How has your understanding of health and well-being changed since reading this chapter? How do you think the information from this chapter can help you in your day-to-day life?
From your reading, which topic(s) are most interesting to you?
What was the most surprising or memorable thing you learned about in this reading?
Provide a list of psychological terms that you used in your comment at the bottom of your post.
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The biggest thing this chapter has helped me to understand about health and well-being is that a person’s different aspects of well-being are very closely connected and have a huge effect on each other. This is especially true for emotional and physical well-being. This chapter addressed this issue specifically in the area of the effects of stress on the body’s physical well-being. I learned that stress does not only cause many negative emotions that can cause emotional trauma, it also causes physical damage like an increased risk of coronary heart disease and other serious health issues. I also learned that stress can take a huge toll on the immune system because lymphocytes slow down and decrease the body’s ability to fight off viral and bacterial infections. I definitely understand this to be true as I have seen an entire musical cast go down with sickness after a stressful show week. This chapter has really proved to me that emotional well-being doesn’t just help you feel happy, it also helps you stay healthy physically and to keep all of the other areas of well-being in your life satisfied and healthy.
The number one thing that this chapter has taught me that will help me in my day to day life is the actual meaning of stress. The book is definitely right when it says that stress is an ambiguous term. We hear people every day say that they are “stressed out” and feeling “too stressed.” However, the definition in the book says that stress is not actually a feeling or emotion. Stress is really “a state brought on by any situation that threatens or appears to threaten a person’s sense of well-being, thus challenging the individual’s ability to cope.” The book goes on to explain that the effects of stress can then in turn cause emotional responses that we attribute to the stress itself. These emotions include anxiety, fear, apprehension, dejection, annoyance, anger, rage, guilt, shame, disgust, and jealousy. There are also four types of primary ways to experience stress: frustration, pressure, conflict, and danger. This was very interesting for me to learn about because I am now able to really pinpoint what I am feeling. Just in the last couple of days when I have started to say that I feel stressed, I stop, analyze my feelings, and then am able to realize that I am feeling pressure, frustration, anger, et cetera. This has really helped me to deal with my emotions because I am better able to identify what to do about these emotions rather than the ambiguousness of stress.
The final thing that I found interesting about this chapter was the part about the universality of emotions. Researchers found that there are eight basic emotions: surprise, interest, joy, rage, fear, disgust, shame, and anguish. I think it’s really amazing and quite beautiful that these emotions are built into us as humans and are not even socially constructed in any way. It is neat to know that I could go anywhere in the world and, even if I don’t speak the same language as the natives, if I were expressing one of these emotions they would understand. One thing I found interesting about this list, however, was that sadness is not included. I would have thought of sadness to be one of the most universally known emotions. I think maybe this is because sadness can be a mixture of emotions like anguish and shame or shame and anger.
Vocabulary: stress, immune system, lymphocytes, emotion, frustration, pressure, conflict, basic emotions
This chapter didn’t really change my understanding of the ideas in the chapter; I would say that it instead enhanced my understanding of emotion, health and stress. I’ve been aware of the basic ideas behind emotion and health for a long time, as far as what these ideas are and how each idea can be influenced by outside forces and stimuli. It has enhanced my understanding, however, by improving my understanding of theories and technicalities behind each of these ideas. This way, I better understand emotion and how each person can be affected differently. I also noticed that there are several different theories regarding emotion, so it is interesting to think about which of the theories is most reliable in terms of being closest to the actual intricacies of emotion and stress.
This chapter can help me in my day-to-day life because, as a college student, I experience an awful lot of stress in my life (but I know others who have a lot more in their lives). As a result of this stress, I not only have experience with learning how to reduce that stress to a manageable level, but I also experience a lot of emotion, like happiness, sadness, disappointment, frustration, and excitement. Because I have now read this chapter and know a little more about the psychology and the science behind stress and emotion, I can now think of better ways to deal with these issues, and can thus execute new methods to destress and improve my overall mood when I’m feeling a bit down (which is not often, have you met me?). This will help me in my everyday life and improve my coping skills.
The topic most interesting to me in this chapter was the section on stress which, as I mentioned before, is very important and relevant to me in this stage of my life. I am a person who becomes stressed VERY easily. I think about projects a month and a half away, and I panic and feel the need to do them immediately because I fear that I will forget. This fear of forgetting, I believe, is what really fuels my stress levels, because I have an unhealthy preoccupation with believing that if I don’t take every precaution, then I will crash and burn and fail at everything in my life horrifically. This chapter helped me to realize that that’s probably not going to happen, and there are better ways to cope with stress.
