Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. Define stress in one line.
Answer: Stress is the pattern of responses an organism makes to a stimulus event that disturbs its equilibrium and exceeds its ability to cope.
Q. What is eustress?
Answer: Eustress is the level of stress that is good for a person and helps achieve peak performance and manage minor crises.
Q. Define a stressor.
Answer: A stressor is an event that causes the body to give the stress response.
Q. Name the three stages of the General Adaptation Syndrome.
Answer: Alarm reaction, resistance and exhaustion.
Q. What are the three Cs of hardiness?
Answer: Commitment, control and challenge.
Q. Name the three resources of resilience.
Answer: I HAVE (social/interpersonal strengths), I AM (inner strengths) and I CAN (interpersonal and problem-solving skills).
Q. Define coping.
Answer: Coping is a dynamic, situation-specific reaction to stress, a set of concrete responses to stressful situations intended to resolve the problem and reduce stress.
Q. What is burnout?
Answer: Burnout is the state of physical, emotional and psychological exhaustion caused by prolonged stress.
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. Distinguish between primary and secondary appraisal.
Answer: Primary appraisal is the perception of a new or changing event as positive, neutral or negative (harm, threat or challenge). Secondary appraisal is the assessment of one’s own coping abilities and resources, and whether they are sufficient to deal with the harm, threat or challenge.
Q. Differentiate between problem-focused and emotion-focused coping.
Answer: Problem-focused coping attacks the problem itself, gaining information and altering the event or one’s beliefs to reduce its threat value. Emotion-focused coping instead makes psychological changes to limit the degree of emotional disruption, with minimal effort to change the event itself.
Q. Name any two types of white blood cells (leucocytes) mentioned in the chapter and their functions.
Answer: T cells destroy invaders directly; T-helper cells increase immunological activity (and are attacked by HIV). (B cells produce antibodies; natural killer cells fight viruses and tumours are also acceptable answers.)
Q. What is the difference between perceived support and social network, as explained in the chapter?
Answer: Perceived support is the quality of social support and is positively related to health and well-being. Social network is the quantity of social support and is unrelated to well-being, because maintaining a large network is itself time-consuming and demanding.
Q. Distinguish between hassles and traumatic events as sources of stress.
Answer: Hassles are personal, frequent stresses of daily life such as commuting or noisy surroundings. Traumatic events are extreme events such as fire, accidents, robbery or earthquakes, whose effects can appear after a delay and persist as anxiety or intrusive thoughts.
Q. What is assertiveness, and why is it considered a useful life skill?
Answer: Assertiveness is the ability to communicate feelings, needs, wants and thoughts clearly and confidently, including the ability to say no. It is useful because assertive people feel confident, have high self-esteem and a solid sense of identity, which helps them handle everyday demands without being overwhelmed.
Q. List any four factors that lead to a positive attitude, according to the chapter.
Answer: A fairly accurate perception of reality; a sense of purpose in life and responsibility; acceptance and tolerance for different viewpoints of others; and taking credit for success while accepting blame for failure. (Openness to new ideas and a sense of humour are also acceptable.)
Q. State one criticism of Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome model.
Answer: The model has been criticised for assigning a very limited role to psychological factors in stress; researchers argue that how a person responds to stress is substantially influenced by their perception, personality and biological constitution, not just a uniform physiological pattern.
3 4-Mark Questions
Q. Explain the factors that make cognitive appraisal of a stressful event subjective.
Answer: Appraisal is subjective and depends on several factors. Past experience of dealing with a similar situation makes a person feel less threatened if they handled it successfully before. Perceived controllability, whether a person believes they have mastery over a situation or its onset, lowers the amount of stress felt. Self-confidence or a sense of efficacy determines whether a person appraises a situation as a threat or as a challenge. Beyond these, physical health, psychological characteristics such as temperament and self-concept, the cultural context a person lives in, and the resources available to them (money, social skills, coping style, support networks) all shape how the same event is appraised differently by different people.
