrupter, or people tend to interrupt me, B minus one. I play games to have fun, B minus one.
To win, A plus one. The best position in a team is the leader, A plus one. Second in command to an awesome leader, I just took this from the internet, B minus 1. When driving, or if you don't drive you can say when walking or whatever, people tend to pass me B minus 1. Or other people tend to pass me A plus 1. If you pass other people A plus one, if other people pass you B minus one.
The pleasure in a task is finishing it, A plus one, exploring its possibilities, B minus one. I eat slowly to savor the flavor, B minus one. Or fast for a burst of flavor, A plus one. Stress pushes me to achieve more, A plus one. Harms my output, B minus one.
When I take breaks, I enjoy the moment, B minus one. Or I stay preoccupied with my work, A plus 1. I start my homework a long time in advance, A plus 1. Close to the deadline, B minus 1. That's what I'm hearing, some laughter. I did have a look at some of the APA assignments.
Some people in this class may be very type B. Sorry. I gave you all a template. I mean, there's really no excuse.
Which word better describes you? Carefree, B-1, or hardworking, A-1? Just four more. How often do you worry about the future? Often, A-1, or rarely, B-1.
Do you keep a weekly schedule? Yes, then A plus one. No, then B minus one. How many days a week do you exercise?
B, less than three, minus one. Or A, plus one, if you work out three or more days per week. So three would be type A.
How often do you yell at your friends and family? Often, that would be A plus 1, somewhat rarely B minus 1. So you go ahead and tally that up. Okay, raise your hand if you need more time to tally it up.
Shouldn't be too hard. Okay, so now you have a sense of where you are on this. So, as I say, type A is associated with more long-term negative effects of stress, such as cardiovascular problems. As an illustration of this, how many of you have seen the short clip on my YouTube channel? It's not like in the main...
part. Okay, so you'll have a pleasant surprise right now. So there's only one non-teaching video I have that's public on my channel.
It's footage of my brother. So I have two brothers and one sister. They're all younger than me.
So I'll focus on my brother. my brothers, one of them is very type A. He is just very competitive, very driven.
He works out like four or five days a week. He recently did his second full marathon. But he also has the irritability.
So when we play video games, which we never used to do that much, but during COVID, we got really into Smash Bros. How many of you play Smash Bros? So it was a great way to pass the time, but my brother would scream whenever he walked.
And after a while, it was actually hurting my other brother and I, like hurting our ears. It was too much. And dad would always downplay, no, it's not that bad, you're just a few babies. So then I hid my phone and recorded it and kind of targeted him a little bit just to get the best reaction I could. And you'll see an example of this.
This should illustrate why being type A in the long run may be bad for your health. I'm so pissed. You said that's type B? What's wrong with you?
Well, I said type A. She said type E. Oh, okay. So, if I misspoke, I said type A.
That's what I meant. So, anyway, that's why you can't... Oh, what? Okay. Oh, okay.
We're talking about... The only other thing I have to say about this is the book says there's some research into the variables in type A that are most predictive of cardiovascular disease, and it does seem to be the irritability. Of all the personality traits, that's the one that's especially predictive of long-term bad reactions to stress. There's also a section on finding meaning in stressful events.
I don't have too much to add to this. The basic findings are that if you can find meaning in stressful events, that's good. That is a protective factor.
It also has a discussion of the role of religion in finding meaning in stressful events. I'm going to come back to that at the end of the book. in the positive psych section, so I'll just hold off on that, but zoomed out, it is generally the case that finding meaning in stressful events is protected. One example that might help you see the force of that, think about what it feels like when you wake up after a good workout, and you're like really sore.
You feel kind of proud of it, right? Like, yeah, this is good, this is a sign that I'm progressing. Imagine if that exact same feeling was the result of an illness. If you just woke up, you had no doubt, and you're like, oh, I'm sick with something.
