Hello everyone and welcome to our first video for module 6.

In this module we’re

going to talk all about one of my favourite subjects: stress! I know it seems kind of
weird for stress to be someone’s favourite subject. Many times in Psychology we use
the phrase ‘research is me-search’, meaning that people tend to gravitate towards
studying subjects that have some kind of personal relevance to them. And, well, if we
think about it, stress is a subject that has personal relevance to all of us.

I came to study stress for a couple reasons. The first was that I started to notice when
I was growing up that I’d actually be able to remain calm in a lot of situations where
others around me would start freaking out, like tests, or even if say something fell
through for a large event we were planning and we had to come up with a solution
really quickly to get things back on track. I tended to be pretty calm and was able to
think clearly in those situations and help the people around me to stay calm to get
the task done. But then, for other situations, I noticed I’d tend to get stressed or
nervous when many other people around me would seem totally fine. These would
be more mundane types of situations, like speaking in class, or, heaven forbid, having
to do a presentation, or being in a crowd waiting for the bus, or talking to people I
didn’t know. So it seemed I was good at handling personal or situational stressors,

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but not great at handling social stressors. This pattern intrigued me, so I did what I do
with any issue I have: I turn my particular set of skills to it, just like I did with my
parasite issue. I figured if I was going to get better at dealing with social stress, I
should study the roots of stress and intellectualize the problem. So I did. And I found
the whole subject fascinating. Many things I learned, like the evolutionary reasons
we have a stress response, and different ways to think about my stress response,
really helped me to change my perspective about stress and be able to handle a
much wider variety of situations with a less destructive and negative stress response.

I hope through the next two modules, where we cover stress and then coping, you
learn some interesting things that help you to think differently about stress and
perhaps even some techniques and strategies that you can incorporate into your life
to help you have a healthier relationship with stress.
Ok, let’s dive into our first topics, where we’ll cover what stress is, and some of the
theories and models that have been developed by researchers to conceptualize
and study stress.

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 What is STRESS?

As we’ve touched on in earlier modules, we know that stress is something that can
affect all areas of our health. It can affect us biologically, as we covered in module 2
when we talked about the effects of stress on some of the body systems. It can affect
us psychologically, as I’m sure we’ve all experienced firsthand with an increase in
negative mood when stressed, and perhaps many of you have experienced the
feelings of anxiety and depression, which are intimately related to stress. And of
course, stress can affect us socially. It can impact how we relate to others, how we
treat others, and ultimately the quality of our relationships and our social support
networks.

We’ve touched on the idea that many chronic illnesses are related to stress. In fact,
the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 90% of chronic
illnesses can be attributed to stress. Stress, and our experience of it, is a lifestyle
factor, which suggests that factor is modifiable. Since so many chronic illnesses have
links to stress one way or another, this suggests that one of the most important
things we might be able to do to support our active achievement of health is to get a
handle on our experience of stress. If you think back to module 1 and our discussion
of the mind-body connection, the experience of stress is one of the best illustrations
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of the mind-body relationship. Something that we generate in our mind with our own
thoughts, stress, can have such a dramatic influence on our bodies.

Ok, but to get a handle on stress, first we have to know what it is we’re talking about.
So, what is stress? I’m sure we all have a sense of what it is because we’ve all
experienced it. Many of us perhaps every day. But if you had to define stress, what
would you say?

Here I’d like you to pause the video for a minute or two and think about that
question. If some alien landed on Earth and was like, I’ve heard a lot of Earthlings talk
about stress, what is this thing? What would you tell that alien?
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What is STRESS?

LO1: What is 1) Importance

attached to a thing: to lay stress upon good
stress? manners.
2) Thephysical pressure
, pull, or other force exerted on
one thing by another; strain.

3) A physical factor, such as injury, or mental state, such as

anxiety, that
disturbs the body's normal state of
functioning
.
Synonyms: Significance, meaning, emphasis, consequence,
weight, value, worth.

