Stress
a mental and bodily response that shifts the organism towards a fight or flee reaction.
Disclosure writing
- involves writing about a very upsetting or traumatic event from one’s past.
- produces long term reductions in distress & improvements in bodily health.
- individuals who showed the most improvement disclosed information they ACTIVELY held back from telling others.
Cognitive reappraisal
involves re-framing the underlying meaning of an affective situation to change one’s emotional response.
Misattribution of Arousal Study
- male participants who crossed a scary bridge were more likely to call a female confederate after the experiment.
- participants attributes the arousal from the bridge to attraction towards the female.
- shows that individuals can re-frame negative arousal as positive arousal (affects cognition and behaviour).
Free Choice Paradigm
after choosing between one of two objects, people begin to show increased liking for the chosen object and decreased liking for the non-chosen one.
PTSD
an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a traumatic event.
components of PTSD
1) avoidance.
2) intrusive memories.
3) negative mood.
4) constant state of hyper-arousal.
Hans Selye
- stress causes flight or fight response.
- experimented with rats and noticed that stressful conditions gave experimental group and placebo group rats ulcers.
Sympathetic system
Activates body to deal with a stressful situation.
Parasympathetic system
Keeps bodily systems functioning effectively in a calm state.
Stress responses
- mobilize energy to get muscles to move.
- enhance cognition: lower thresholds to boost attention.
- suppress long-term building projects i.e growth.
Impacts of Stress on Health
- ) diabetes (releasing too much glucose, metabolism will be impaired).
- ) heart disease (constricting blood vessels by controlling blood pressure).
- ) ulcers.
- ) neuron death in hippocampus (crucial to form new memories).
Predictor of health improvement (disclosure writing)
using causal and self-reflective words in disclosure writing predicted whether people were likely to improve.
Why does disclosure writing work
the act of inhibition is a type of low level stress, when you free your mind from repressing, your body systems can focus on other areas.
Mindfulness Meditation
- attending to the present moment, on purpose, and with non-judgement.
- when people reported that their mind was on task they reported being happier.
- can be used to prevent depression relapse.
Memory re-consolidation
when a memory trace is re-activated, it temporarily enters a malleable state where it can be altered before being transferred again into long-term memory.
Affect of regulation
Ex of decreasing positive affect: when people with bipolar disorder are having a manic episode.
Ex of increasing negative affect: watching a sad movie to trigger sad emotions and have an emotional release.
Can we erase the past?
beta- blockers like propranolol bind to norepinephrine, (reducing its impact)
