Stress

Stress as Bidirectional

Stress is a double-barreled threat in conflict situations because it can be both a source of conflict and the result of conflict. Conflicts with other people are rated as most distressing in terms ofboth immediate and enduring effects.

Stress primes people for conflict. Lazarus and Folkman (1984) conceptualized stress as “a relationship between the person and the environment that is appraised by the person as taxing or exceeding his or her resources and as endangering well being” (p. 19). Stress results from experiencing demands that seem greater than we can meet, a fear attached to a lack of performance, and/or frustration that we cannot reach our goals (Schafer, Wickrama, & Keith, 1998).

Stress results when we are faced with an overly demanding task, at the work­place, home, and even in leisure activities. The high degree of effort required to work toward completing this task creates negative arousal and ultimately inter­feres with our ability to complete the task (Keeley-Dyreson, Burgoon, & Bailey, 1991). The frequency, intensity, and duration of these demands, as well as our physiological and psychological responses, affect the level of stress we experience (DeLongis, Flokman, & Lazarus, 1988).

Stress can inhibit strategic behavior that allows for episodic control. For exam­ple, stress reduces the amount of thought capacity available to interpret situations because stress causes people to focus on unrelated ideas (Mandler, 1993). Like­wise, high stress causes people to divide their attention between the situation and their anxiety; highly anxious people have difficulty in focusing their cognitive efforts on the current task, issue, or problem (Dobson & Markham, 1992).

One common source of stress is the workplace. In addition to problems that co-workers present, workplace stress can result from noise, changes in work, workload, environment, and other variables (Holt, 1993; Repetti, 1993). A seri­ous reaction to workplace stress is burnout. Burnout is not the same as ordinary job stress, which is experienced by most people. Rather, burnout involves emo­tional exhaustion, depersonalization, and diminished personal accomplishment, although stressed-out people are generally highly motivated and begin their jobs with high expectations. Burnout begins when people realize that reality differs from their expectations (Pines, 1993) and that they might lack what it takes to do everything.

Workplace stress does not stay in the workplace. Stress transfers from one situation to another—a “spillover” (Repetti, 1994; Repetti & Wood, 1997). In her study of male air traffic controllers, Repetti found that fathers experienced negative spillover that was evident in both their expression of anger and their disciplining of their children. She also found that withdrawal is the predominant coping behavior, and she theorized that the fathers use withdrawal to give them­selves time to return to their normal emotional state before they spend much time interacting with their children. You might have noticed a similar tendency when coming home after a day at work or school, all you want to do is “chill” and avoid talking with anyone.

In a study of mothers, Repetti and Wood again found that work stress led to emotional and indirect fighting at home. Also, they found that negative reactions to stress, including impatience and irritability, occurred among mothers with high anxiety and with Type A personalities, much as what was found for the male air traffic controllers.

The effects of stress are wide reaching. High levels of stress interfere with thought processes, so people with elevated levels of stress experience decreases in their complexity of thought. People are then less likely to control aggression because they lose sight of the negative consequences (Zillmann, 1990). They also experience increases in selectivity of attention, which distracts from under­standing what the other person says, and in overall perceptual accuracy (Kee- ley-Dyreson et al., 1990). As a result, overly stressed people tend not to devote enough attention to the situation, and they overlook information that would help them see what occurred. Aivazyan, Zaitsev, Vadim, Khramelashvili, and Golano (1988) found that people who showed large increases in blood pressure during psychological stress also had more interpersonal conflicts. Other research found a connection between stress levels and health problems, including flu, sore throat, headaches, backaches (DeLongis et al., 1998), and degeneration of the immune system (e.g., time needed for sores and inflammations to heal; Kiecolt-Glaser, Gouin, & Hantsoo, 2010).

BOX 4.1 STUDENT STORY

Juggling Tables

by

Danielle Pasteur

I work as a food server in a restaurant and waiting tables through most of my college career has presented me with many instances of conflict, whether it be between strangers or acquaintances. I was involved in a conflict a few days ago while I was waiting tables during the dinner rush. I had a full section of tables and when it is that busy, it is difficult to give 100% perfect service to very high demanding tables. The people who were involved in the conflict were myself, a customer at one of my tables and a customer at another one of my tables.