Ok, I hope you actually took a couple minutes to engage in that little exercise. I
wonder what you came up with as a definition of stress. On this slide I’ve provided
some of the dictionary definitions of stress. I wonder if any of you came up with
something similar to these first two definitions. Probably not. This first one is talking
about stress more like an emphasis, like to stress a point. Maybe you would have
come up with that definition if you were asked about stress in the context of an
English class or maybe a music class. This second definition is talking about stress
more in the physical sense of materials. Maybe you would have come up with that
definition if you were in the context of a physics or engineering class.

But, we’re in a Psych class, so we have an idea about what Psychology is and what
stress means in a Psychological context. So your definition was probably closer to this
last one. I really like this definition because it highlights something that is important
to remember about stress. It disturbs the body’s normal state of functioning. This
definition implies that, perhaps contrary to what society now finds normal, stress
should NOT be a regular part of our existence. It is a departure from normal. And it
can be quite an unhealthy one if we’re in that state all the time. Remember our
previous discussion about stress in module 2. Stress is an EMERGENCY response by
 3
the body to help us in a time of need. Emergencies are NOT supposed to be a normal
part of everyday life.

I also thought some of the dictionary synonyms for stress were interesting to
consider. These words all tend to relate to reasons that we get stressed. We tend to
get stressed about things that are significant to us, like a good mark in a class, or
things that have a lot of meaning to us, like landing a job we’re interviewing for, or
things we place a lot of weight or value or worth on. When those things are uncertain
or threatened in some way, that’s when we tend to get stressed. We don’t tend to
get stressed about things we don’t care that much about.

Although it probably seems like the Psychological meaning of stress has been around
since the dawn of time, since it’s such an evolutionarily ancient response of the body,
the term stress only started to be used in the Psychological context we’re most
familiar with now in the 1920s, so only about 100 years ago. The Psychological
definition of stress was actually borrowed from the Physics definition, referring to
forces causing strain.
 3

ulcers?

Why don’t zebras get

What stresses you out?

Now, whenever I do seminars about stress and I ask the audience if they would
prefer to wish their stress response away and never feel stress again, barely anyone
says they would want to do that. When I ask why, many of them say things like our
stress response is important in certain situations. So we generally seem to know that
we have a stress response for a reason and it’s really important. But it’s also really
important to activate that stress response in the right way.

When I teach my stress class, I use this book written by Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras
Don’t Get Ulcers. I LOVE this book. It’s a great science book for non-scientists. If
you’re interested in these topics and learning more about stress from a brilliant and
funny author, I highly recommend it. The title brings up an important point. Most
non-human animals don’t tend to end up with stress-related diseases like humans
do, even though we share an almost identical stress response system. That’s right,
our stress response is so evolutionarily important that it has not changed much
through evolutionary history. This is why we can study stress in animals and apply
some of those findings to the human stress response. But the title of this book
prompts us to think of an interesting question. WHY don’t animals tend to get
stressrelated disease, even though they use relatively the same stress response
system as humans?

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Well, if you think about some of your typical stressors, you might notice that many of
those stressors are either focused on things coming up in the future, like an
upcoming test, or stressful conversation, or job interview, or the dreaded ‘what
should I do with the rest of my life’ question, or what’s going to happen in the future
with COVID. Or, some of your stressors might be related to things that happened in
the past, like ruminating about something you said to someone that you’re not sure
if they took in the way you meant, or regretting some previous action that you did or
didn’t do. These stressors highlight one of the great features of human brains, our
ability to mentally time travel. We owe our abilities to plan, invent, and reason
abstractly to this skill, but we also get from it our ability to worry. We can project
ourselves into the future and imagine all kinds of crazy scenarios. And we can also
project ourselves into the past and imagine all kinds of scenarios that didn’t happen
but maybe we wished would have happened. So, as this saying on the slide describes,
our ability to mentally time travel allows us to come up with all kinds of potential
problems that aren’t happening right now, and many of which will never actually
happen. But we invent them in our minds, so we stress about them. And we know
our minds have powerful effects on our bodies. For example, in a study of chess
grand masters during tournaments, their bodies were found to have metabolic
demands as high as those of athletes in physical competition – just from their minds.