Q. Explain the four major effects of stress on psychological functioning.
Answer: Stress produces emotional, physiological, cognitive and behavioural effects. Emotional effects include mood swings and erratic behaviour that can alienate a person from family and friends, sometimes starting a vicious circle towards more serious emotional problems like anxiety and depression. Physiological effects come from a rise in hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, changing heart rate, blood pressure and metabolism, helpful briefly but damaging if prolonged. Cognitive effects include mental overload, poor concentration and reduced short-term memory, which can cause faulty decisions. Behavioural effects include poorer nutrition, increased use of caffeine, cigarettes, alcohol or tranquillisers, disrupted sleep and reduced work performance.
Q. Describe Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome with its three stages.
Answer: Selye studied prolonged stress by exposing laboratory animals to stressors and observing hospital patients, finding the same pattern of bodily response in each. He called this the General Adaptation Syndrome, with three stages. In the alarm reaction stage, a stressor activates the adrenal-pituitary-cortex system, releasing hormones and preparing the body for fight or flight. In the resistance stage, if stress continues, the parasympathetic nervous system calls for more cautious use of the body’s resources while the organism tries to cope, often through confrontation. In the exhaustion stage, continued exposure to the same or additional stressors drains the body’s resources, the earlier systems stop working effectively, and susceptibility to stress-related disease, such as high blood pressure, increases.
Q. Explain Endler and Parker’s three coping strategies with examples.
Answer: Task-oriented strategy involves obtaining information about the stressful situation and alternative courses of action, deciding priorities and acting to deal directly with it, for example scheduling one’s time better. Emotion-oriented strategy involves efforts to maintain hope and control one’s emotions, such as venting feelings of anger and frustration, or deciding that nothing can be done to change things. Avoidance-oriented strategy involves denying or minimising the seriousness of a situation, consciously suppressing stressful thoughts and replacing them with self-protective ones, such as watching TV or phoning a friend instead of confronting the issue.
Q. Describe any four life skills that help a person meet life’s challenges.
Answer: Assertiveness lets a person clearly and confidently communicate feelings, needs and thoughts, including the ability to say no. Time management involves changing one’s perception of time and spending it on what one values, relieving time-related pressure. Rational thinking challenges the distorted, negative thinking that stress creates and replaces it with realistic, positive statements. Improving relationships depends on communication, listening to others, expressing one’s own feelings honestly, and accepting others’ opinions even when they differ, while avoiding misplaced jealousy. (Self-care and overcoming unhelpful habits such as perfectionism, avoidance and procrastination are also acceptable as a fourth or fifth skill.)
Q. Explain any four stress management techniques described in the chapter.
Answer: Relaxation techniques are an active skill that starts relaxation from the lower body and progresses to the facial muscles, using deep breathing along with muscle relaxation. Meditation is the yogic method of refocusing attention through learned techniques to reach an altered, fully absorbed state of consciousness. Biofeedback develops awareness of a physiological response such as heart rate, teaches control of it in quiet conditions, and then transfers that control into everyday life. Cognitive Behavioural Techniques, such as Meichenbaum’s Stress Inoculation Training, aim to replace negative and irrational thoughts with positive and rational ones through assessment, stress-reduction techniques, and application and follow-through.
Q. What is positive health, and what factors promote it?
Answer: Health is a state of complete physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Positive health comprises a healthy body, high-quality personal relationships, a sense of purpose in life, self-regard and mastery of life’s tasks, and resilience to stress, trauma and change. Five factors act as stress buffers and promote positive health: a balanced diet, regular exercise, a positive attitude, positive/optimistic thinking, and social support from family and friends.
4 6-Mark Questions
Q. Discuss the nature of stress and the process of cognitive appraisal that determines whether an event becomes stressful for a person.
Answer: Stress can be described as the pattern of responses an organism makes to a stimulus event that disturbs its equilibrium and exceeds its ability to cope. Hans Selye, the father of modern stress research, defined it as the non-specific response of the body to any demand, though many researchers argue the response is not this uniform, since different stressors and different people produce different reaction patterns.
