Psych for Finals

• Designed to help people address a broad range of problems or provide them with general skills to deal with a range of stressors.
• Often focused on a single favored technique
• Rarely evaluated in terms of the extent to which follow through occurs or usefulness.

Motivate people to take preventative action to avoid exposure to dangerous stressors (AIDS or Cancer) or to prepare them to deal effectively with specific stressors they may encounter.

• Taught to evaluate impact that specific stressors have on them and coping strategies
• Directing them to consider alternative coping strategies.

• Provides specific resources and information to help deal w/ stress-related problems.
• Reactive
• Emphasizes using one's own resources
• Originally Suicide prevention

Highly stressful events

• 1. Establish a relationship and maintain contact
• 2. Identify and clarify the nature of the problem
• 3. Evaluate suicide potential
• 4. Assess the caller's inernal strengths and resources
• 5. Create action plan and mobilize caller's response

• 1) Aimed at stressors we don't confront in near future
• Usually attend most closely to matters of immediate concern
• Use emotion-focused: rationalize, intellectualize, etc.
• 2) Likely to confront in near future
• People often 'ignore' or 'normalize' warning signs
• Stress level just prior matches or exceeds during actual exposure

Need to identify the attitudes and behaviors that promote the occurence of stressors and change those attitudes and behaviors.

• Minimize negative consequences if exposed to stressors
• Persuasion and attitude change
• People must be convinced that the preventative behavior is possible and there are benefits.

• 1) Communicator- believable, sincere, expert, trustworthy
• 2) Communication- arouse fear

Designed to preclude or to forestall exposure to a stressor

Detect a problem at its earliest stages so that negative consequences are minimized.

• In panic/ near panic
• Stress levels are so high that individual is hyper vigilant--> focus on petty details

Able to see and respond to warning signs

• Can lead to wishful thinking and inaction
• Muscle relaxation, breathing, etc. helps in crisis

• Dealing with stress engendered by harm or losses that have already been sustained.
• Reactive

• Most effective delivery is from kin or someone of a similar background/ experiences.
• Agressive interventions centered on victim will be unproductive.

• Designed to treat recent rape victims (1-2 days after)
• 6-8 week treatment
• Reestablish a stable emotional equilibrium after stress
• 1) Have client relax, encourage to recall details
• 2) Educate victim on how fears develop and are maintained
• 3) Attempt to reduce guilt/ responsibility
• 4) Teach emotion-focused and problem-focused coping strategies

• Certain Conditions:
• 1) extreme depression
• 2) serious suicidal ideation
• 3) substance abuse
• d) diseases (i.e. heart trouble, asthma, ulcer, etc.)

• Exposure
• Discuss perceived stress
• Diminish actual stress response

• Stressor Exposure
• Relaxation Techniques
• Taught to connect relaxation with anxiety arousal

• Active and Direct
• Guided by professionals

• Must be exposed to stimuli that:
• Focused on adults recently exposed to trauma
• 1) Reactivate the fear memory
• 2) Provide new information connected with stressor (i.e. expose to dogs, but don't let bite)

Homework with hierarchy consisting of major situations that are avoided but that are realistically safe

• Therapist is less active
• One memory leading to another until coherent traumatic event was evoked
• Leads to improved emotional functioning and in physical symptoms

• Shapiro
• The memory of a traumatice event can be diminished if rythmic side-to-side eye movements are generated while visualizing
• Create vidual image of event
• Follow therapist's finger w/ eyes laterally
• Produces fundamental change in memory versus modifying reaction
• Found to be minimally effective at best

• Healing effects of simply opening up
• Painful in short-term
• Talking more effective than writing
• Means of reframing shame and guilt
• Reconfront experiences and achieve some insight to distress

• Calhoun and Resick
• Developed for sexual assault with PTSD
• Combination of Disclosure and Exposure
• Exposure to traumatic memoris in a safe environment--> alters fear structures and enables habituation to feared stimulus
• Write out in detail and recount to therapist frequently

• Related to psychoanalysis
• Removes 'blocks' to processing --> encourages encountering event to tolerable level over time until all aspects can be worked through
• Used with PTSD

How to expose to trauma with minimal therapist guidance

Confrontation

• Treatment or prevention of diagnosed disease or alleviation of physical or mental discomfort
• Accepted recreational use is a function of your reference group and best determined by individual

