Emotion-focused coping is aimed at controlling the emotional response to the stressful situation. People can regulate their emotional responses through behavioral and cognitive approaches. behavioral approaches include using alcohol or drugs, seeking emotional social support from friends or relatives, and engaging in activities, such as sports or watching TV, which distract attention from the problem. Cognitive approaches involve how people think about the stressful situation. In one cognitive approach, people redefine the situation to put a good face on it, such as by noting that things could be worse, making comparisons with individuals who are less well off, or seeing something good growing out of the problem. Other emotion-focused cognitive processes include strategies Freud called "defense mechanisms," which involve distorting memory or reality in some way. Defense mechanisms include things like Denial and avoidance strategies. People tend to use emotion-focused approaches when they believe they can do little to change the stressful conditions.
Problem-focused coping is aimed at reducing the demands of a stressful situation or expanding the resources to deal with it. Everyday life provides many examples of problem-focused coping, including quitting a stressful job, negotiating an extension for paying some bills, devising a new schedule for studying (and sticking to it), choosing a different career to pursue, seeking medical or psychological treatment, and learning new skills. People tend to use problem-focused approaches when they believe their resources or the demands of the situation are changeable. Both the husbands and the wives used more problem-focused than emotion-focused methods to cope with the stressful event, but the wives reported using more emotion-focused approaches than the husbands did. People with higher incomes and educational levels reported greater use of problem focused coping than those with lower incomes and educational levels. Last, individuals used much less problem-focused coping when the stress involved a death in the family than when it involved other kinds of problems, such as illness or economic difficulties.
Systematic desensitization, a useful method for reducing fear and anxiety. This method is based on the view that fears are learned by classical conditioning—that is, by associating a situation or object with an unpleasant event. Biofeedback is a technique in which an electromechanical device monitors the status of a person's physiological processes, such as heart rate or muscle tension, and immediately reports that information back to the individual. One way people can learn to control their feelings of tension is called progressive muscle relaxation (or just progressive relaxation), in which they focus their attention on specific muscle groups while alternately tightening and relaxing these muscles.
Systematic Desensitization starts with using relaxation techniques. (the focus of Progressive muscle relaxation is relaxing the muscles to reduce stress by removing tension). Then the steps in a hierarchy are presented individually, while the person is relaxed and comfortable. Stimulus hierarchy—a graded sequence of approximations to the conditioned stimulus, the feared situation. The purpose of these approximations is to bring the person gradually in contact with the source of fear in about 10 or 15 steps. The steps follow a sequence from the least to the most fearful for the individual. Each step may elicit some wariness or fear behavior, but the person is encouraged to relax. Once the wariness at one step has passed and the person is calm, the next step in the hierarchy can be introduced. Completing an entire stimulus hierarchy and reducing a fairly strong fear can be done in a few hours, divided into several separate sessions. Biofeedback is more so focused on the biological responses to the stressor. They pair it with progressive muscle relaxation to ease some sort of physical manifestation of stress like headache. It is not interested in reconditioning of the stressor which is the primary focus of systematic desensitization.
First, various factors at any given time in people's lives may differentially affect different behaviors. For instance, a person may have lots of social encouragement to eat too much ("You don't like my cooking?"), and, at the same time, to limit drinking and smoking. Second, people change as a result of experience. For example, many people did not avoid smoking until they learned that it is harmful. Third, people's life circumstances change. Thus, factors, such as peer pressure, that may have been important in initiating and maintaining exercising or smoking at one time may no longer be present, thereby increasing the likelihood that the habit will change.
The process of preventing illness and injury can be thought of as operating as a system, in which the individual, his or her family, health professionals, and the community play a role. This plays into Von Bertalanffy reading in that he believed that every human is a individual system of their psychological and biological processes. All of these processes interact amongst themselves and with the environment. Each of our human systems are a part of other systems (i.e our family, schools, work). Also that our human system is open and interacts freely with our environment as we develop and receive feedback. All of our human lives have context and there for we cannot be a closed system. On our individual system scale, there are four factors that are important for the well-being of the individual person : First, adopting wellness lifestyles may require individuals to change longstanding behaviors that have become habitual and may involve addictions, as in cigarette smoking. Habitual and addictive behaviors are very difficult to modify. Second, people need to have certain cognitive resources, such as the knowledge and skills, to know what health behaviors to adopt, to make plans for changing existing behavior, and to overcome obstacles to change, such as having little time or no place to exercise. Third, individuals need sufficient self-efficacy regarding their ability to carry out the change. Without self-efficacy, their motivation to change will be impaired. Last, being sick or taking certain drugs can affect people's moods and energy levels, which may affect their cognitive resources and motivation. Another system influence is Many social factors influence people's likelihood to adopt health-related behaviors. For instance, one partner's exercising or eating unhealthfully before marriage can lead his or her partner to adopt the same behavior over time. People are more likely to adopt healthful behaviors if these behaviors are promoted or encouraged by community organizations, such as governmental agencies and the health care system. Each of these things interact to influence the collective health.
1. Reinforcement. When we do something that brings a pleasant, wanted, or satisfying consequence, the tendency to repeat that behavior is increased or reinforced. A child who receives something she wants, such as a nickel, for brushing her teeth at bedtime is more
likely to brush again the following night. The nickel in this example is a positive reinforcer because it was added to the situation (the word "positive" refers to the arithmetic term for addition). But reinforcement can also occur in another way. Suppose you have a headache, you take aspirin, and the headache goes away. In this case, your headache was unpleasant and your behavior of taking aspirin removed it from the situation. The headache is called a "negative" reinforcer because it was taken
away (subtracted) from the situation. In both cases of reinforcement, the end result is a desirable state of affairs from the person's point of view.
2. Extinction. If the consequences that maintain a behavior are eliminated, the response tendency gradually weakens. The process or procedure of extinction exists only if no alternative maintaining stimuli (reinforcers) for the behavior have supplemented or taken the place of the original consequences. In the above example of toothbrushing
behavior, if the money is no longer given, the child may continue brushing if another reinforce exists, such as praise from her parents or her own satisfaction with the appearance of her teeth.
3. Punishment. When we do something that brings an unwanted consequence, the behavior tends to be suppressed. A child who gets a scolding from his parents for playing with matches is less likely to repeat that behavior, especially if his parents might see him. The influence of punishment on future
behavior depends on whether the person expects the behavior will lead to punishment again. Take, for example, people who injure themselves (punishment) jogging—those who think they could be injured again are less likely to resume jogging than those who do not.
Maintenance. People in this stage work to maintain the successful behavioral changes they achieved. Although this stage can last indefinitely, researchers often define its length as, say, 6 months, for
follow-up assessment.
Action. This stage spans a period of time, usually 6 months, from the start of people's successful and active efforts to change a behavior.
Preparation. At this stage, individuals are ready to try to change and plan to pursue a behavioral goal, such as stopping smoking, in the next month. They may have tried to reach that goal in the past year without being fully successful. For instance, these people might have reduced their smoking by half, but did not yet quit
completely.
Contemplation. During this stage people are aware a problem exists and are seriously considering changing to a healthier behavior within the next several months. But they are not yet ready to make a commitment to take action.
Precontemplation. People in this stage are not considering changing, at least during the next several months or so. These people may have decided against changing or just never thought about it.