It would probably feel very different. You would interpret it very differently and probably be more stressed as a result. That's one way of getting at the idea that if you construe negative events in a meaningful way, it can be positive.
Okay, next we'll talk about three different types of coping. So all types of coping. Problem-focused, emotion-focused, and social-focused. So I'll use a concrete example.
So I love my supervisor, he's great. Kyle Nash, if you ever have a chance to take social psych with him, he's great. But let's suppose that he decides to be really mean. He has a big personality shift, and he starts treating me like garbage. Like, you know what, David, you're a terrible PhD student.
I can't believe I ever, you know, accepted you into this program, or whatever. He starts really treating me badly. So that's my stressful event, is Kyle is really mean to me. If I took a problem-focused approach, I would try to deal with the problem, namely Kyle being a jerk.
So I could try to confront Kyle and make him treat me better. I could try to get a new supervisor or whatever. Something that actually addresses the issue that's causing me stress.
Emotion-focused, I accept that the problem's not going to change, so I have to deal with my emotional reactions. There are different strategies that fall under this umbrella. Some of these we will talk more about in the therapy section.
So one is positive reinterpretation, kind of changing how you interpret the negative event. That's similar to cognitive therapy, which we'll be talking a lot about in the therapy chapter. There are some that are maybe less healthy, like repression and denial that the book talks about. That's review from the Freud stuff.
But anything that's targeting the emotional reactions, that's going to fall under the umbrella. emotion category. So in the case of Kyle, I may say, you know, this isn't so bad, you know, Kyle's just helping me build character, helping me be more resilient or something.
Or maybe I meditate, try to like, you know, reduce my negative emotional reactions that way. Anything like that that's targeting the emotion, that's emotion focused. And then social support is related to what we've already talked about, you know, trying to get help from other people. The book has a discussion of which of these is better. That discussion is a little complicated.
I'm not going to get into that. Don't worry about which is better. Just understand what the three are.
One specific type of emotion-focused... Coping that the book targets as being bad is is repression is kind of pushing negative emotions down The book cites a number of studies finding that in the long run that is not so good They even once did an experiment on this. They randomly assigned people to different conditions after going through some negative event, one of which was given a chance to write about it in detail to kind of express how they felt, and one group that was not. And in a one-month follow-up they found a significant difference in the amount of negative emotion, so that's consistent with repression being maybe not a good way to go. And there are more long-term studies finding similar things.
There's also a discussion of a sex difference here. On average, men are more likely to use problem-focused coping, and women are more likely to use emotion-focused coping or social support. This is of course, as always, just on average. There will be lots of variation and outloggers. But to illustrate this point, that men and women use this one, I have a clip from Modern Family, in which Phil learns the importance of not only using that one.
I'm just trying to help you guys out. Okay, so that's what it says about sex differences. Something that surprised me, apparently there's also a cultural difference wherein individualistic cultures, or people in individualistic cultures, are also more likely to use problem-focused coping.
That kind of surprised me, but that's what the book says. Any questions on stress or COVID? Yes. So if you were to, like, like, do the example that you used, if you were to go up to Kyle and you would yell at him, would you, like, do things?
into like the problem or the emotion? Even if it's like a confrontation when you're angry? Oh yeah, so that's a good question.
So the question is how am I trying to solve? If I'm doing anything to get rid of the problem that's causing me the bad emotions, so the problem is Kyle's being a jerk to me in this hypothetical. If I am trying to get rid of that problem, the Kyle being a jerk problem, then I'm doing problem-focused coping. So if I yell at him, I'm doing that to get him to stop being a jerk, right?
If I'm trying to get rid of my bad emotions, like me being really sad, I'm trying to get rid of that, then I'm doing the emotion focus. Good question. Any other questions about stress or coping?
I think we're going to be pretty good for time on Tuesday. Are there any objections to ending a little bit early? No. All right. See you all on Tuesday.
Thank you. Have a wonderful Thursday.