Understanding Beliefs, Disease, and Stress Responses

Posted on Mar 27, 2025 in Psychology and Sociology

Beliefs and Social Cognition

Beliefs involve the internalization of values and are part of the world of ideas and thoughts. All human beings have them. They are intelligible and externalized. The Social Cognition Model, proposed by Bandura (1987), suggests that increased risk awareness and knowledge of the prerequisite conditions for change, along with media resources, influence the skills or ability to execute behavior.

Rosenstock’s Model states that for people to get moving and adopt acceptable health behaviors, the following conditions must be met:

  • Minimum levels of motivation
  • Health information
  • Perceived vulnerability
  • View of the disease as threatening
  • Conviction in the effectiveness of the intervention
  • Few difficulties in implementation

Demographic and socio-psychological variables also influence susceptibility and severity in individuals.

Disease as a Psychological Fact

Anyone can experience illness and disability (physical or psychological). It poses a threat depending on the condition. It threatens to change our way of life and involves regression and self-centeredness.

  • Regression: Remembering behaviors from previous stages.
  • Absorption by the body: When a person is sick, all information received is from our own body.
  • Soledad (Solitude): Especially if the person is hospitalized, comparisons are made with those who are healthy.

Psychosocial Variables Influencing Disease

  • Beliefs about the disease: How it is interpreted.
  • Beliefs about causes.
  • Beliefs about control.
  • The meaning of illness: Challenge, punishment, hospital shelter, enemy, threat.
  • Confrontation of the disease: Addressing the problem, directed to the excitement.
  • Social support: Any help that comes from others, including material support, staff, and information.

Responses to illness: opposition, denial, over-inclusion.

Stress: Eustress and Distress

Eustress (good stress) and Distress (bad stress) have phases:

  1. Alarm: Prepares the body for immediate reaction.
  2. Resistance: The body produces resources to combat the stressor.
  3. Exhaustion: Depletion of resources by the person.

The Stress Circuit

Depends on the subject:

Environmental stimulus → Arousal → Negative thinking → Painful emotion

Environmental stimulus → Negative thinking → Arousal → Painful emotion

Consequences of Stress

  • Changes in personal relationships. Comparison, thinking that things had to be different…
  • Decreased ability to work, especially if the situation comes from work stress.
  • Predisposition to disease.

Stress Responses

  • Self-referential: Focus on yourself and only assess what is an emotional stress.
  • Self-efficacy.
  • Naysayers: Although stress is ignored, it is an unconscious mechanism that does not solve the problem but avoids it.

Coping Strategies

  • Adaptive: Initial avoidance → Accept the situation
  • Maladaptive: Substance abuse, aggression, histrionics (any situation is dramatized), suicide.

Adaptation to Special Situations: Grief/Death of a Loved One

Normal Grief: (at most 6 months)

  1. Disclaimer – emotional anesthesia
  2. Anxiety, sadness – isolation, anger
  3. Resolution-adaptation

Abnormal Grief:

  1. Severe or prolonged symptoms.
  2. More common in unexpected deaths, intimate relationships.
  3. Psychiatric patient, insecurity.

Treatment: Listen, explain the grief, drugs.