Now, non-human animals, on the other hand, tend to spend their time living in the
present. So they tend to active their stress response in the way it’s meant to be
activated: to deal with immediate emergencies, like a rival animal coming into their
space right now. Then, once that immediate emergency is over, their stress response
shuts off. Think about your pets. Your dog or cat isn’t lying around worrying about
what will happen a week from now, or what happened yesterday. They’re basking in
the here and now. It’s very hard for us humans to live in the here and now. This is
why many stress-coping strategies that focus on mental control of stress are about
focusing on the here and now and being present, like mindfulness and yoga. Those
 strategies help us to active our stress response in the way it evolved to be activated –
to deal with the present.

Homeostasis

LO2: What is • The body has anideal levelfor many components and want
s
stress? to keep all components in
balance

• Stressor: Anything in the outside world,

or the anticipation
of that thing, that knocks the body out of homeostatic
balance.
• Subjective
• Stress Response: What the body does tore-establish
homeostasis.

Now I want to touch on the idea of homeostasis for a couple minutes. This concept
relates back to what we talked about in module 5 with classical conditioning and
substance use. Our bodies function optimally in only a narrow range of conditions.
Drugs and various other substances can push us out of that narrow range, and we
saw how our bodies try to compensate for that to remain in balance. That state of
balance is referred to as homeostasis.

Remember we said our definition of stress was disturbing the body’s normal state of
functioning. That essentially means that stressors, or things that cause us stress,
knock our bodies out of homeostasis. So our body tries to get back into balance, or
homeostasis. That is what the stress response is trying to do: help us deal with the
stressor, so our body can get back into balance. But, just like the conditioned
compensatory response without the drug, sometimes the body’s reaction can knock
us out of balance if there is not actually anything coming that it needs to respond to.
This is the same idea as getting stressed about something that you think might
happen but that doesn’t actually happen. You have essentially caused a reaction in
your body, which knocks it out of balance, but you didn’t have anything happen to

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your body in the first place, so now just the reaction itself, or your stress
response, has knocked your body out of balance because there was no actual
emergency to respond to.

So, just like the compensatory response can be adaptive when a drug is actually
ingested, to help protect the body from things like overdose, but the compensatory
response can then be damaging if it happens with no drug, and can actually cause a
person to want to take the drug to get back into balance, our stress response is
adaptive and protective when there is an actual emergency knocking us out of
balance in the first place. But, if we activate the stress response without an
emergency, then our stress response itself becomes the thing knocking us out of
balance and causing damage, instead of being the thing that helps us out.
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Person-Environment Fit:
Appraisal

Stress = Demand > Coping Resources

• Assessment of whether
personal resources are
sufficient to meet
environmental demands
• Challenge (adequate
resources) vs. threat
(inadequate resources)

Now that we’ve broadly defined what stress is, I’m going to boil it down into an
equation that pretty much sums up stress in a nutshell: Stress happens when you
perceive that the demands on you outweigh the resources you have available to
deal with those demands.

Really at the heart of it a lot of stress comes down to our belief or confidence
regarding whether we think we have the resources to cope with whatever demands
are placed on us. For example, let’s say you need 30 cupcakes for a party tomorrow.
You have everything you need in the house to make them and nothing else to do
today. Your coping resources, time and supplies, are larger than the demand placed
on you – needing 30 cupcakes. No big deal, it may even be fun and relaxing to make
them. Now let’s look at the same demand but with different resources available.
Let’s now say you remember at 11pm that you need 30 cupcakes for a party
tomorrow. You have no supplies at home to make cupcakes, you still have a bunch of
homework to do for tomorrow, and the grocery store closes at midnight. Now you
don’t feel like your resources are adequate to meet this demand, so you start to get
stressed… Or, you know, your assignments start to pile up and your time (a resource)
starts to dwindle. Now you don’t feel like you have enough resources (time) to meet
the
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demands placed on you (all your assignments)… enter stress! This is often a popular
source of stress. Not having adequate resources of time and energy to meet the daily
demands of our busy and over-scheduled lives in the modern world.

Now, here I want to emphasize that resources can be a LOT of different things. We
often tend to have a narrow definition of resources and only think of a few things,
like the resources of time, or money, or people to help us with things. But there are
other resources we have that we don’t often think about, like knowledge that applies
to the situation, or previous experience, or confidence or belief in ourselves that we
can handle the situation. Yes, confidence can be a resource against stress!

