chapter 11

• Includes a biopsychosocial model of health

Subjective Well-Being

• Individuals' overall evaluation of life satisfaction and happiness
• Applies research to provide people with the knowledge and skills that allow them to experience fulfilling lives
• Positive subjective experiences: positive moods, positive emotions, flow, mindfulness
• Positive Individual traits: hope, resilience, grit, gratitude
• Positive institutions: positive workplaces, positive schools

Elements of Positive Psychology

• A predominant, positive emotion or state of mind like happiness, alertness, and joy
• Recognizing a positive event and that someone or something else was responsible for it, can promote happiness
• A wide range of positive inner feelings
• Feelings of approval and acceptance towards yourself, someone else, or something else

Growing Up

• Physiological
• Safety
• Love/belonging
• Esteem
• Self-actualization

Stress and Positive Psychological Change

• Survivors of serious illnesses, accidents, natural disasters, and other traumatic events will report positive psychological growth, namely post-traumatic growth
• Have successfully coped with the trauma
• Frequently reflect on the traumatizing event and relate it to some positive outcomes

Post-Traumatic Growth

• Six domains
• New possibilities: recognition of new interests and activities
• Relating to others: feeling closer to others
• Personal strength: acknowledgement of inner resilience and self-reliance
• Appreciation of life: increased value placed on life
• Spiritual change: deeper understanding of religious or existential concepts
• Life priority change: a clearer sense of what truly matters

Stress Definition

• A lack of fit between perceived demands and perceived ability to cope with the demands
• Stress is felt when perceived resources are less than perceived demands
• This may depend on how we appraise events
• Initial evaluation of the relevance, level of threat, and degree of stress the event brings
• An evaluation of our ability to cope

Stress: Primary and Secondary Appraisal

• If a situation is perceived as relevant and threatening it leads to secondary appraisal
• If a situation is perceived as irrelevant or harmless, then there is no stress
• If coping resources appear inadequate or likely to be taxed, this results in stress
• If coping resources appear adequate then no stress

Types of Stress

• Relatively short duration with a clear endpoint, like a job interview
• A relatively long duration and no readily apparent time limit, for example, relationship conflicts, financial problems, heavy workload, fighting chronic diseases, ambient stress, daily hassles, readjustment to life changes (or major life stressors), and burnout

Stress in the Environment

• Chronic negative conditions embedded in the environment
• Types include: excessive noise, traffic, pollution, poverty

Response To Stress

• Human response to stress is complex and multidimensional
• Emotional responses
• Physiological responses
• Behavioural responses

Intensity of stress

• Chronic stress
• Life change, acute stress
• Traumatic stress

Stress Management Factors

• Social support, hardiness, and optimism may cause some people being better at stress management

Stress Response

• Some people withstand stress better than others
• Many moderating variables may reduce the impact of stress on physical and mental health
• Aid provided by members of one's social networks
• A disposition marked by commitment, challenge, and control purportedly associated with strong stress resistance

Optimism and Stress

• A general tendency to except good outcomes
• Action-oriented, problem-focused, carefully planned coping; more willing to seek social support
• Pessimists deal with stress by avoiding it, giving up, or using denial
• Associated with better mental and physical health around the world

Coping Stress

• Active efforts to master, reduce, or tolerate the demands created by stress
• Coping responses may be healthy or unhealthy
• Coping strategies help determine whether stress has any positive or negative effects on a person

Handling Stress

• Giving up prematurely
• Acting aggressively
• Indulging oneself/blaming oneself
• Procrastination
• Examples of Positive/constructive coping: problem-focused (when situation is controllable) and emotion focused (when situation is uncontrollable)

Giving Up

• Passive behaviour produced by exposure to unavoidable aversive events
• Cognitive interpretation of aversive events determines whether learned helplessness develops
• Sometimes transferred to situations in which the person is not really helpless
• Creates a passive reaction to stressful events, rather than active problem-solving

Learned Helplessness

• Passive adaptation to unavoidable aversive events
• Dogs in electrified cage at first were not able to escape the impending shock
• Later, all they had to do was cross the other side, but they did not even try
• They had learned they were “helpless” to avoid the shock and just sat there and took it without trying to escape

Aggression and Acting Aggressively

• Behaviour intended to hurt someone, either physically or verbally
• Frustration aggression hypothesis: aggression is always due to frustration
• People often act out toward others who had nothing to do with their frustration
• Freud: aggressive acts release emotional tension in a process called catharsis
• Research finds that acting aggressively produces more, not less, anger and aggression

Displacements

• The transfer of negative emotion from one person or thing to an unrelated person or thing

Handling Stress Poorly

• Stress sometimes leads to poor impulse control, or self-indulgence
• Examples: excessive eating, drinking, shopping, gambling, drug use or internet addiction
• A tendency to engage in negative self-talk in response to stress
• Is associated with catastrophic thinking rooted in irrational assumptions
• Increased distress and depression for those who have experienced trauma and natural disasters
• Heightened PTSD symptoms and greater feelings of shame in those who experienced sexual abuse

Procrastination Facts

• About 70-90% of college students off academic assignments
• Many claim to benefit from this tactic
• Desire to minimize time on a task
• Desire to optimize efficiency
• Close proximity to reward
• Students often get rewarded for procrastination
• Procrastinators also tend to experience more anxiety and health problems
• Students reported, early and late in the semester, how many symptoms of physical illness they had experienced

Procrastination Results

• Procrastinators turned their papers in later than did non-procrastinators
• Procrastinators obtained lower grades on those papers
• Early in the semester, procrastinators reported fewer stress-related symptoms; later in the semester, procrastinators were reporting more symptoms

