Health - Week 8
Health - Week 8
Health - Week 8
RESILIENCE
AND SOCIAL
SUPPORT
Coping with Stress, and Resilience
Moderators of Stress Experience (meaning all those things that effect how we experience stress and
the effects it has on us)
• Stress moderators modify how stress is experienced and the effects it has.
• Psychological and social factors that play a role in whether people under stress get ill or stay healthy
Psychosocial Resources
• Perceptions of psychological control (“I have some control over my health”) and self-efficacy (I can do what
I set up to do such as “I can drink more water”)
o Improve emotional well-being, coping and health behaviors such as exercise
o Facilitate intervention in treatment settings
• Conscientiousness
o Competence, order, self-discipline, dutifulness
o If you’re high on conscientiousness, you sort of plan your time, so that you are able to study for your
different midterms and you prepared yourself. Yani sınavdan önceki akşam yetiştirme stresine
girmiyorsun planlı gittiğin için)
• Easy going nature (related to agreeableness) – Easy going people make good friends, they humour you,
they don’t pick up fights with you.
• Intelligence (it’s not necessarily an emotion related factor, intelligence is also a resource. It makes sense
that, you would use your cognitive skills to seek out. For example, where you might get best help when you
have a problem)
• Emotional stability (as opposed to neuroticism)-> Duygusal denge (they regulate their moods, modlarında
fazla iniş çıkış olmuyor neuroticismdeki gibi. Maybe they have learned to regulate their moods. Sometimes
it takes going to a therapist, it may take time. This is not something necessarily we’re born with. It’s a skill
that we can develop with the help of someone)
Resilience
• Psychological resources also help us bounce back from bad experiences and adapt flexibly to the changing
demands of stressful situations. (Getting up and moving on and being positive, trusting others, coherence…
all those things that we talked about are things that help us stay resilience.
• Talks by resilience researcher Barbara Fredrickson (psychological researcher) can be found on youtube
(done a lot of research on these issues)
Coping Style
• Individual differences in how we behave to cope with stress
o More specific than personality, directly relevant to health
Here are the different strategies: Self destruction, denial, substance-use, use of emotional support, venting,
positive reframing, planning, humor, acceptance, religion, self-blame, use of instrumental support…
So the scale is giving to a person and their asked to look at an item and say “I haven’t been doing this at all” to
“I have been doing this a lot”. For example, “I’ve been refusing to believe that it has happen”-> that relates to
denial etc.
Communal Coping
• Coping processes can also be shared
• It’s not just individual coping that we could be talking about, but there is a such a thing as communal
coping. Theories of coping mostly from a more individualistic perspective, but there is also shared coping
processes.
o Ex. A couple appraising and coping with one partner’s diabetes as the couple’s rather than the
partner’s problem brings more success in treatment. (Diyabette beslenme ve ilaçlara uyma çok
önemli, eğer diyabet çiftin ortak problemiyse daha iyi baş edilir.)
o Generally, problem focused coping is associated with better psychological adjustment and fewer
physical symptoms (effectiveness depends on whether or not there is actually something you can do to
improve the situation; when something is unavoidable, when your situation is untreatable then maybe
you engage in emotion focused coping)
o Emotion focused coping is generally associated with negative adjustment, because avoidance can
prevent you from coming to terms with the experience
o Effectiveness depends on whether or not there is actually an opportunity for improving the situation
§ Ex. When faced with an unavoidable/untreatable situation, denial may be protective for mental
health
o People who are flexible copers, who match their strategies to the type of situation (less ore more under
control) have an advantage
Coping Strategies
• Even when under extreme stress, remain hopeful that things will be OK/improve; but at the same time,
don’t deny the possibility that they will not!
• Hope for the best and let hope to prevail over your emotions, but keep a little piece inside to prepare you
for the worst!
• Most successful copers: try to take control when faced with a stressful event, do not worry about what
they will not be able to control in the future, and do not attempt to repair what is beyond
repair…(relationships maybe beyond repair)
• Solution usually comes from small but realistic steps!
• Ex: As students in our coursework, we benefit from problem focused coping. You manage your time, you
keep up with your readings etc. /Maybe you’re face with the stress of midterms and your parents are
separating what can you do? Hopefully you can talk with the teachers about that ve hocalar sana make-up
exam yapmayı kabul edebilir veya projenin teslim tarihini uzatabilir veya withdrawing from the course. All
of these are coping strategies…
• Ex: Çocuğu doğal yoldan olmayan bir çift çocukları olabilsin diye tedavi yöntemine başvurup, bunun için
uğraşıyorsa bu problem focused coping oluyor. Ama diyelim ki tüm tedavilere ragmen çocukları olmuyorsa
artık emotion focused coping yapmaya başlarlar.
• Yani yapabileceğinizi yapın, yapamayacağınız durumlarda kendinizi iyi hissettirecek şeyler yapmaya çalışın.
• Of course, emotion focused coping sometimes engaging in things that don’t make you feel necessarily very
well; like venting, avoidance…Because avoiding the situation means that you don’t have to think about it,
so rather than feeling bad about the situation you may engage in avoidance, using escape behavior. Ama
avoid etmek daha kötü. For example, cancer patients who don’t express their feelings, are more likely to
experience depression and anxiety etc.
Coping Interventions
Expressive Writing Paradigm
• Traumatic experiences tend to disrupt our beliefs about ourselves & the world
• Inhibition may lead to health problems through
o Increased isolation and lack of communication with others
o Breakdown in cognitive processing, resulting in obsessive thoughts or rumination
o Increased physiological reactivity
• Written or verbal self disclosure has physical and psychological health benefits
• Self-disclosure facilitates
o A process of self-reconstruction (meaning, coherence, insight into the experience)
o Gaining emotional distance from the event (it doesn’t continued to hurt you, in the way that did before)
o When you think about the therapies -> verbal self-disclosure is what helps us, to take it outside, to deal
with it as best as we can
Coping Interventions
• Affirmation of important self values
• Relaxation training
o Yoga (the type of yoga that is more focused on breathing, on moving with the breath, on remaining
focus and has a healing quality)
• Coping Skills training
o Learn what stress is and how to identify the stressors in our lives
o Acquire and practice skills for coping with stress
o Practice stress management techniques in stressful situations and monitor their effectiveness
Individual Differences?
• Certain personality characteristics (self-disclosure, extroversion, lower social anxiety) and greater social
competence relate to greater effectiveness of both getting & using social support. (Even asking for social
support is not that easy for everyone. Being able to do so is an advantage.)
• Women both receive and provide more social support
Gender Effects?
- Women give& receive more SS than men
- Women benefit more from SS than men
*Negative connection between social support and mortality was stronger for women
- Men benefit more from marriage
*In old age, loss of a spouse has a stronger negative effect on men
Reasons? There are different factors, but women tend to live longer than men approximately 5 years
longer across different cultures.
-Men share more with their wife, women more share with their girl friends
- Men who have lost their wife, are going to have fewer men in their age group, because their male
friends are more likely to passed away compared to a woman who has lost her spouse.
-Kadınlar kendilerine daha iyi bakabiliyorlar, erkekler yemek yapımı vs. de eşine ihtiyaç duyuyor vs.