So, we have a few options to try to reduce our experience of stress. We can try to
reduce demands, we can try to increase resources, or we can try to do both.

I’m going to come back to this idea of demands and resources when we talk about our
last model for studying stress, the cognitive transaction model.
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Stress: Theories and Models

LO2: What
theories and
1. Fight or Flight(Cannon,1932)
models are
used to study
• Adapted for lots ofmuscle action. Stress response mobilizes
energy.
stress? • Adaptive in the short term
• Need totransportthat energy
• Increase heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate
• Destructive in the long term
• Digestion is slowed; growth and tissue repair is postponed;
reproduction is halted; immunity is inhibited; blunted pain
perception…
• Can also be afigurativeresponse
• ‘fight’ = aggression; ‘flight’ = withdrawal

Now that we have a solid idea of what stress is, we’ll dive into the second main topic
of this video: the theories and models used by researchers to conceptualize and
study stress. We’re going to touch on four main theories in this video. The first I
already described in module 2 when talking about the effect of stress on the body
systems: The fight or flight model.

The fight or flight model is one of the earliest models describing the stress response.
It focuses on the evolutionarily adaptive mechanisms of the stress response for
helping us to deal with immediate emergencies. These include the sympathetic
nervous system taking over to mobilize energy in the body and transport that
energy to our muscles to help us either fight our way out of an emergency, or run
away. This is the classic scenario of meeting a bear in the woods. Your body will
immediately go through a variety of changes to prepare you to deal with that in-the-
moment stressor. These responses are great for dealing with a short-term
emergency; but, as we mentioned back in module 2, to mobilize all this energy to
deal with stress, your body has to neglect other longer-term processes, like digestion,
growth, and repair.

But, the idea of fight or flight can also be applied to some of our stress reactions
 7
when we’re not faced with an immediate physical threat, like a bear in the woods,
where we might literally fight or flee. This response can also be thought of in a more
figurative sense. For non-physical stressors, a ‘fight’ reaction might take the form of
an aggressive response to something, like yelling at someone that just took your
parking space even though you had your blinker on. ‘Flight’, on the other hand, might
look more like social withdrawal when you’re stressed or even withdrawing through
substance use, like we talked about in module 5. Sometimes the stressor might seem
like too much to deal with, so a person may try to find ways to withdraw, or ‘flee’,
from thinking about it altogether.
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Stress: Theories and Models

LO2: What
theories and • Hans Selye– Father of stress research
models are
used to study
stress?
• Studied the effects of an ovarian extract on rats
• Peptic ulcers, enlargedadrenalglands, shrunken
immunetissues

2. General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS)(Selye, 1974)

Same bodily response toall stressors
If the response continues too long wear
= and tearon the body

The second theory of stress we’re going to touch on was developed by Hans Selye, a
Hungarian-born researcher who ultimately came to Canada to work and study in
Montreal. He is often referred to as the Father of Stress research because he made
such important contributions to the field.

The fight or flight theory focused more on what happens in the short term during a
stress response, and focused more on activation of the sympathetic nervous system.
Selye’s work focused more on what happens when the stress response continues for
too long and becomes maladaptive. He focused a lot of his work on the endocrine, or
hormonal responses to stress, and how those hormones, like cortisol, affect the
body.

Sapolsky relates a great story about how Hans Selye first started to study stress in his
book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. When Selye was early in his research career, he
was looking to get some papers published quickly to establish himself. So, he went to
some of his colleagues and asked if they had any projects on the go that he could
help them work on. One of his colleagues was working on a project where they had
just extracted a compound from the ovaries of rats, and he wanted to know what the
compound did. Selye offered to help. He devised a pretty simple experiment with
 8
rats. He had two groups: he’d inject one group with the ovarian compound, and one
group with saline, and after some time he would look for differences between the
groups. Nice and easy. Well, what turned out to not be so easy for Selye was actually
handling the rats. Turns out he wasn’t great at it. They would often squirm away
from him when he was trying to inject them, or he would drop them, then they’d
scurry around the laboratory floor and hide in dark corners, so he’d have to get a
broom out to try to get them out of the corners, then chase them around the lab to
try to grab hold of them to finally inject them.