Productive and Healthful Ways of Dealing With Stress

• Efforts to deal with stressful events that are judged to be relatively healthful
• Realistic appraisals of stress and coping resources (appraisal-focused)
• Confronting problems directly (problem-focused)
• Learning to recognize and manage disruptive emotional reactions to stress (emotion-focused)

Rational Thinking

• Therapy that focuses on altering clients' patterns of irrational thinking to reduce maladaptive emotions and behaviour
• Rational-emotive behaviour therapy (REBT) and the (ABC) model:
• Negative appraisals (or beliefs) are often associated with catastrophic thinking, which exaggerates the magnitude of our problems
• Positive (realistic and/or optimistic) appraisals allow constructive coping

Humour And Positive Reinterpretation

• Reduces the negative impact of stress on mood for many reasons
• Creates a more positive appraisal
• Increases positive emotions
• Facilitates positive social interactions
• Positive reinterpretation can buffer stress by recognizing that things could have been worse and searching for something good in a bad experience

Problem-Focused Strategy

• Using systematic problem solving
• Clarify the problem
• Generate alternative courses of action
• Evaluate alternatives and select a course of action
• Take action while maintaining flexibility
• Social support and sense of personal control
• Two psychosocial models of stress

Social Support

• Feeling that one is loved, cared for, esteemed, and valued
• Feeling that one is part of a network of communication and mutual obligations from significant others

Sense Of Personal Control

• The feeling that one can make decisions and take effective action to produce desirable outcomes and avoid undesirable ones

Types of Social Support

• Expression of empathy, caring, and concern toward a person
• Provides the person with a sense of comfort, reassurance, belongingness, and being loved in times of stress
• Expressed through positive regard for the person in the form of encouragement or agreement with the individual's ideas or feelings
• Positive comparison of the person with others
• Building the individual's self esteem
• Be an ego booster but avoid being an ego-buster
• Tangible or instrumental support: involves direct assistance

Informal Support

• Includes giving advice, directions, suggestions, or feedback about how the person is doing

Network Support

• Provides a feeling of membership in a group of people who share interests and social activities

Sense Of Personal Control

• Another psychosocial factor that modifies the stress people experience is the degree of control people feel they have in their lives
• People like the feeling of having some measure of control over the things that happen to them
• People feel less distressed if they feel that they have control over the problem/situation

Types Of Control

• Behavioural control involves the ability to take concrete action to reduce the impact of a stressor and is same as problem-focused coping
• Cognitive control processes or strategies to modify the impact of a stressor and is same as appraisal focused coping
• Decisional control is opportunity to choose between alternative procedures or courses of action and having the second choice or a “plan B"
• Informal control has opportunity to get knowledge about a stressful event and knowing ahead of time what will happen, why, and what the consequences are likely to be

Happiness - Philosophical Views

• Happiness was attained by living a virtuous life and being a good person-Aristotle
• The road to happiness lies in the satisfaction of one's desires and the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Happiness was the ratio of one's accomplishments to one's aspirations- William James

Measuring Happiness (Operationally Defining It)

• Judgement that life is satisfying
• The predominance of positive compared with negative emotions which is the percent happy scale

Positive Illusion - The Paradox

• Inflated view of one's own characteristics as a good, able, and desirable person
• Having a positive illusion will make you happy
• Lowering one's aspiration and making downward comparisons can result in positive illusion

Traits of Happy People

• Being less abusive and hostile and less self-focused
• Reporting fewer instances of disease
• More helpful and cooperative
• More likely to spend money on others (giving)
• Have more social skills
• More creative and energetic
• Are more forgiving and trusting

Benefits of Happiness

• Correlates with positive outcomes of life
• Marriage & longevity
• Self-esteem & job satisfaction
• These correlations might involve reciprocal causality

Factors That Affect Happiness

• Men and women are seen as being equally happy
• Some variations in happiness across different age groups, but the range of change is very small
• In other studies, level of happiness is constant across different age groups

National Wealth And Happiness

• The correlation between a nation's well-being score and its gross national product is +.67
• National wealth is confounded with several factors and is determined by holding these confounding variables at a constant level when we look at the relationship between income and happiness

Income and Happiness

• There seems to be a threshold, which shows a positive correlation between income and happiness when this threshold is not met, but happiness does not increase with income when this threshold is met

Mood Stabilization

• People's moods are usually maintained at a constant level, regardless of a sudden fortune or misfortune
• People will gradually return to their previous state of happiness
• This overall constant level of happiness is affected by personality

Personality and The Well Being

• Gender, age, ethnicity, and income account for only 10 to 15 percent of the variation in happiness
• Personality accounts for up to three times as much of the variance accounted for by age, income, gender, education, ethnicity, and religion put together
• Two personality traits are closely related to well-being and those are extraversion and neuroticism

Neuroticism and Extraversion Details

• Loves variety and excitement
• Has a positive outlook on life
• Is the life of the party
• Energetic and enthusiastic as well as seeks novelty and external stimuli
• Tendency to experience positive emotions
• Friendly and talkative
• Highly adaptable

Scoring High On Neuroticism

• People with an emotional instability, anxiety-proneness, negative affectivity
• Moody
• Touchy
• Irritable
• Anxious
• Unstable
• Pessimistic
• Complaining

Happiness Factors

• Personality (happier people are emotionally stable and socially engaged)
• Life satisfaction (ratio of one's accomplishments to one's aspirations)

Social Support And Social Status Impact

• Married people tend to be happier than people with few friends
• People with many friends tend to be happier than people with few friends
• Socioeconomic status: people who can support their basic needs are happier than people that can’t