The topic most memorable to me was the topic of all the disorders associated with emotion and stress. I have many friends with a variety of mental illnesses, and this chapter’s awareness of these disorders as valid illnesses made me happy, because there are people out there that believe that mental illnesses are made up, or people are overreacting. I was therefore simply thrilled to see, even in health terms, the recognition of these disorders, along with scientific explanations for their occurrences. It offers hope that others will come to agree in the validity of these illnesses.
emotion
health
stress
stimuli
theories
psychology
methods
disorders
mental illnesses
Throughout this chapter as the author focused on the ideas of emotions and stress a reoccurring theme was how people stay healthy. Before reading this chapter I knew a fair amount about the affect stress has on the body. For instance I knew that there were many coping mechanisms that are not very effective and a chronic amount of stress leads to an increase in illness. However, there were a few things that really stuck out. One of those things was the large percentage of people that have a Type A personality that also have coronary heart disease. I knew that stress was bad for your body if in excess but I had no idea that it could lead to coronary heart disease. Another thing that I had not considered in detail before reading this chapter was the idea that stress could be positive. This was covered toward the end of the chapter and the book explained that eustress was once described as pleasant stress but now has been described as the optimal level of stress that promotes growth. This made a lot of sense to me considering I am one of those people that do not thrive well in situations with very little stress. I am very productive with a certain amount of stress but not enough that it feels overwhelming because if it gets to that point I end up frozen and unable to start in on the things to reduce my stress level.
The information given in this chapter really helped me to notice the different areas I can improve in order to keep my stress at an optimal level along with the importance of taking care of my emotions and not stuffing them. The information regarding emotional well-being was very insightful as well. In my everyday life, paying attention to people's facial expressions more often will be very helpful in determining how a person is feeling. Another area of the chapter that will be very helpful in my daily life was the practically speaking box on page 470. This box explained some different, positive ways to deal with stress that include exercise, meditation, and relaxation. This gave me a good understanding that relaxing can be very beneficial to reduce stress, blood pressure, and anxiety levels.
The topic that was the most interesting in this chapter was the section focused on constructive coping strategies for stress. As college students there are so many stressors in our lives between the next test we have to take and balancing everything. The problem-focused coping mechanism includes recognizing the stressor and directly dealing with it. For short term stressors such as a test in three days this mechanism can help us to focus on the problem and sit down and study in order to deal with the stress that test creates. For stressors that are not as simple to fix the emotion-focused coping mechanism works better. This mechanism helps in reappraising a situation to make it less stressful.
The most surprising thing that I learned was the correlation of stress and people developing coronary heart disease. I knew before reading this chapter that stress had negative effects on the body but I had no idea that it could be this detrimental.
Vocabulary: Type A personality, coronary heart disease, stress, emotion, eustress, problem-focused coping, stressor, emotion-focused coping.
After reading this chapter, my understanding of health hasn’t changed much. This chapter filled in some of the details about emotion and stress that I was not aware of. The information discussed in this chapter will definitely help in my everyday life. I usually use self-indulgence and occasionally use self-defense coping mechanisms to deal with my stress. I now know that I can better cope with my stress by using problem or emotion focused coping. I actually have been using problem focused coping recently with certain aspects of school work, and the way I confronted the problem was by thinking of my distress as creating eustress.
The topics that I was most interested in were the different theories about where emotions come from. I specifically was interested in the facial-feedback theory. I thought it was very cool how the nervous system responded to a change in facial efference. I did try the “pen-in-mouth” experiment for myself and I did notice that I felt happier after holding the pen in my teeth (then again, I might have felt happy because I’m laughing at how ridiculous I looked trying the experiment).
I was also interested in the little box about sports and pressure. I’m not much of a sports guy, but over spring break I spent some time watching March Madness games with my dad and we both noticed how some of the teams were definitely feeling very anxious and made stupid mistakes that cost them the game. I could also draw a similar conclusion looking back on marching band competitions I used to participate in (yes, marching band is a sport). When I focused on my music and maneuvers right before a competition, I did more poorly than when I relaxed and trusted that I knew everything I needed to know.
The most memorable part of the reading for me was the part about cultural and ethnic differences in emotion. I was surprised that I wasn’t surprised that the differences in emotion across the world are caused more by differing display rules than actual emotional differences. I also thought it was very interesting that in Japan, they couldn’t sell depression drugs until they changed “depression” into “cold of the soul.”
