The following is adapted from our textbook, Stress: A Student’s Guide for IB Health Psychology. Are some people naturally more stressed than others? The Warrior / Worrier hypothesis says yes. This theory identifies the specific gene that explains stress levels. The Basic Theory How do genes affect stress? How you respond to stress could be based on your COMT gene. …
Emotion-focused vs. Problem-focused Coping Strategies
Coping is “a person’s efforts to manage demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding their resources.”(1) In other words, coping is how we try to deal with stress. It is a widely studied topic in psychology and there are over 400 categorized styles of coping. (2) These styles are commonly grouped into two distinct types: problem focused vs. emotion-focused. In …
The Prefrontal Cortex and Stress
The following information didn’t quite make the final cut of our new eBook: “Stress: A Student’s Guide to IB Health Psychology.” The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is important in stress because it’s connected with the amygdala through numerous neural networks. The PFC can increase or decrease amygdala activity depending on the thoughts generated by the PFC (i.e. how threatening we think …
Exam Wheel of Fortune: IB Health Psychology
Click the wheel to get a practice question for IB Health Psychology. Use this for quick review by writing down the example/s and studies you would use if this came up in an exam. Travis DixonTravis Dixon is an IB Psychology teacher, author, workshop leader, examiner and IA moderator.
Key Studies: Workplace stress, status and the Whitehall Studies
This material was in the first draft of “Stress: A Student’s Guide to IB Health Psychology.” It was removed from the final edition in favour of studies about teenagers. The information is here instead as extra optional content for extended and/or interested students. Executive Stress Syndrome Hypothesis In the 1950s and 1960s, psychologists thought that high-ranking individuals had higher stress. …
How stress can kill: The HPA Axis & Cardiovascular Disease (CVD)
This material was in the first draft of “Stress: A Student’s Guide to IB Health Psychology.” It was removed from the final edition and the information is here instead as extra optional content for extended and/or interested students. What is stress? In laboratory experiments stress can also be measured in multiple ways, including physiological responses to the Trier Social Stress …
Key study: Subjective social status and stress in teenagers (Rahal et al. 2019)
Social status is an important predictor of numerous mental and physical health problems. Generally speaking, the lower your social status, the more at risk you are for developing health problems, like chronic stress and heart disease. While socioeconomic status has been extensively researched, more modern studies are focusing on subjective social status. This is particularly relevant for understanding stress in teenagers. …
Example Exam Essay: Prevalence rates of one health problem (IB Health Psychology)
Discussing “prevalence rates” is easy when you’re writing about psychological disorders. That’s because these disorders have standardized diagnoses. You can calculate a specific % of the population who have depression, for example, and that is your “prevalence rate.” It might be more difficult in Health Psychology. For some health problems the same is true. Obesity, cardiovascular disease and addiction are …
Cognitive explanations of one health problem: Appraisals and stress
The following content is adapted from our eBook Stress: A Student’s Guide for IB Health Psychology. Stress is one health problem that students could explain for IB Psychology’s Paper Two. In this post we’ll look at the most common cognitive explanation of stress – cognitive appraisals. Humans are different from other animals in that stress can be caused completely by …
Key Study: Stress beliefs and health problems (Fischer et al., 2016)
The following information is adapted from our eBook: IB Health Psychology – A Revision Guide. Why do people develop physical health problems? One answer could be based on stress beliefs – if you think stress is bad you might be more likely to have health problems. This was one finding from the following study. Stress is correlated with a number …
Exam Question Bank: Paper 2: Health Psychology
The following are a list of practice exam questions for IB Psychology’s Health Option in Paper Two. This list contains past exam questions and some written with our best guess as to what the probable exam questions may look like. You could watch this as a video here. READ MORE IB Psychology Exam Question Banks Paper 1: Biological approach (Link) …
Key Study: Cognitive appraisals and the stress response (Lazarus, 1963)
The most influential cognitive explanation of stress is based on “cognitive appraisals” – how we assess the relevance and potential harm of a stressor. The following study is one of many that supports this explanation. Stress is a complex phenomenon that involves biological, psychological and environmental factors. Richard Lazarus was a pre-eminent psychologist in the field of stress research. Along …
IB Health Psychology | HOME PAGE
