Stress, Personality, & Heart Disease

In this video I discuss the relationship between stress, personality, and heart disease. Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman proposed that Type A personality, characterized by competitiveness and hostility, was associated with 7x more heart disease than Type B personality, characterized … Read More

Psychological Stressors & Health

In this video I discuss the psychological components of stress and how we can become stressed from the anticipation of threats. Psychological stressors are especially dangerous because they have the potential to become chronic stressors which constantly plague us. Next … Read More

Stress & The Immune System

In this video I briefly describe the immune system and the cells involved in surveillance and protection from invaders, pathogens, and other threats. Next I discuss the relationship between stress and decreased immune function, which is related to elevated levels … Read More

General Adaptation Syndrome

In this video I describe homeostasis, which refers to maintenance of an optimal state, and allostasis, which clarifies that an optimal state is actually a range of possible states depending on context. Next I discuss Hans Selye’s theory of General … Read More

The Stress Response & HPA Axis

In this video I describe the stress response in more detail, including possible gender differences in reaction to threats. Shelley Taylor proposed the tend–and–befriend response to refer to a female tendency to focus on relationships, empathy, and group cohesion in … Read More

What is Stress?

In this video I discuss how we define stress. I begin with Walter Cannon’s “fight or flight” response and the activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Next I discuss the distinction between stressors and the stress response. I consider Holmes … Read More

Introduction to Health Psychology

In this video I introduce the unit on health psychology by defining several key terms and discussing the challenges of understanding the causes of illness. I describe etiology (or aetiology), epidemiology, the use of retrospective & prospective studies, and the … Read More