Stress is not simply a stimulus or a response; it is an ongoing transactional process between a person and their social and cultural environment. The person makes a primary appraisal of an event as positive, neutral or negative, and negative events are further appraised for harm (damage already done), threat (possible future damage) or challenge (confidence in one’s ability to cope and even profit from the event). If the event seems stressful, the person then makes a secondary appraisal, assessing whether their mental, physical, personal and social resources are sufficient to cope with it.
This two-level appraisal is subjective and depends on past experience of similar situations, perceived controllability over the event, and self-confidence or efficacy. It determines not just cognitive and behavioural responses but also emotional and physiological ones, which is why the identical event, such as facing a fast bowler in cricket, can feel like an exciting challenge to one player and a threatening ordeal to another.
Q. Explain how stress affects psychological functioning and health, referring to the General Adaptation Syndrome and the immune system.
Answer: Stress produces four major effects: emotional (mood swings, anxiety, depression), physiological (raised adrenaline and cortisol changing heart rate and blood pressure), cognitive (poor concentration, faulty decisions) and behavioural (poor nutrition, more smoking or alcohol, disrupted sleep). Prolonged, unresolved stress can lead to burnout, a state of physical, emotional and psychological exhaustion, and researchers estimate that stress plays a role in 50 to 70 per cent of physical illnesses, and that 60 per cent of medical visits are primarily for stress-related symptoms.
Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome describes how the body copes with prolonged stress in three stages: the alarm reaction, where a stressor activates the adrenal-pituitary-cortex system and prepares the body for fight or flight; resistance, where the parasympathetic nervous system enables more cautious, sustained coping; and exhaustion, where continued exposure drains the body’s resources and increases susceptibility to stress-related disease such as high blood pressure.
Stress also impairs the immune system; psychoneuroimmunology studies the links between the mind, the brain and the immune system. White blood cells such as T cells, T-helper cells, B cells and natural killer cells identify and destroy foreign bodies, but high stress has been shown to reduce natural-killer-cell activity, seen in students facing important exams, bereaved persons and those who are severely depressed. Negative emotions accompanying psychological stress, such as depression, hostility and anger, are linked to weaker immune functioning, while social support has been found to improve it, showing how closely the mind, brain and body are connected.
Q. Discuss the different ways of coping with stress and the stress management techniques described in the chapter.
Answer: Lazarus and Folkman conceptualised coping as a dynamic, situation-specific process rather than a fixed personal trait, dividing coping responses into problem-focused strategies, which attack the problem itself by gaining information and altering the event or one’s beliefs, and emotion-focused strategies, which make psychological changes to limit emotional disruption with minimal effort to change the event. Both are necessary, though research suggests people tend to use problem-focused coping more often.
Endler and Parker give a separate list of three coping strategies: task-oriented (gathering information, deciding priorities and acting directly on the problem), emotion-oriented (maintaining hope, venting or controlling emotions) and avoidance-oriented (denying or minimising the seriousness of the situation and suppressing stressful thoughts).
Because stress is linked to hypertension, heart disease, ulcers, diabetes and even cancer, specific stress management techniques have been developed: relaxation techniques using deep breathing and progressive muscle relaxation; meditation, the yogic refocusing of attention; biofeedback, which develops awareness and control of a physiological response and transfers it to daily life; creative visualisation, using imagery toward a realistic goal; cognitive behavioural techniques such as Meichenbaum’s Stress Inoculation Training, which replaces irrational thoughts with rational ones in three phases; and regular exercise, practised at least four times a week, which improves heart efficiency, lung function and the immune system.
Q. Explain how hardiness, resilience and life skills together help a person meet life’s challenges.
Answer: It is unlikely that anyone goes through life without some acute personal crisis, but people who sail through positively tend to have constructive attitudes and strong emotional and social support. Managing pressure this way is like being immunised against unhealthy stress, leaving a person ‘stress fit’ for future crises.