• Caffeine
• Sympathomimetics
• Beta-Adrenergic Stimulants

• Most widely used CNS stimulant
• Can be found in cold remedies, diuretics, other stimulants

• Stimulate the sympathetic NS
• Cough/ cold meds, nasal sprays, eye drops, respitory drugs

• 1) Accepted medical or nonmedical use
• 2) Drug Misuse
• 3) Compulsive Abuse
• 4) Addiction

Use of any drug (legal or illegal) for a medical or recreational purpose when other alternative are available, practical or warranted

• Use of a drug despite adverse social or media consequences
• Developed an intense reliance on self-administered drugs

• Overwhelming involvement in drug use and securing supply
• Pervades the person's life and controls his or her behavior

• Most frequently prescribed drugs in the the treatment of anxiety
• Associated with rapid relief from subjective feelings of anxiety
• Increased in Mid-70's--> medicalized many simple problems of daily living
• Overprescribing was legitimized drug abuse
• Produces substantial cognitive deficits--> amnesia, associated learning and retention impairment
• Users develop a tolerance and then increase use

• Affects GABA neurotransmitter
• Affects Seratonin
• Users report feeling lethargic and slow cognitively and motorically
• Not considered addictive
• Takes 2-3 weeks to obtain maximized benefits

Disinhibition

• Mild-sedative hypnotic drug with clinical effects resembling alcohol and anti-anxiety drugs
• Relaxation, relief from anxiety, mild euphoria

• Decrease sympathetic NS activity
• Decrease cardiac output

Increase in norepinephrine and seratonin

• Avoidance or endurance with dread of situations from which escape might be difficult or help unavailable in the event of a panic attack
• Benzodiazepines, trycyclic drugs, prozac

• Tricyclic--> anafranil
• Prozac
• Increase Seratonin
• Moderate gains
• Exposure therapy is most effective

• Medication is not treatment of first choice for GAD
• Anxiety management and general coping skills treatment recommended

• Hyperventilation and Asthma
• Anxiety can precipitate or is a consequence or both

Palpitations, chest pains, cardiac awareness

• Hyperthyroidism (i.e. Grave's Disease)
• May increase release of adrenallin which causes anxiety-like symptoms

Anxiety and panic like sypmtoms from drug abuse

• Part of Department of Labor
• Helped formalize occupational stress as a field of study

As a result of on-the-job stress, individual is completely drained and exhausted and can no longer function efficiently.

Only part way there...

Result of boredom and low job challenge

'Eliminated' sexual harrassment in work place

Lack of clarity about job's objectives and expectations of boss/ coworkers

• Job demands clash
• Job functions aren't consistent
• Tasks are viewed as undesireable

• Tendency to cope actively w/ stressors and believe that one can controle stressors through hardwork and determination
• Higher blood pressure
• More prevelant in Black men and women than White

• Kramer
• Developed for student nurses to prepare them for stressors encountered in job.

• Peer support
• Personell drawn from emergency service organizations
• Help in situation like work place death, trauma, etc.

• Treatment procedures designed to help people adjust to highly stresful events
• Usually of sudden onset
• Strain coping capability

• Anticipatory coping behavior
• Designed to detect early signs of a potentially stressful event
• Minimize negative impact (i.e. self exams--> detect cancer)

• Exposure approach
• Emphasizes on presenting to the client sensory material representative of the trauma
• Present stimuli that are symbolically relevant but not actually experienced

• Memoris of past sexual/ physical abuse 'recovered' from adult 'survivors'
• Usually become aware after many years
• Usually as a result of psychotherapy

• Systematic Desensitization where family/ friends of client tkae responzibility for implementation
• Occurs after consulting with a professional

• Commonly prescribed designed to reduce anxiety
• Muscle relaxants and sleeping medications

• Class of drugs with dampening effect on teh cardiovascular system
• Blocks beta-adrenergic receptors
• Prescribed for high blood pressure and also anxiety

• Relatively ne antianxiety drug
• fewer side effects than benzodiazepines
• Lethargy
• Relief may take up to 2-3 weeks

Term used when one manages anxiety with alcohol or other drugs w/out professional help

Workplace-based programs that focus on promoting healthy lifestyles in employees and improving their stress management skills.

• Factors that are part of basic job tasks or work environment that are percieved as stress full
• i.e. Noise, social isolation

Overwork-related death