Week 7 – Stress, health and illness
Psychology and Physical Health – recap
Previously, we looked at how psychosocial factors interact with their health, symptoms, disease and
acute maintenance of disease. Peoples psychosocial factors influence health through health related
behaviour.
Today we focus on more direct pathway whereby psychosocial factors can directly affect health
through stress pathways. In turn, people’s negative health experiences can have psychosocial
impacts on them, and this creates a cyclical relationship. There are ways to cope with these stress
pathways.
Lecture content:
1. Introduction: definition, measures – stressors, stress response perceived stress as an
interaction
2. Example: work stress, links to health and wellbeing
3. Stress and physical health: underpinning evidence and how links are research
4. Mechanisms linking stress and health: e.g: CVD, psychoneuroimmunology, plus cautions,
summary
Part 1: Introduction
Stress
What do we mean when we talk about stressed? What do we associate with stress?
We can think about stress in two ways: stressors and response
From a psychological perspective, how we understand peoples pereptions of stress is as an
interaction betweena stressor and a stress response.
Role of Stress
Stress is important, and it isn’t all negative (Yerkes Dodson model)
- Positive factors: eustress, challenge, motivator
- Negative: leads to distress
There is an optimal level of stress, which aids our performance. We need to try to control this
balance.
Stress as a stressor
, - A stimulus, a trigger or event can be a stressor.
- These are physical, psychological threat to our wellbeing. (Baum)
- They make demands that require us to demand.
- The most stressful stressors are typically imminent, severely threatening, unpredictable,
uncontrollable, have complex demands and lead to a feeling of helplessness.
Common Stressors:
- Personal: illness, time pressures, loneliness
- Family: life events, relationships, caring relationshio
- Work: environment, demands, control, role and responsibility, lack of support, work
relationships, change, job loss
- Environmental: disasters, noise, crowding
- Societal: social change, inequalities, stigma
Stressors can be quite catastrophic event, and others can be transitions that we pass through, or
they can be chronic (ongoing).
Measuring stressors:
Social Readjustment Rating Scale (Holmes and Rahe, 1967)
Originally thought about through measuring life events. Each event was given a score of how much
stress it would give and you would add up these life events scores to give idea of their exposure to
stressors over a time period.
Problems: not all stressors are negative, they have positive aspects too (e.g: Christmas)
Everyday hassles scale (Kanner et al., 1981)
Gets people to rank the frequency and severity of minor to major events. The more of these they
have going on, the higher exposure to stressors. Howevr, there may be daily thigns that happen that
counteract, so there is another scale that is important to measure:
Daily hassles and uplifts scale (DeLongis et al., 1989)
This has 53 items that are scored and it identifies how much fo these things are hassles in people’s
lives, how much theyre stressors, and they are also ranked in terms of how much of an uplift they
are.
There are sclaes that tap into specific stressors:
- Work stress
o Job Content Questionnaire
o Effort-reward imba;ance Questionnaire
Stress as a response
Psychology and Physical Health – recap
Previously, we looked at how psychosocial factors interact with their health, symptoms, disease and
acute maintenance of disease. Peoples psychosocial factors influence health through health related
behaviour.
Today we focus on more direct pathway whereby psychosocial factors can directly affect health
through stress pathways. In turn, people’s negative health experiences can have psychosocial
impacts on them, and this creates a cyclical relationship. There are ways to cope with these stress
pathways.
Lecture content:
1. Introduction: definition, measures – stressors, stress response perceived stress as an
interaction
2. Example: work stress, links to health and wellbeing
3. Stress and physical health: underpinning evidence and how links are research
4. Mechanisms linking stress and health: e.g: CVD, psychoneuroimmunology, plus cautions,
summary
Part 1: Introduction
Stress
What do we mean when we talk about stressed? What do we associate with stress?
We can think about stress in two ways: stressors and response
From a psychological perspective, how we understand peoples pereptions of stress is as an
interaction betweena stressor and a stress response.
Role of Stress
Stress is important, and it isn’t all negative (Yerkes Dodson model)
- Positive factors: eustress, challenge, motivator
- Negative: leads to distress
There is an optimal level of stress, which aids our performance. We need to try to control this
balance.
Stress as a stressor
, - A stimulus, a trigger or event can be a stressor.
- These are physical, psychological threat to our wellbeing. (Baum)
- They make demands that require us to demand.
- The most stressful stressors are typically imminent, severely threatening, unpredictable,
uncontrollable, have complex demands and lead to a feeling of helplessness.
Common Stressors:
- Personal: illness, time pressures, loneliness
- Family: life events, relationships, caring relationshio
- Work: environment, demands, control, role and responsibility, lack of support, work
relationships, change, job loss
- Environmental: disasters, noise, crowding
- Societal: social change, inequalities, stigma
Stressors can be quite catastrophic event, and others can be transitions that we pass through, or
they can be chronic (ongoing).
Measuring stressors:
Social Readjustment Rating Scale (Holmes and Rahe, 1967)
Originally thought about through measuring life events. Each event was given a score of how much
stress it would give and you would add up these life events scores to give idea of their exposure to
stressors over a time period.
Problems: not all stressors are negative, they have positive aspects too (e.g: Christmas)
Everyday hassles scale (Kanner et al., 1981)
Gets people to rank the frequency and severity of minor to major events. The more of these they
have going on, the higher exposure to stressors. Howevr, there may be daily thigns that happen that
counteract, so there is another scale that is important to measure:
Daily hassles and uplifts scale (DeLongis et al., 1989)
This has 53 items that are scored and it identifies how much fo these things are hassles in people’s
lives, how much theyre stressors, and they are also ranked in terms of how much of an uplift they
are.
There are sclaes that tap into specific stressors:
- Work stress
o Job Content Questionnaire
o Effort-reward imba;ance Questionnaire
Stress as a response