After some time of doing this experiment and injecting these poor rats, Selye
examined the groups for differences. When he looked at the experimental group, he
found that they were riddled with peptic ulcers, they had enlarged adrenal glands,
and they had shrunken immune tissues. Great, he thought he’d figured out what this
ovarian extract did! Until he looked at the control group. Turns out that the control
group had the exact same effects: peptic ulcers, enlarged adrenal glands, and
shrunken immune tissues. But they were only injected with saline, so what
happened?!?! Well, apparently the stress of Selye trying to handle and inject the rats
is what happened. That sustained stress throughout the experiment for both groups
lead to those changes in the rats’ bodies. And this accidental finding is how Hans
Selye started to study the effects of stress on the body and developed his theory of
stress called the General Adaptation Syndrome, or GAS. The main gist of the GAS is
that the body responds the same way to any stressor, and if that stress response
goes on too long, it results in wear and tear on the body, just like Selye’s rats
experienced.

One criticism of Selye’s approach to stress is that he basically neglected the mind, or
how we perceive stressors. This kind of makes sense because he studied animals, and
as I mentioned earlier, animals don’t do the same kind of mental time travel and
worry that humans do. However, Selye does have a great quote that I love that
suggests that he did ultimately believe that the mind was important for stress
research related to human health. He said “The modern physician should know as
much about emotions and thoughts as about disease symptoms and drugs. This
approach would appear to hold more promise of cure than anything medicine has
given us to date.” So it appears that Selye, through his study of stress, was a big
proponent of the mind-body connection in relation to health.
8
 Stress: Theories and Models

LO2: What
theories and • Gender differences?
models are
used to study
• The stress response prepares the body for a major use
stress? ofenergy
• Male-biased?

3. Tend and Befriend

(Taylor et al.,2000)
Respond to stress with
social
and nurturing behaviours
Oxytocin

Earlier when we talked about the fight or flight model of stress, we talked about the
idea that the stress response is important for mobilizing energy. That seemed to
make sense based on the changes that happen in the body during a stress response.
But if we look a little closer, maybe that idea has some gender bias to it.

What do I mean by gender bias? Well, the idea of fight or flight is that those are the
two primary ways to deal with an immediate threat. But what if either of those ways
still leads to pretty negative outcomes. For example, throughout evolutionary history
and in most animal species, the females are the ones that care for the young. This is
exemplified with the image on the slide. This is the fish species I studied during my
PhD, the convict cichlid. These fish are interesting because they care for their young
for weeks after they are born. Generally that care takes the form of the female
staying near the nest to fan the eggs and make sure the young don’t wander too far
away, while the male goes out in search of food and defends the nest. If the male is
gone and the female is alone with the young and a predator comes around, the
options of fight or flight could both lead to really dangerous consequences for the
young. If the female fights and doesn’t win, then the young are toast and the
predator will eat them. The females are often smaller, so their chances of winning a
fight against a predator are worse than a males. Ok, what if the female flees? Well, in
this scenario, the female might be ok, but the young are still toast because now
they’ve been left unprotected.

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Thinking about these sex differences in evolutionary parental care roles led some
researchers, one of whom is the author of your textbook, to propose the stress
model of tend and befriend, another potential response to stress. In this model,
instead of fighting or fleeing, a response to stress is to gather one’s social group
around them for support and to provide support when others in the social group
are stressed. This is a much safer response for females caring for young because a
group of females has a much better chance of defending their young against a
predator than one female on her own.

We see this type of response to stress when communities come together to rally
during or after a stressor, like a natural disaster. Neighbours help one another. We
also see this response in many animals when they huddle together during times of
stress. We see this response in humans too when we are driven to seek support from
our social network, like venting to a friend when we are stressed, or groups of
parents coming together to help share childcare duties.

This theory seems to have some underlying hormonal support as well. We know that
when we have higher levels of the hormone oxytocin, we feel calmer and more
relaxed. For example, in a study done on humans, some people were given a spritz
up the nose of an oxytocin spray and others were given a placebo. They then showed
both groups pictures of scary images while measuring their brain activity. There was
less activation in the amygdala, an important area of the brain for processing stress
and negative emotions, in those people that had received oxytocin compared to
those people that received the placebo.

