Describe 2 ways in which personality may modify the effects of stressors.?

Question

Psychology assignment, the text book isn't really helpful, does anyone have any suggestions? I'd ask my teacher, only she's useless and is actually a business studies teacher! Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi! I totally sympathise with your problem which is why I refuse to teach subjects that I'm not specialised in. I must warn you in advance that I have neither studied nor taught stress as a topic before BUT I have sat in on lessons dealing with stress, so I can give you a general overview.

Ok, you probably know that there is a difference between stress as a bodily response (e.g. fight/flight response=short-term and GAS=long-term) and a stressor which triggers a response. Stressors include life events, daily hassles and workplace stressors. Techniques used to help us cope with (manage the effects of stress) can be split into Physiological (biological) and Psychological techniques.

As you probably know, physiological techniques focus on teaching us to control the body's reaction to stress and include drugs (e.g. beta blockers), bio feedback (looking at our breathing rate/heart rate etc on a machine and deliberately trying to slow things down) and exercise (e.g. yoga).

Psychological techniques concentrate on how we feel when we're stressed and how to deal with the triggers that cause us to feel stress. Techniques include Counselling (if bullied in the workplace for example) and psychotherapy (change how we perceive and deal with stressors). Forms of Psychotherapy include Stress Innoculation training (SIT) and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT-where you change the way you think about things).

Now, a problem that you've probably spotted with these techniques is that they don't work for everyone because we're all different (aka individual differences). According to Psychologists, these differences include:

1. Stress personality type (Type A people are those who become stressed more easily because of the way they behave, such as being very aggressive, anxious etc and are therefore more likely to suffer from the effects of stress.)

2. Hardiness-Kobasa suggested that people who are 'hardy' (cope better with stress) are different to other people because of the 3 Cs: Control, commitment and challenge. In other words, they think about and change how they react to the stressful situation (control), they are willing to do whatever it takes to change things (committment) and only do things that they feel capable of doing (challenge).

3. Locus of control- A locus is a point, so what this means is that the way we deal with stress depends on how much control we think we have over a situation and how we explain things when they go wrong. I.e. Some people believe that things are totally outside of their control and if things go wrong it's someone else's fault. These people also believe that they can't do anything to change things that are going wrong for them. In other words, Psychologists suggest that these people have a high locus of external control and a low locus of internal control (external meaning outside and internal meaning inside). In contrast, some people believe that everything is down to them and when things go wrong, it's their fault but when things go wrong, they change them. In other words, these people have a high locus of internal control and a low locus of external control. We all have a mixture of both but Psychologists suggest that people with higher levels of internal control cope better with stress than people with high levels of external control.

I hope that this answers your question. These are 3 things that you could focus on when describing the effects of personality on our ability to deal with stressors. I assume that the question that you've asked on here is for your homework, so I suggest that you read up on these in more detail, in order to clear up and go into more detail about what I've written here when you do your homework or answer an exam question on this topic.

Good textbooks include:

Psychology for AS Level (3rd Edition)-Eysenck, M.

Psychology for A-Level (3rd Edition)-Cardwell, M, Clark, A and Meldrum A*.

AS Psychology: The Complete Companion_Cardwell, M.

*This is the recommended textbook at my current College.

Good websites include:

www.s-cool.co.uk (AS psychology, unit 2, stress management section)

www.psyonline.org.uk

Finally, I will be teaching stress in a couple of months, so you may want to check out my free (non-profit, non-commercial) teaching resource website:

www.freewebs.com/psychedout

You might want to check it out now anyway, because it has other resources from units 1 and 3 on it that you may find useful. All of my resources have been used with my students and are absolutely free to download. However, they are in zip folders, so you'll need to use winzip (or similar program) first. If you need help with any more topics, you can e-mail me (e-mail address is on the website) and I'll be happy to clear up any problems that you might have.

By the way, I would like to know why on earth the person who said 'this is totally over my head, I don't have a clue' bothered to answer the question! Personally, I think that Yahoo should introduce a system where people who write this type of answer either receive no points or have points deducted! This is yahoo answers, not yahoo time wasters!

Answer 2

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Answer 3

Use PsychInfo (an on-line data base that many academic libraries subscribe to) to find articles, searching using the words Personality and Stress. Many articles are available on line in PDF form. Skim through the abstract to see if it's what you need. If you don't know how to use PsychInfo this ask your librarian to help.

If you don't have time to do this our your library is closed right now, you can use Google Scholar to search easily for article. You'll get the title, the source, and the abstract. If you need the whole article you can check with your library. Here's the link, and an example of what showed up when I tried Personality and Stress.

http://scholar.google.com/


J Pers Soc Psychol. 1995 Nov;69(5):890-902.
A framework for studying personality in the stress process.

Bolger N, Zuckerman A.

Department of Psychology, New York University, New York 10003, USA.

This article presents a framework for studying personality in the stress process. The framework specifies that personality may affect both exposure and reactivity to stressful events and that both processes may explain how personality affects health and psychological outcomes. The framework also specifies that personality differences in reactivity may be due to differential choice of coping efforts and differential effectiveness of those efforts. In a 14-day daily study of 94 students, this framework was used to analyze the links among neuroticism, daily interpersonal conflicts, coping with conflicts, and distress. Results showed that high-neuroticism participants had greater exposure and reactivity to conflicts. Furthermore, high- and low-neuroticism participants differed both in their choice of coping efforts and in the effectiveness of those efforts, a possibility not considered in previous models of personality in the stress process.

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Answer 6

You mean like if your were a pisces (very erractical) or a virgo ( calmer sign) I can believe it does depend on your personality and character to how you deal with the effect of stress

Answer 7

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