Emotion
Stress
Coping
Problem focused coping
Emotion focused coping
Distress
Eustress
Facial-feedback theory
Facial efference
Display Rules
I didn’t realize what profound effects stress had on the body. I knew that it could cause heart disease and had a really bad effect on the coronary system, but I wasn’t aware that it could also harm the immune system and maybe even cause other serious health problems. I also didn’t know that stress could be beneficial. There are such things as pleasant stressors, which can influence your development in a positive way. This kind of stress is called eustress. Without experiencing frustration or pressure, we would never get anything done. Studies have also shown that high levels of stress can improve your performance in a variety of areas.
The chapter suggested some positive ways of dealing with stress that I can’t wait to start putting into practice. You can focus on the problem, problem-focused coping, and how to solve it, or you can focus on how you feel about the stressor, especially if you can’t do anything about the problem. This is called emotion-focused coping. The book really encourages changing the way you think and accepting that fact that you can’t do anything about what is causing you stress, and deciding to not be stressed out about it anymore.
The book also encourages learning how to regulate how you respond to emotions and not letting them control you. However, I learned that emotions do serve some positive purposes, and you shouldn’t repress your feelings. Emotions can help us organize our lives, behaviors, and memories. Positive emotions will cause you to repeat the activity that caused them, and negative emotions will make you think twice about doing it again. Relationships are immensely improved when you talk about how you feel. Emotions should by no means govern our lives, and sometimes we have to do things that give us unpleasant emotions (like homework), but they help us make sense of the world and our part in it.
The most interesting part of the chapter to me was how we differ in how we feel and express emotions. There are three parts of feeling emotions: emotional clarity, attention to emotion, and emotional intensity. There are four levels, or clusters, of how people have these combinations. Those in the cool cluster have low emotional intensity, low emotional clarity, and low emotional attention. Those in the hot cluster display high levels of all three. The other two, cerebral and overwhelmed, have combinations somewhat in the middle.
Women have always been thought of as more emotional than men. This has actually been proved to be true, scientifically, but a lot of this has to do with expectations. Display rules are expectations of society of how certain people should feel emotions and respond to them. This is why men seem to repress their emotions more than women.
The most surprising thing I learned in the reading was the fact that there are certain personalities that actually handle stress differently. Hardy personalities deal with stress the best, and seek out challenges. Type A personalities stress out about everything, and are always worried. Type B personalities are the complete opposite. I didn’t realize that these were actual psychological concepts.
Terms: stress, immune system, stressors, eustress, problem-focused coping, emotion-focused coping, emotions, emotional clarity, attention to emotion, emotional intensity, display rules, hardy personalities, Type A, Type B
This chapter helped me to better understand my health and well-being that I did not quite understand before. Not only that but understanding that the people around me can affect me emotionally and physically, good and bad, and knowing when to say enough is enough for my own well-being. This chapter addressed specifically the issues of stress which can cause not only negative emotions, but also causes physical damage like the increased risk of coronary heart disease as well as other serious health issues.
The most interesting section to me was the section on stress, which is very important to me because I get stressed very easily, as a student that is not a good thing, and for me in general it is an even worse thing, so learning how to reduce stress to a manageable level is a great thing. I tend to stress out when I receive a project or a new assignment and I think about what I already have in the ever growing pile of homework, and start to stress about when I will have the time to get everything done. The fear of running out of time I think is my stressor of what fuels my fear and frustration and the fact that I tend to be a perfectionist makes it even worse, fuelling my stress even more. One thing I found interesting even though I know we already talked about it is that this chapter did not talk about the fact that when you stress it can lead to stress migraines, which is something I get fairly often when I reach a certain stress level.
The most memorable to me was the topic of all the disorders associated with emotion and stress. I have many friends and family family members with these psychological disorders and the awareness this brings. Many people think that a mental disorder is made up or you can “take a pill” and the person will be all better, and yes someone actually said that to my face. It pisses me off when someone writes off a mental disorder as something that you can make disappear when you can not. You can bring this person to a calm state or close to a calm state with the right amount of pills but they will never be “rid” of their mental disorder. One that really stood out to me was obsessive-compulsive disorder because of the book Triggered that I finished a couple of weeks ago. Reading from the textbook, but also from getting first hand perspective from Fletcher Wortmann I understood the disorder a lot better than I thought I did before in some ways.