We tend to get a boost of oxytocin from warm contact with people we feel close to,
like a partner, family, or friends. So turning to our social network for support in times
of stress, be that tangible support, like providing resources to help us deal with the
demands, or emotional support, can help increase our levels of oxytocin and help us
feel better during times of stress. Even something as simple as a hug from a loved
one can increase our oxytocin levels.

In support of this theory, there is evidence that women are consistently more likely
than men to respond to stress by turning to others for support, linking back to
those evolutionary ideas for the theory. However, men can also show social
responses to stress, they just tend to be less typical than social responses to stress
in women. The idea goes the other way too. Many studies have shown that GIVING
social support to others can help reduce the stress of the giver. Giving support can
often make us feel good and increase our sense of worth. It may also help to raise
our oxytocin levels so we can feel better when faced with our own stressors. Also,

9
the reciprocal giving and receiving of social support can strengthen social networks,
so you feel like you have a stronger resource at your disposal the next time you are
stressed, thus targeting the ‘increasing resources’ part of the stress equation.

9
Person-Environment Fit:
Appraisal

Stress = Demand > Coping Resources

• Assessment of whether
personal resources are
sufficient to meet
environmental demands
• Challenge (adequate
resources) vs. threat
(inadequate resources)

To introduce our last theory about stress, I want to remind you of our equation:
Stress = Demands > Resources. This equation helps explain why the same event can
be stressful to one person, but not to another. So if you remember my story at the
beginning of this video, I never used to get that stressed out about tests. That’s likely
because I always viewed myself as having a lot of resources to cope with test-related
stress. Learning information and writing it on a test is a skill I’m pretty good at. I’ve
done well at it in the past, so I have confidence that I can continue to do well at it and
that my study strategies are effective. So tests didn’t stress me out that much.
However, interacting with people in social situations, something that happens more
on the fly that you can’t totally prepare for, would stress me out. I didn’t often feel
like I had the proper resources to potentially deal with anything that might come up
in the moment in a conversation, or a question on a presentation that I wasn’t
anticipating, so those things did tend to stress me out.

We all have different collections of resources. Those resources come from our
situations, our life experiences, our personalities, our upbringing, our skills, all kinds
of things. So each time an event happens, we basically do an appraisal of what
resources we have in our arsenal to deal with that situation. These appraisals aren’t
 10
necessarily done consciously, but they do affect our response to stress. This idea of
appraisal of our resources is what our last stress theory is all about.

11
 10

Psychological Appraisal

LO2: What 4. Cognitive Transaction Model(

theories and Stress is a relationship between the
Lazarus 1968) and environment
person
models are
used to study
Appraised by the person as taxing or exceeding resources
stress? A. Primary Appraisal (meaning): Is this situation:
Positive, negative, or neutral?
If negative, appraise potential
Harm – Damage already done
Threat – Possible future damage
Challenge – Potential to overcome the event/benefit from it?
B. Secondary Appraisal: How well can I cope?
Poorly = freak out; Well = cope

Our last stress theory is called the Cognitive Transaction Model and is all about that
idea of appraisal. Stress isn’t just about the environmental thing or situation that
happens to you, or the particular demands that are placed on you. It’s an interaction
between you as a person, the demands put on you, and the particular resources you
have to cope with those demands. This model of stress really highlights how the
same events can cause different people different amounts of stress based on how we
think about those events and our ability to cope with them using our available
resources.

There are two steps to the Cognitive Transaction Model. The first is primary
appraisal. In this step, a person appraises the situation or event that has popped up.
You basically appraise if this situation is something you find positive, neutral, or
negative. If you just heard news that your friend is having a baby, you might perceive
that as a positive event. If that’s the case, your appraisal process typically ends there
and this event isn’t a stressor for you. In other cases, the event might be neutral. You
might hear a news story about a town hall event in another town that doesn’t affect
you. So that event is also not a stressor to you because it doesn’t have any meaning
for your life. For events that are appraised as negative though, then there is a second
part to the primary appraisal process. Now you consider the potential harm, threat,
and challenge posed by this event.

