Chapter 14

FRQ #1

1. There’s a dramatic increase in the likelihood of a person becoming ill or dying during a

brief period following the death of a spouse. Describe some of the specific biological and

psychological processes that may contribute to this effect.

Stress can be defined as the process by which we perceive and respond to certain events,

called stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging.

The death of a spouse is a significant life change which is a very big stressor. Psychological

states cause physical reactions. Stress is the process by which we perceive and respond to certain

events, called stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging. Stress appraisals are how

we appraise an event influences how much stress we experience and how effectively we respond.

If a person experiences severe of prolonged stress and has an unhealthy behavior, they increase

the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic lung disease. From what the U.S. National

Academy of Science says, people recently widowed, fired, or divorced are more vulnerable to

disease. Another point that was made was a Finnish study of 96,000 widowed people who

confirmed the phenomenon that their risk of death doubled in the week following their partner’s

death. Important life changes are especially stressful when we appraise them both negative and

uncontrolled. Perceiving a loss of control also causes us to be more vulnerable to ill health

because it provokes an outpouring of stress hormones. A control-related factor that also influence

on vulnerability is optimism. Mayo Clinic research similarly finds that optimists tend to outlive

pessimists.
 A biological effect that may contribute to this effect is general adaptation syndrome (GAS).

GAS is Selye’s concept of the body’s adaptive response to stress in three stages- alarm,

resistance and exhaustion. The alarm reaction would be the death of the spouse which may cause

your blood to divert to your skeletal muscles and feel some shock. The resistance would be the

high in temperature, blood pressure and respiration. And finally the exhaustion would be the

leading cause to the vulnerability to illness. In extreme cases this may cause you to collapse or

die. Another biological effect is the observation by Walter Cannon. Cannon observed that

extreme cold, lack of oxygen, and emotion-arousing incidents (such as the death of a spouse) all

trigger an outpouring of epinephrine (adrenaline) and nonrepinephrine (noradrenaline). These

two stress hormones enter the blood stream from the sympathetic nerve ending in the inner part

of the adrenal glands. When alerted by brain pathways, the sympathetic nervous system increases

heart rate and respiration, diverts blood from digestion to the skeletal muscles, dulls pain, and

releases sugar and fat from the body’s stores- all to prepare the body for fight or flight.

Physiologists have also found another stress response system which secretes cortisol.