Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

Introduction: What Is Stress?497>> Introduction: What Is Stress?Key Theme• When events are perceived as exceeding your ability to cope with them,you experience an unpleasant emotional and physical state called stress.Key Questions• What is health psychology, and what is the biopsychosocial model?• How do life events, daily hassles, and conflict contribute to stress?• What are some social and cultural sources of stress?When you think of the causes of psychological stress, your initial tendency is probablyto think of events and issues directly related to yourself, such as school, work,or family pressures. And, indeed, we don’t want to minimize those events as stressors.If you’re like most of our students, you probably have ample firsthand experiencewith the stress of juggling the demands of college, work, and family responsibilities.Those pressures represent very real and personal concerns for many of usas we negotiate the challenges of daily life.As the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, unfolded, our entire nation wasthrown into an extraordinary state of shared psychological stress as we watched,minute by minute, reeling in disbelief. It is impossible, of course, to convey the anguish,grief, and despair experienced by the thousands of people who lost loved onesas a result of the attacks. It is equally impossible to convey the sense of relief thatthousands of other people felt when they eventually learned that their loved ones—like our niece Katie—had survived the attack.But as the days turned into weeks, and then months, the aftereffects of this greatnational trauma lingered and reverberated, like ripples in a pond. For people whowere directly involved, the physical and psychological effects of the attacks and theiraftermath lingered for years (Farfel & others, 2008; Stellman & others, 2008). Katie,for example, still has nightmares and occasional waking flashbacks of the towersfalling. However, even those Americans who were physically hundreds or thousandsof miles away reported high levels of stress after the attacks.What exactly is stress? It’s one of those words that is frequently used but is hardto define precisely. Early stress researchers, who mostly studied animals, definedstress in terms of the physiological response to harmful or threatening events (e.g.,Selye, 1956). However, people are far more complex than animals in their responseto potentially stressful events. Two people may respond very differently to the samepotentially stressful event.Since the 1960s, psychologists have been studying the human response to stress,including the effects of stress on health and how people cope with stressful events.It has become clear that psychological and social factors, as well as biological factors,are involved in the stress experience and its effects.Today, stress is widely defined as a negative emotional state occurring inresponse to events that are perceived as taxing or exceeding a person’s resourcesor ability to cope. This definition emphasizes the important roleplayed by a person’s perception or appraisal of events in the experience ofstress. According to Richard Lazarus, whether we experience stress dependslargely on our cognitive appraisal of an event and the resources we have todeal with the event (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Miller & others, 2009).If we think that we have adequate resources to deal with a situation, it willprobably create little or no stress in our lives. But if we perceive our resources asbeing inadequate to deal with a situation we see as threatening, challenging, oreven harmful, we’ll experience the effects of stress. If our coping efforts are effective,stress will decrease. If they are ineffective, stress will increase. Figure 12.1on the next page depicts the relationship between stress and appraisal.stressA negative emotional state occurring inresponse to events that are perceived astaxing or exceeding a person’s resources orability to cope.“Your mother and I are feeling overwhelmed, soyou’ll have to bring yourselves up.”© The New Yorker Collection 1999 David Sipress fromcartoonbank.com. All Right Reserved.