Let’s take the example of failing a midterm as an event perceived as negative. Harm is
an assessment of the damage that has already been done. There has been some
damage done in terms of grades on the midterm lost. Next, you appraise the threat
from the event, or the potential for future damage. You might appraise some
potential future damage to your overall course grade and GPA, and potential ability
to get into a good grad program as a result of failing this midterm. Lastly, you
appraise your ability to overcome the event (challenge). Here you might consider
whether there are ways you can make up the lost marks, or whether you can still pull
out a good mark in the class if you do really well on the final exam. You might also
consider how this event might prompt you to change your overall study habits for the
better.

All these appraisals are part of primary appraisal, when we’re first considering a new
event that has just happened. These appraisals all contribute to the meaning that we
give to the event.

The other appraisal process that we go through is secondary appraisal. This is where
we consider our stress equation and essentially do an appraisal of the resources we
have to cope with the demands from this new event. In secondary appraisal, a person
essentially quickly sizes up the amount of demand the situation places on them and
the resources they have to cope with the demand. If the appraisal is that the
situation does place demands on them, but they have abundant resources to deal
with the demand, the situation won’t be perceived as very stressful. Like our cupcake
example earlier. If you need 30 cupcakes, but have all the time in the world and all
the supplies to make them, you have a lot of resources to deal with that demand, so
you won’t perceive it as stressful and it might actually instead be relaxing.

If you perceive an event as placing a lot of demands on you, like having to do a

project you’re interested in and really passionate about, but you know is going to be
a lot of effort and work, you might perceive the event as really demanding, and
perceive that you do have the resources to meet the demand, but your resources,
like time and energy, will be taxed. So you can cope, but it will still be demanding,
which will put some stress on you. If, however, you perceive that the stressor places
a lot of demands on you, and your resources are not adequate to effectively meet
those demands, this is when you will have the strongest stress reaction to that event
and will not perceive that you have the ability to effectively cope with it. This is
generally when people start to have a freak out response to stress and then it can
become even harder to do something about the problem because the person already

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believes they won’t be able to effectively handle it. If I evaluate my own ability to
deal with the situation and it doesn’t look good, then that generally means that I’m
going to have a negative emotional reaction of some sort. I might start to panic, or I
might get really angry. Essentially, when you have no other options to either get rid
of the situation or deal with it, then all that is left is some sort of emotional reaction.

So we can see this model of stress is much more psychological than the previous
three, which focused a fair bit on biological or evolutionary ideas about stress. In the
Cognitive Transaction Model, we see right in the name, ‘cognitive’; it really highlights
how our thoughts are the main drivers of our stress response. How a potential
stressor is perceived determines whether it will be experienced as stressful. So our
thoughts basically determine whether a stress response will be initiated in our bodies
or not and how strong that stress response will be. When harm and threat are
perceived as high, and coping resources are perceived as low, substantial stress is felt
and a larger stress response will happen. When coping resources are perceived as
high, stress may be minimal.

The transaction method of studying stress involves an appraisal, or assessment, of

the situation, and an appraisal of our ability to cope, or deal with, that situation by
looking at our available resources. Like I said, these appraisals often aren’t necessarily
conscious decisions that we’re making. You probably haven’t often said to yourself,
“Hmm, self, I wonder if we have the resources to deal with this current situation?
Let’s evaluate!”. But we are usually evaluating every moment without really thinking
about it. But you can make these appraisals conscious and intentional, and that can
be a useful thing to do in order to think about and manage your stress. And
remembering that resources come in all types of forms, like prior experience,
knowledge, confidence, social networks, etc. can also give us a broader conception of
the resources that we think are available to us to help deal with the demands of the
event.

Ok, this brings us to the end of our first video for module 6. I hope you’ve started to
think about your stress response, and the types of things that initiate it, in a new and
perhaps more conscious way after watching this video. I’ll see you back here for
video #2, where we’ll talk about what makes events stressful. In that video, we’ll
again touch on this idea that different factors are going to be more or less important
to different people, again highlighting the variability in the types of things that
people will appraise as stressful. I’ll see you there…

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