Kobasa’s studies found that people with high stress but low illness share a personality trait called hardiness, made up of the three Cs: commitment (to work, family and social life), control (a sense of purpose and direction over one’s own life) and challenge (seeing life’s changes as normal and positive rather than as a threat). Related to this is resilience, the dynamic capacity to ‘bounce back’ under challenging conditions, built from three resources: I HAVE (social and interpersonal strengths), I AM (inner strengths such as self-respect) and I CAN (problem-solving skills). A person needs more than one of these resources to be genuinely resilient.
Not everyone has these traits naturally, so specific life skills can be learned: assertiveness, time management, rational thinking, improving relationships through communication, self-care including relaxed diaphragmatic breathing, and overcoming unhelpful habits like perfectionism, avoidance and procrastination, which feel helpful briefly but increase long-term vulnerability to stress.
Q. ‘Positive health and well-being come through several factors, not through the absence of disease alone.’ Discuss this statement with reference to the chapter.
Answer: The chapter defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity; positive health is then described through its constructs, which include a healthy body, high-quality personal relationships, a sense of purpose in life, self-regard and mastery of life’s tasks, and resilience to stress, trauma and change.
Five factors act as stress buffers and build this kind of health. Diet, a balanced and varied diet, lifts mood, provides energy and strengthens immunity, while under stress people seek high-fat, high-salt and high-sugar ‘comfort foods.’ Exercise, both stretching exercises like yogic asanas and aerobic exercises like jogging or swimming, has a consistently positive relationship with health and helps manage weight, tension and depression. A positive attitude, built from an accurate perception of reality, a sense of purpose, tolerance of others’ views and accepting responsibility for both success and failure, keeps a person centred. Positive thinking, or optimism, has been linked to psychological and physical well-being; optimists also use more problem-focused coping and seek advice and help, while pessimists anticipate disaster. Finally, social support, whether tangible (material aid), informational (facts and advice) or emotional (reassurance and care), reduces psychological distress and benefits both the giver and the receiver.
Taken together, these factors show that positive health is actively built through daily choices and relationships, not simply something a person has by default when they are not sick.
5 Case Studies
(A) 1 mark Name the four categories of effects of stress that the chapter describes.
Answer: Emotional, physiological, cognitive and behavioural effects.
(B) 2 marks Identify which type of stress effect each of Meera’s symptoms best represents: (a) getting angry with family, (b) headaches, (c) difficulty concentrating.
Answer: (a) Getting angry with her family is an emotional effect. (b) Headaches are a physiological effect. (c) Difficulty concentrating and re-reading without absorbing content is a cognitive effect.
(C) 3 marks Suggest three techniques or life skills from the chapter that could help Meera, explaining briefly how each would help.
Answer: Relaxation techniques with deep breathing would help calm her physiological arousal, reducing the physical symptoms of stress and tension. Time management would let her plan a realistic revision timetable instead of repeatedly re-reading the same material under pressure. Exercise, such as a short daily walk or stretching, would improve her circulation and mood and give her physiological arousal a healthy outlet, in line with the chapter’s description of exercise as a stress buffer.
(A) 1 mark Which of the chapter’s sources of stress does the father’s sudden loss of his job represent for Arjun’s family?
Answer: It is a major life event: an unpredicted change that disturbs the family’s routine and causes upheaval, the kind of event the chapter lists first among the sources of stress.
(B) 2 marks Which of Endler and Parker’s coping strategies is Arjun mainly using when he takes up tutoring and manages his classes, and why?
Answer: He is mainly using a task-oriented strategy, because he is deciding priorities and acting directly to deal with the stressful situation (taking a job, managing time) rather than only managing his emotions or avoiding the problem.
(C) 3 marks Identify and explain (a) Arjun’s attitude toward the crisis and (b) the kind of social support he is seeking from his cousin, using the chapter’s own terms.
Answer: (a) Arjun’s attitude, believing ‘this is temporary and we will get through it,’ reflects positive thinking/optimism, the inclination to expect favourable outcomes, which the chapter links to better psychological and physical well-being. (b) Asking his cousin for advice on managing money is seeking informational support, since it provides facts and guidance about handling a similar stressful situation, rather than material aid (tangible support) or reassurance alone (emotional support).