Vocabulary: health, well-being, stress, coronary heart disease, stressor, frustration, stress level, obsessive-compulsive disorder
The biggest thing I learned from this chapter was the emotional well-being has a great impact on your physical well-being as well. Although stress is not an emotion, they are related, and being “stressed out” can bring up many emotions that go along with that stress. I think stress is something that almost all college students can immensely relate to. Understanding how stress “works” in the body and the potential harmful effects it can have is really important for us to know, so hopefully we can use some coping strategies to effectively deal with the stress and limit the long-term consequences. I had heard before that high levels of stress can lower your immune system’s ability to fight off infections, but I had no idea that it could lead to something as serious as coronary heart disease. Reading that section put a little fire under my feet to try out some coping strategies for dealing with my stress, as the book suggested, so that I don’t have to worry as much about potentially developing such a fatal disease. Knowing what stress is, how it works, and what it can do to my body gives me a better understanding of how it plays into my everyday life. While I know that I cannot entirely get rid of all the stressors in my life, I can employ some techniques to lessen their negative effects and maximize their positive effects.
I also gained a greater understanding for what emotion really is and how changes to your mood can drastically affect your psychological well-being. I suffer from panic disorder and depression, and while I have received some general information on these illnesses from my doctor, reading about them from a psychological and emotional viewpoint has given me an even greater understanding of what I deal with on a day to day basis. It really surprised me to read that a person’s emotional well-being, or one’s happiness, is largely determined by their temperament. I’ve always understood how people can be genetically predisposed to diseases such as cancer or heart disease, but it never occurred to me that something like emotion can also be genetically determined.
The most interesting topic of this chapter was Holmes and Rahe’s Social Readjustment Rating Scale, that rated various life-changing experiences based on the amount of stress they caused. I found this interesting simply because it was very intriguing to see where various aspects of life fell on the scale. While death of a spouse being to most stressful doesn’t surprise me, it did seem somewhat odd that retirement was so close to the top. Out of all life stressors, I would have assumed that it would be closer to the bottom, as it is the chance to not have to work anymore! Granted money may become an issue, but the prospects of retirement, for me, seem to outweigh that possible setback.
Terms: Emotion, panic disorder, depression, stress, stressor, life changes, coping, immune system
Normally, I read the entire chapter and then write my response as I do these assignments. Today, however, I came across a passage that described me so well that I felt the need to write it down right away: “too much to do, too little time, too many expectations, too little certainty about what to do next”. This is me right at this very moment; I in fact had a minor panic attack on Sunday as I looked at my schedule and to-do list for the week ahead. My stress mostly come from chronic stressors – work, classes, homework, activities, scheduling conflicts, and fights with friends. One of my very good friends is struggling with a flare-up of her mental illness, and I totally understand the frustrated feeling that comes from not being able to do more for her. There is a huge sense of pressure on me to perform well in all of my classes, especially as a double major when it seems like I am so far behind in both of my majors. I also have pressure to accomplish a certain amount in my activities and organizations, like a certain amount of brotherhood events for my fraternity and a quota of volunteer hours with Team TC/TK. I also have conflicting feelings about my plans for this summer: do I stay in Cedar Falls and work full-time but have to pay rent, or do I move home and live rent-free but only work part time? It’s a stressful situation, especially when I need to be saving up for a trip to Rome in December. Part of being a college student is being settled in one living situation for a semester, summer, or year at a time and job/internship changes, so in addition to the daily hassles of college, we also have to deal with life changes on a regular basis.
I didn’t realize stress had such an impact on my day-to-day health. I know that it’s not good to be super-stressed all the time, but with the level of involvement I’m at, it’s hard not to be. I found the part on Type A and Type B personalities very interesting. My mom is very Type A and my dad is very Type B. I lean much more towards B but certainly have A qualities. I also thought the coping strategies were interesting. I’m starting to identify how I cope with my near-constant stress and how I can improve my coping methods in a constructive way. I also appreciated the “How can you manage stress?” inset. I definitely need to be more mindful of my stress levels after reading about how too much stress can lead to a variety of illnesses, like coronary heart disease.
stress, chronic stressor, frustration, pressure, conflict, daily hassles, life changes, Type A, Type B
Yet another chapter read and another word that I unknowingly had too narrow of a definition for. I knew health was a broad subject encompassing everything from the annual sniffles and body weight to issues on the mental health spectrum and I knew that Stress can be good and bad depending on how much you have but I never thought of emotions as matter of health. I knew that emotions can trigger posture changes but I didn’t know posture changes could trigger emotions. On a daily level, it seems very helpful to know that forcing a smile can actually make you feel better. This chapter was filled with many little helpful tips to make your daily life better for you and those around you.
