Predictability and Control
The rat gets the same pattern of electric shocks, but this time, just before each shock, it hears a warning bell. Fewer ulcers. Predictability makes stressors less stressful. (Location 4239)
Organisms will eventually habituate to a stressor if it is applied over and over. Classic demonstration: men in the Norwegian military going through parachute training — as the process went from being hair-raisingly novel to something they could do in their sleep, their anticipatory stress-response went from being gargantuan to nonexistent. (Location 4250)
The warning of impending shocks has little effect on the size of the stress-response during the shocks; instead, allowing the rat to feel more confident about when it doesn’t have to worry reduces the rat's anticipatory stress-response the rest of the time. (Location 4271)
Warnings are less effective for very rare stressors (you don’t usually worry much about meteors) and very frequent ones (they approach being predictable even without the warning). (Location 4380)
Give the trained rat a lever to press; even if it is disconnected from the shock mechanism, it still helps: down goes the stress-response. So long as the rat has been exposed to a higher rate of shocks previously, it will think that the lower rate now is due to its having control over the situation. ==This is an extraordinarily powerful variable in modulating the stress-response.== (Location 4285)
⇒ Learned Helplessness
The person who has a button and believes that pressing it decreases the likelihood of more noise is less hypertensive. (Location 4292)
Airplanes are safer than cars, yet more of us are phobic about flying. Why? Because your average driver believes that he is a better-than-average driver, thus more in control. In an airplane, we have no control at all. (Location 4295)
Let a rat run voluntarily in a running wheel, and it makes it feel great. Force a rat to do the same amount of exercise and it gets a massive stress-response. (Location 4300)
The link between occupational stress and increased risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases is anchored in the killer combination of high demand and low control — you have to work hard, a lot is expected of you, and you have minimal control over the process. The control element is more powerful than the demand one — low demand and low control is more damaging to one’s health than high demand and high control. (Location 4306)
⇒ Chronic Stress and Cardiovascular Disease
Most studies have shown that it is middle management that succumbs to the stress-related diseases. This is thought to reflect the killer combination that these folks are often burdened with: responsibility without control. (Location 5971)
If you believe you have control over stressors that are, in fact, beyond your control, you may consider it somehow to be your fault that the inevitable occurred. People with a strong internal locus of control have far greater stress-responses when confronted with something uncontrollable. (Location 4403)
How’s this for an implication of lack of control: one study of the working poor showed that they were less likely to comply with their doctors’ orders to take antihypertensive diuretics because they weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom at work as often as they needed to when taking the drugs. (Location 5930)
see also
Tags: neuroscience science psychology
Superlink: 050 🧠Neuroscience 051 ☣Neurobiology
Quellen
Erstellt: 05-04-26 10:00