Cognitive Explanations of Stress (HL IB Psychology)

Cognitive appraisal

• Lazarus (1966) developed his cognitive appraisal model to explain that it is the appraisal of the environmental stressor that leads to a stress response - or the lack thereof.

• In the cognitive appraisal model stress is perceived as the imbalance between the demands placed on the individual and the individual’s resources to cope 

• Lazarus argued that the experience of stress differs significantly between individuals depending on how they interpret an event 

• When the situation first arises, there is a primary appraisal, and if it is

  • seen as threatening > stress

  • seen as a challenge > motivation

  • seen as of no concern > neither

• After this (or sometimes even at the same time) comes the secondary appraisal, 

• The secondary appraisal is when the person decides on their coping process – what they are going to do about the situation

• This is often either

  • emotion-focused coping – changing the individual’s emotional response to the stressor, or

  • problem-focused coping – trying to solve the stressful situation

Stress can be reframed to be non-threatening in the cognitive appraisal model

Evaluation of cognitive appraisal

Strengths

• The cognitive appraisal model explains why people cope better with stress than others, through appraising it differently.

• Stress reduction programmes have experienced success by implementing strategies that involve re-appraising a perceived stressor as a challenge

Limitations

• The cognitive appraisal model does not explain why two individuals may appraise the same stressor differently

• The model does not really consider the physiological response to a stressor, which may play a role in the way we cope with a stress

The Cognitive Activation Theory of Stress (CATS)

• The Cognitive Activation Theory of Stress (CATS, Ursin & Eriksen, 2004) argues that arousal and stress are part of a beneficial system that is an evolutionary adaptation

• The term stress is used for four aspects of stress:

  • stress stimulus  (i.e. stressor) 

  • stress experience - depending on interpretation of the stressor

  • stress response - physiological, and depending on the interpretation of the stressor

  • experience of the stress response - how we feel 

• CATS proposes that the stress response depends on our expected outcome of a situation 

• CATS is in this way similar to cognitive appraisal theory, as both rely on the person’s appraisal of the situation

• In CATS, appraisals are expectations (called expectancies) of what will happen, based on previous experience and they affect the experience of the stress response:

  • stimulus expectancies – the understanding that a particular stimulus (stressor) will lead to another stimulus, such as:

    • we fear injections, and the needle is the stressor (first stimulus) 

    • we know through past experience we will feel some pain (second stimulus) that will stimulate our heart to beat faster 

    • so, because of this stimulus expectancy our heart starts racing when we see the nurse 

  • outcome (response) expectancies – the anticipation that the outcome of handling the stressor will or will not be successful, such as:

    • before we undergo surgery, we are experiencing the fight or flight response

    • we can interpret this as quite natural or as a sign of impending danger and harm

    • The first interpretation will calm the stress response; the second will increase it

• Thus CATS breaks down stress into steps and explains the experience of stress as being mediated by one of the following:

  • coping – the anticipation of being able to regulate one’s stress and of a positive outcome to the situation

  • helplessness – lack of perceived control of the situation

  • hopelessness – the belief that all attempts to handle the stress around the situation will only make it worse.

Simplified diagram of the CATS showing how the stimulus and outcome expectancies mediate the experience of stress

Research which investigates cognitive explanations of stress

• Gomes et al. (2013) found that cognitive appraisal mediates the relationship between job stress and burnout

• Jamieson et al. (2011) found that participants instructed to reinterpret their stress arousal exhibited more adaptive cardiovascular stress responses

Both Gomes et al. (2013) and Jamieson et al. (2011) are available as ‘Two Key Studies of Cognitive Explanations of Stress’’ – just navigate to the next section of the Cognitive Explanations of Stress topic.