I was very intrigued by the research done one facial-feedback theory, it is amazing to me that the body can work backwards like that. Smiling obviously happens naturally when you’re happy but the fact that positioning your face in a smile can improve your mood is mind blowing to me. How many other body movements could affect your mood? What if could help people build confidence by changing their posture or brighten someone’s day by reminding them to smile more? I know I won’t be forgetting this information anytime soon and hopefully on my next gloomy day I’ll try smiling to bring up my attitude. This is such a cool idea to me that your brain associates behaviors in such a strong way that it can be tricked into feeling differently
Health
Stress
Emotions
Research
Posture
Facial-feedback theory
Behaviors
My understanding of health and well-being really hasn’t changed very much throughout the reading of this chapter however I feel like I have a better understanding of how to handle and think about stressful situations. I always thought of stress as a kind of state of mind, but is not just that, but a visceral physical response along with cognitive response to an environmental stimuli. I feel like as I have found out what physically occurs in my body during a stressful situation, I will now know how to better control myself in those situations through my knowledge and what I have learned about the event. I now know that what I feel has to do with a mixture of my cognitive perception of the situation which is usually optimistic and my physiological reaction that creates the fight or flight response through the Sympathetic Nervous System and the Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. I feel like this chapter also had many instances where it taught me how to better deal with and cope with my stress through constructive strategies and through other ways such as my environment and through exercise and meditation. To improve my health and well-being I’ll definitely try to use the problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping techniques talked about in the book the next time I find myself in a tight stressful situation. I will also seek out more support from my friends, fellow students, and loved-ones as needed more often when in a stressful situation and try not to lash out or use any self-defense in stressful situations which I have done in the past. I have also realized through this chapter that stress is not always a bad thing. I have known about good stress in the past, but know I have a better understanding of why certain levels of stress can always be good for you.
I found the correlation between stress levels and performance levels to be quite interesting in this chapter. I know we have gone over this briefly in class, but I still think it is very interesting how there is a point to which stress actually maximizes your performance rather than inhibiting it. I found it fascinating learning about the biology behind emotions and how the amygdala is so interwoven into the biology to allow us to quickly assess a report of our situation to allow us to act quickly against any hostilities within the environment. I also found it surprising that even in the midst of positive changes, your body can experience great deals of stress and hardship. I also never thought of frustration as being a form of feeling stress from different stressors in our daily lives. I have also heard the famous tale about how former president Abraham Lincoln possibly suffered from severe forms of depression, but I never knew how serious they were and that one of them resulted in him sending a letter saying that he was now the most miserable man living.
Terms: stress, stressor, depression, amygdala, self-defense, lashing out, emotion-focused coping, problem-focused coping, meditation, Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, Sympathetic Nervous System
After reading this chapter, I reaffirmed my past knowledge that emotional health and physical health are closely interconnected. I also added to my knowledge base with new facts and ideas from this material. I really enjoyed reading this chapter of the textbook because I think that emotional health is an important aspect of life that often gets overlooked, especially when it comes to stress in our lives. There are many stressors that can cause us to feel negative, and even positive, emotions which lead to stress. Obviously we are able to understand that stress can be both negative and as well as positive, but it is not something that we commonly think of.
Stress and emotion go hand in hand but they are not equivalent. That was something new to me. I'm constantly saying, "I'm so stressed, I feel stressed, this is so stressful, etc" when I am actually feeling emotions like anger or frustration. Stress is a physiological result of emotion. This physiological response results in bodily changes. For example, an increase in stress causes the autonomic nervous system to respond, in particular the sympathetic nervous system. Some examples of this response is the heart rate increasing or the blood pressure increasing. These can in turn have a negative impact on a person's health.
A person's health can decline drastically faster than the average individual if they have too much stress over a long period of time. An individual who does suffer with intense and long-lasting stress are at a greater risk of suffering from coronary heart disease, the number one killer in the United States. They are likely to die earlier as well as to suffer more illnesses due to a weakened immune system.
Another event that can occur as a result of this long-term stress is psychosomatic or psychophysiological diseases. This is yet again an example of emotion and stress leading to health issues. It seems complex that this could happen, yet it is so simple. Our body works wonders while we sit around freaking out about the most minute details. For instance, ulcers, asthma, tension and migraine headaches, hypertension, and coronary heart disease are all in result of this.
I found it interesting to learn that facial recognition can be perceived across various cultures. That is, the facial expression of one person in a certain country can be recognized from a person of a different country. We are able to understand what emotion people are feeling based simply upon their face and how it is positioned. There are some basic emotions that are universally recognized. Those include surprise, interest, joy, rage, fear, disgust, shame, and anguish.
Vocabulary Terms: emotion, stress, stressors, physiological, autonomic nervous system, sympathetic nervous system, basic emotions, psychosomatic or psychophysiological diseases