Stress and Health Psychology
Psychology · Section 4.2 · 18 study cards
Appraisal, stressors, the physiology of stress, stress and disease, coping, perceived control and the evidence on managing stress.
Practice this set → Spaced repetition, card by card. No account needed.
Method
Treat stress as a three-part process
Every question in this unit fits somewhere in a chain: stressor, appraisal, response, health outcome. Locate the term in the chain before defining it. Catastrophes and hassles are stressors, primary and secondary appraisal are the middle, the sympathetic and HPA routes are the response, and immune suppression and cardiovascular damage are outcomes.
Work through a stress scenario in this order
- Name the stressor and classify it as catastrophe, significant life change or daily hassle.
- State the appraisal: is the demand judged a threat or a challenge, and are resources judged adequate.
- Identify the physiological route the question is about, fast sympathetic or slow HPA, since only the second explains chronic illness.
- Ask whether the stressor is controllable, which decides whether problem-focused or emotion-focused coping is the better fit.
- Name the evidenced intervention: exercise, relaxation, restored control or social support.
Be precise about causal language
Almost every health finding here is correlational, and marks are earned by saying so. Stress does not cause infection; it raises susceptibility. Religious attendance does not lengthen life; it predicts longer life, largely through behaviour and support. The exceptions, where randomisation exists, are the exercise trials, the controlled virus-exposure studies and the relaxation and mindfulness trials, so cite those when you need to make a causal claim.
Learn the paired names
Lazarus goes with appraisal, Selye with the general adaptation syndrome, Holmes and Rahe with the life-events scale, Friedman and Rosenman with Type A, Taylor with tend-and-befriend, Seligman with learned helplessness and explanatory style, and Benson with the relaxation response. These pairings are quick marks and are almost always asked for.
Definitions and theorems
Worked example
Daniel works in a call centre where the pace is set by an automatic dialler and every call is monitored. He also has a long commute, a leaking roof and an ill parent whose condition will not improve. Over eight months he has had three colds, sleeps badly and has been told his blood pressure is raised. He says he has stopped trying to change anything at work because it makes no difference.
Analyse this case using appraisal, the physiology of the stress response, the evidence on control, and coping, and recommend two interventions with the evidence for each.
Classify the stressors. The dialler, the monitoring and the commute are chronic daily hassles; the parent's illness is a significant life change with no endpoint. Note that the hassles are continuous, which matters more for health than their individual severity.
Apply appraisal. High demand with low perceived resources yields threat rather than challenge, and the parent's prognosis blocks any appraisal in which effort resolves the problem.
Identify the physiological route. Eight months of continuous demand means sustained HPA axis activation and raised cortisol, not repeated fight-or-flight episodes. That fits the raised blood pressure and disturbed sleep.
Explain the colds through psychoneuroimmunology. Prolonged cortisol elevation suppresses lymphocyte activity, so exposure to ordinary circulating viruses is more likely to produce symptoms. Stress increased his susceptibility; it did not create the virus.
Interpret the remark about work. High demand combined with low control is the classic pattern linked to coronary risk, and giving up after repeated ineffective effort is learned helplessness, with a pessimistic explanatory style visible in the claim that nothing makes a difference.
Match coping to controllability. The work processes and the roof are at least partly controllable, so problem-focused coping is appropriate. The parent's prognosis is not controllable, so emotion-focused coping, including support and reappraisal, is the better fit rather than a failure of effort.
Recommend two evidenced interventions: restoring some perceived control at work, supported by the care-home and workplace-control findings, and regular aerobic exercise, supported by randomised trials showing reduced depressive and anxiety symptoms and lowered blood pressure. Mention social support as a third, noting its evidence is largely correlational.
Common mistakes
- Saying stress causes illness. The defensible claim is that stress alters susceptibility and accelerates existing disease processes. Writing that stress causes infection or cancer will be marked wrong even where the association is real.
- Treating emotion-focused coping as the weak option. It is the correct strategy for uncontrollable stressors. The marking criterion is fit between coping style and controllability, not a ranking of the two styles.
- Muddling the two physiological routes. Adrenaline from the adrenal medulla is fast and short-lived; cortisol through the HPA axis is slow and sustained, and it is the one that explains chronic health damage.
- Describing all Type A people as at risk. Ambition and time urgency are not the harmful components. Anger, hostility and depression carry the cardiovascular risk, and the current mechanism cited is chronic inflammation.
- Reporting the religious attendance and longevity finding without its confounds. Health behaviours, social support and reverse causation account for much of it, and an answer that omits them treats a correlation as a demonstrated cause.
Practice it
Reading the method is not the same as being able to recall it under pressure. This set drills 18 cards one at a time and schedules each card separately, so the ones you keep missing come back sooner.