Psychology of Stress and Emotions

Stress, Emotions, and Motivation

Stress

• Stress is a change that challenges adaptability, measured by the Holmes & Rahe scale
• Short-term effects of stress: sympathetic over-activity
• Long-term effects of stress: increased cortisol
• Life events that can cause stress: loss, humiliation, entrapment
• Factors that determine the effect of stress: individual (physical, emotional, and mental state and expectations)

Coping with Stress

• Problem-solving, but impaired by cognitive errors (e.g. perfectionism, black and white thinking, catastrophization)
• Emotional coping (defensive mechanisms), but impaired by pathological defenses (e.g. denial, projection, repression)

Defensive Mechanisms

• Childish:
  • Denial: don't see problems
  • Distortion: problems seen as distorted
  • Projection: see own problem in others
• Adolescent:
  • Identification: imitate significant others
  • Projective identification: provoke others to assume a role
  • Act out: impulsive expression of unconscious wishes
  • Passive aggression: expression of aggression by being passive
  • Somatization: somatic symptoms symbolic to psychic state
• Pathological:
  • Repression: exclude conflicts from awareness
  • Dissociation: transient amnesia to an event or identity
  • Isolate/split affect: avoid emotionality and focus on intellectual details
  • Inhibition-undo: consciously limit impulse
  • Displacement: direct unaccepted emotion to a weaker or lower rank person
  • Reaction formation: express the opposite of an unaccepted emotion
  • Rationalization: justify criminal behaviors
  • Sexualization: give sexual meaning to non-sexual objects
• Mature:
  • Anticipation: realistic plan for future inner discomfort
  • Suppression: consciously delay impulse
  • Sublimation: change unaccepted impulses to accepted ones
  • Humor: comedy to express unaccepted impulses
  • Altruism: gratified through others' happiness
  • Asceticism: moral limit to base pleasure

Emotions

• Subjective experiences managing our responses
• The limbic system (limbic cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, diencephalon) is involved in emotions
• Theories of emotions:
  • James-Lange: stimuli evoke physiologic response perceived as an emotional state
  • Cannon-Bard: events evoke emotional state causing physiologic response
  • Schachter-Singer: emotions are labeling of simultaneously physiologic and cognitive response
  • Lazarus cognitive appraisal theory
  • Plutchik: emotions aim for equilibrium
• Disorders of emotions:
  • Expression as a physical symptom (conversion and somatization)
  • Experience: reactivity of emotions is exaggerated (affective disorders)
  • Quality of emotion is incongruent to situation (psychotic disorders)
  • Quantity of emotions is blunt or even flat (psychotic disorders)

Motivation

• Initiating, guiding, and maintaining goal-oriented behavior
• Maslow's hierarchy of needs: basic needs at the bottom and higher level needs above
• Motivators:
  • Instincts: universal inborn programmed behavioral patterns
  • Drives reduction: internal tension relieved by desired behavior
  • Incentives: external rewards
  • Needs: humanist Maslow's hierarchy of needs
• Disorders of motivation:
  • Addiction: craving to seek pleasurable experience despite destructive consequences
  • Amotivation syndrome: burn out of the brain reward system

Clinical Psychology

• Assessment, understanding, preventing, and managing psychological distress in clinical settings
• Psychometrics and neuropsychology: standardized tests (e.g. intelligence quotient, personality assessment, structured interview)
• Psychotherapies and counseling: approaches (psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, humanistic) and counseling (couple therapy, family therapy)
• Psychosomatics: study of mind-body relation

Mind-Body Relation

• Stress model: psychological stress affects the body (sympathetic nervous system, endocrinal and immune systems)
• Somatoform and pain model: perception of bodily symptoms is affected by psychological state
• Placebo effect: treatment effects, side effects, and placebo elicit the effect expected by the patient through autosuggestion
• Body affects the mind:
  • The body's health influences the brain where mentation processes occur
  • Coping with disabilities, chronic and terminal illnesses: stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance
  • Hospitalization and invasive maneuvers: disrupt daily life routine, privacy, and familiarity with the surrounding environment

Personality

• Personality is the characteristic behavioral trend of an individual with underlying thinking, affect, cognition, and perception.

Factors Affecting Personality

• Biological factors: Genetic, perinatal, medical, and geographic
• Psychosocial factors: Humanistic, cognitive, behavioral, and analytical

Biological Approach

• Ancient assumption: People were created from 4 components of the environment (Air, Water, Fire, and Dust)
• Later, these 4 components were substituted by body fluids (Yellow bile, Phlegm, Blood, and Black bile)
• Cloninger's temperament-character aspect:
  • 4 temperaments: Reward dependent, Persistent, Novelty seeker, Harm avoidant
  • Character: Acquired environmental impact on the mind and how we mature

Assessment Methods

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
• Rating scales (Standard Assessment of Personality, SAP)
• Temperament Character Inventory (TCI)
• Neurophysiologic studies of different temperaments

Humanistic Approach

• Based on freedom of choice and subjective experiences
• Carl Rogers' postulates:
  • What determines a person's behavior is self-concept, ideal self, and social image
  • Cognitive consonance: Overlap of self-concept, ideal self, and social image
  • Self-actualization: Development of full individuality with all aspects of personality in harmony
  • Peak experience: Temporary, striving, non-self-centered state of perfection and goal attainment
• Therapist's role: Non-directive or client-centered

Cognitive Approach

• Similar to humanistic approach, but more scientific and precise
• Explains individual pattern of behavior as individual way of seeing ourselves and the world
• Concept: Mental representation (meaning) of object, set of percepts
• Schema: Set of concepts to form prototype (1st model of an object)
• Construct: Set of schemata that dominate our thinking
• Kelly's postulate: Each individual has their own constructs
• A repertory grid interview: Writes down or draws representation of own constructs of the world
• Rotter's postulate: Internal locality of control vs. external locus of control
• Seligman's claim: Depressed people have a learned helplessness
• Beck's claim: Depressed people have a triad of negative view of past, present, and future

Behavioral Approach

• Learning is the change in individual's behavior due to current present experience in the surrounding environment
• Individual pattern of behavior is influenced by stimuli from the surrounding environment
• Pavlov's theory: Our behavior is evoked by stimuli
• Skinner's theory: Behavior is modulated by environmental responses to our behaviors (trial and error)
• Bandura's observational learning

Psychodynamic Approach

• Individuality of behavior can be explained by past experiences during development
• Assessment methods:
  • Word association test (WAT)
  • Completions
  • Choice/order
  • Construct story (Thematic Appreciation Test, TAT)
  • Rorschach inkblots
  • Draw a man

This quiz covers the concept of stress, its effects on the body, and ways to cope with it. It also explores the relationship between stress and emotions, and motivation.