Personality Essay, Research Paper
1.The original example of a stressful experience is both Marie and David are taking evening classes at a local community college, working full time, and two children to take care of. David found a new job last year before he was laid off but he does not get along well with his boss. Marie is not completely happy with her job and the headquarters will move from Tulsa to Mexico City, so she will quit her current job. This is a good example of stress. The negative emotional state occurring in response to events are the anxiety for losing and not being happy with their job. Also consider the fact that they need to make a decent income to rise their children and being competitive by going to school at night. I believe that they both exceed any human resource or ability to cope.
The role of cognitive appraisal in stress has a big impact in creating stress. If we think that we have adequate resources to deal with a situation, it will probably create little or no stress in our lives. But if we perceive our resources as being inadequate to deal with a situation we see as threatening, challenging, or even harmful, we will experience the effects of stress. If out coping efforts are effective, stress will decrease. If ineffective, stress will increase.
2.The stages of General Adaptation Syndrome are the initial alarm stage, intense arousal occurs as the body mobilizes internal physical resources to meet the demands of the stress-producing event. Selye found that the rapidly occurring changes during the alarm stage result from the release of catecholamines by the adrenal medulla, as Cannon had previously described. In the resistance stage, the body actively tries to resist or adjust to the continuing stressful situation. The intense arousal of the alarm stage diminishes, but physiological arousal remains above normal and resistance to new stressors id impaired. If the stress-producing event persists, the exhaustion stage may occur. In this third stage, the symptoms of the alarm stage reappear, only now irreversibly. As the body s energy reserves become depleted, adaptation begins to break down, leading to exhaustion, physical disorders, and potentially, death.
3.Stress can diminish the effectiveness of the immune system. The immune system is your body s surveillance system. It detects and battles foreign invaders, such as bacteria, viruses, and tumor cells. Your immune system comprises several organs, including bone marrow, the spleen the thymus, and lymph nodes. The most important elements of the immune system are lymphocytes-the specialized white blood cells that fight bacteria, viruses, and other foreign invaders. Lymphocytes are initially manufactured in the bone marrow. From the bone marrow, they migrate to other immune system organs, such as the thymus and spleen, where they develop more fully and are stored until needed.
The work of Ader & Cohen challenged the existing view of the immune system were showing that the immune system response in rats could be classically conditioned. Using the same basic procedure that Pavlov used to condition dogs to salivate in response to the sound of the bell, Ader & Cohen paired saccharin-flavored water with a drug that suppressed immune system functioning. After being paired with the drug, the saccharin-flavored water alone suppressed the rat s immune system. As Ader explained, In effect, we had demonstrated that learning processes could influence immune responses. The experiment was a direct and rather dramatic demonstration of a relationship between nervous system function and immune function.
4.The psychological factors of feeling of control are having a sense of control over a stressful situation reduces the impact of stressors and decreases feelings of anxiety and depression. There are two kinds of explanatory style an optimistic explanatory style tend to use external, unstable, and specific explanations for negative events. In contrast, people who have a pessimistic explanatory style use internal, stable, and global explanations for negative events. Pessimists are also inclined to believe that no amount of personal effort will improve their situation. Not surprisingly, pessimists tend to experience more stress than optimists. Chronic negative emotions have report more frequent and more intense daily hassles than people who are generally in a positive mood. And they react much more intensely, and with far greater distress, to stressful events.
5.Coping with stress means the ways we try to change circumstances, or interpretations of circumstances, to make them less threatening.
There are two basic forms of coping problem focus coping is aimed at managing or changing a threatening or harmful stressor. If we think there is nothing that can be done to alter a situation, we tend to rely on emotion focus coping: we direct our efforts toward relieving or regulating the emotional focused coping does not change the problem, it can only help you feel better about the situation.
Chapter 14
1.The reason we must consider social and cultural factors in distinguishing normal behavior from abnormal behavior is because an important qualification is that the pattern of behavioral or psychological symptoms must represent a serious departure from the prevailing social and cultural norms.
2.The main symptoms of the anxiety disorders is intense anxiety that disrupts normal functioning.
The differences between pathological anxiety and normal anxiety has three features. First, pathological anxiety is irrational. The anxiety is provoked by perceived threats that are exaggerated or nonexistent, and the anxiety response id out of proportion to the actual importance of the situation. Second, pathological anxiety is uncontrollable. The person cannot shut off the alarm reaction, even when he or she knows it is unrealistic. And third, pathological anxiety is disruptive. It interferes with relationships, job or academic performance, or everyday activities. In short, pathological anxiety is unreasonably intense, frequent, persistent, and disruptive.
3.Mood disorders means a disturbed emotions cause psychological distress and impair daily functioning.
The symptoms of major depression emotionally, the person feels an overwhelming sadness. Often, the sadness is accompanied by feelings of guilt, worthlessness. Even if surrounded by close friends and loving family members, the person feels alone and disconnected from others. Behaviorally, the depressed person s feelings are reflected in dejected and spiritless facial expressions. Crying spells may occur for no apparent reason. Speech, movements, and gestures seem awkward and slower than usual. Compared with nondepressed people , the depressed person speaks more slowly and takes longer to respond to the comments of others. Depressed people make less eye contact with others and smile less often than people who are not depressed. Frequently, depressed people withdraw from activities that they once enjoyed. Cognitively, memory is often impaired. Thought processes feel dull and sluggish, and the person may have problems concentrating. It becomes increasingly difficult or impossible to complete what were once routine tasks. It differs from dysthymic disorders is because it is chronic, low-grade depression. It is characterized by many of the symptoms of depression, but the symptoms are less intense.
4.The board characteristics of personality disorders are characterized by inflexible and maladaptive personality traits.
The differences among paranoid is people with paranoid personality disorder are just as distrustful of people who are close to them, even when there is no evidence to support their suspicious beliefs. The individual with antisocial personality disorder has the ability to lie, cheat, steal, and otherwise manipulate and harm other people. And, when caught , the person shows little or no remorse for having caused pain, damage or loss to others. It is as though the person has no conscience or sense of guilt. The person with borderline personality disorder often has a pervasive feeling of emptiness, and is desperately afraid of abandonment. Her sense of self is unstable, and just as chaotic as her external world. Partly because her identity is so fragile, she constantly seeks reassurance and definition from others, and then erupts in anger when it is not forthcoming.
5.The core symptoms of schizophrenia can be described in terms of two broad categories: positive and negative symptoms. Positive symptoms reflect an excess or distortion of normal functioning. Positive symptoms include delusions, hallucinations, and severely disorganized thought processes, speech, and behavior. In contrast, negative symptoms reflect a restriction or reduction of normal functions, such as greatly reduced motivation, emotional expressiveness, or speech. According to DSM-IV, schizophrenia is diagnosed when two or more of these characteristic symptoms are actively present for a month or longer. Usually, schizophrenia also involves a longer personal history, typically six months or more, of odd behaviors, beliefs, perceptual experiences, and other less severe signs of mental disturbance.