The following is a work in progress. Health Problems: Stress The following information focuses on the “health problem” of stress. Explanations of health problem(s) Biological explanations for stress COMT gene and the Warrior/Worrier Hypothesis (Blog / Video One/Two) Key study: Key study: The Hippocampus and Stress (Blog) The PFC and Stress (Blog) Cognitive explanations for stress Appraisals (Blog / Video) …
Stress and the Hippocampus
The following is adapted from our eBook for Health Psychology: “Stress and how to cope: A Health Psychology guide for IB Students” (Available here). Not all of this content could make the final cut. So read on if you’re interested in how your hippocampus could be causing you stress. IB Psych Health: This content is relevant for biological explanations of health problems …
Generalizability in Animal Studies: Cognition and Culture
Generalizability is the extent to which we can confidently predict the results of a study would apply to a different context, including different people, places, and procedures. When considering the extent to which we can generalize findings from animal studies, we are considering how confidently we could predict the same finding in humans. For example, animal studies like Sapolsky’s research …
Key Study: Social status and stress in Olive Baboons (Sapolsky, 1990)
An interesting finding in the field of stress and health psychology is that people with higher social status are generally in better health: they have lower rates of heart disease, are less obese and live longer. Why? One reason could be because they are less stressed. A lot of our knowledge about stress and health comes from animal studies, particularly those …
10 ways to stress a monkeyFindings from studies on primate stress and social rank
Why would you want to stress a monkey? Hopefully you don’t. But learning about stressed monkeys can help us explain stress problems in humans. Decades of animal research has shown that social status is connected with stress. Typically speaking, monkeys with a higher rank in their group are less stressed and have lower levels of stress hormones like cortisol. Low-ranking …
What Rebecca Black’s story can teach us about resilience
If you’re an old fogey like me the name Rebecca Black probably won’t mean much. And to be honest, to kids in high school today in 2020 it might not mean much either. But she was the most googled person in 2011 and she can teach all of us a lot about an important psychological concept – resilience. In 2011, …
Health Project Week 4Week 4 - Interviews
Week 4 is time to reflect and try something a little different. We’re going to conduct qualitative interviews on our classmates to learn about their experiences in this project. There are a few reasons I’ve chosen this activity. One reason is to have students keep in touch with other, another is that it can be done without screens (if you …
Health Project Week 3Week 3 - Analysis and Report
After two weeks of collecting data on health habits and their effects, it’s now time to write up the report. Read more: Health Project Week 4 Health Project Week 3 Health Project Week 2 Health Project Week 1 Health Self-Experimentation Project Intro The Importance of Routine Teachers: Feel free to adapt or amend any of this work in any way …
Health Project Week 2Week 2 - Treatment Condition
In Week 1 the main job was collecting data on a range of health habits (sleep, diet, exercise) and their possible effects. This week, you’re going to choose one of those habits that you want to improve. If you can do better this week, that will be your manipulation of your independent variable. We’ll then see in Week 3 if …
Health Project Week 1Week 1 Instructions - Control Condition
Week 1 is focused mainly on gathering a range of data on health habits (sleep, diet, exercise) and their psychological effects. The big job for students is to figure out what they’re going to measure and how. Read more: Health Project Week 4 Health Project Week 3 Health Project Week 2 Health Project Week 1 Health Self-Experimentation Project Intro The …
Health Self-Experimentation Project IntroA Four Week Project for Online Learning in Psychology
Purpose We are going to learn about health psychology through a self-experimentation project. With school closed and all of us turning to online learning, it’s easy to break our routines and fall into bad habits. Read more: Health Project Week 4 Health Project Week 3 Health Project Week 2 Health Project Week 1 Health Self-Experimentation Project Intro The Importance of …
Paper 3 Practice: Sleep and Happiness
The best way to prepare for Paper 3 is to do lots of practice. The study below is designed to replicate what you will see on Paper 3. Read more: Paper 3 Practice: Smartphones and Sleep Quality Paper 3 Practice: Individualism and Happiness in a Japanese Workplace Paper 3 Practice: Trauma and the September 11 Attacks Paper 3 Practice: Observation …
Paper 3 Practice: Smartphones and Sleep Quality
The best way to prepare for Paper 3 is to do lots of practice. The study below is designed to replicate what you will see on Paper 3. Read more: Paper 3 Practice: Individualism and Happiness in a Japanese Workplace Paper 3 Practice: Trauma and the September 11 Attacks Paper 3 Practice: Observation of Hospitals IB Psychology HL Paper 3 …
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