Specifically, the conflict began when I delivered food to table #42. The man at that table requested a spoon so his wife could eat her soup.

In the meantime, the man at table 42 stood up and approached me while I was at table 40 and angrily said in a huff, he wanted his spoon. I told him I would be right with him. At this, table 40 began to take an even slower time to decide what they wanted to eat, insistent that they did not want another minute and they wanted to order right then. This whole time I'm feeling very angry and stressed out. I finally broke away from table 40 and got table 42's spoon. The conflict did not end here.

The people at table 40 were rude and condescending to me the remainder of their visit. They tipped me to the point of a personal insult, even though I was nice and they got their food and bottles of wine promptly. The man at table 42 had had very much to drink and at the end of their visit when they requested their bill, despite the fact they had flawless service (besides the spoon) through a three course meal and two bottles of wine, they warned me to be fast with the check because of "that whole spoon thing.”

I was angry, hurt, and annoyed. Even the next morning when I woke up I remembered how the men at tables 42 and 40 made me feel belittled and unappreciated. Although this conflict seems like it is very petty and mean­ingless, it really means a lot. Waiting tables is what I do to support myself through college.

Before this conflict, my state of mind was good-natured and quite calm. As the conflict was occurring, I felt stressed-out and my anger was rising. After the conflict, the anger lingered and hate for those people began to develop. A conflict like this is tough because I cannot stand up for myself or speak my mind to the person, as they do to me. Part of my job is just taking it. Otherwise, I could lose my job. It is hard to keep all that inside and only absorb it.

From experiencing this encounter, I have learned that people dining at restaurant feel that they are the only people in the whole restaurant. I think more of myself because it is not easy to just let a person be rude to you and not say anything back. In the end, it's the stronger person that did not throw the insults. If I would've chewed the people out like I wanted to, that might've just made me feel worse in the end. My beliefs about the nature of people didn't change as much as made me more aware. It takes a conscience effort to care about other people, especially strangers who are used to having it all, like the rich, don't like to wait for anybody. In the future I will again try to remain calm and not try to take it as personally.

Discussion Questions

1. In what ways did Danielle's stress affect her performance?

2.

3. Do you ever experience a similar dilemma?

Coping with Stress

People vary in their ability to handle stress. People who have a low sense of coherence, a stress resistance construct, experience more stress, more anxiety, and more anger than do people with moderate or high levels of coherence. People with low levels of coherence experience stress in this manner because they are less likely to believe that they have the resources to cope. People with higher levels of stress resistance are confident that they can cope because they enjoy family support, an adaptive personality, positive ideas about how they can manage stress, perceptions of personal control, and self-efficacy (Holahan & Moos, 1990).

Your appraisals of stressful situations also affect the levels of stress you experi­ence (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). People use cognitive appraisals to evaluate the connection between an event and themselves. How people appraise the event influences how they react to the situation. For example, if we label a situation as a threat, we will experience more stress than if we label a situation as a request. For requests, we have some sense that we can deal with the situation, so we set about determining what resources we have to deal with the situation (Tomaka, Blas- covich, Kelsey, & Leitten, 1993). For instance, when someone questions an idea you hold (“What support do you have for this argument?”), you could appraise it as a threat to your status or you could appraise it as a request for evidence you need to support an idea, which could benefit your final product. Managing stress effectively requires some element of personal control, and reframing the situa­tions in terms of positive appraisals could help. We need to believe that we can influence the situation or our reaction to it. Sillars and Parry (1982) observed that communication becomes more constrained, less complex, and less reflective as stress levels increase. People who resist stress are able to maintain their health during periods of stress, to communicate in a more flexible manner, and avoid the biases to which less resistant people fall victim (Sillars & Parry, 1982). Moreover, people who change their appraisals of their stress will also change the feelings they experience when reacting to stress, much as reappraising works for changing moods (Burleson & Goldsmith, 1998).

People need a sense of coherence and structure to view the world as a predict­able place where efforts are rewarded. We want to find meaning in what appears to be an incomprehensible situation (Stoyva & Carlson, 1993). Stress becomes most rampant when we lose this sense of control. We then feel overwhelmed and helpless, so our anxiety, frustration, and other negative emotions increase to set the stage for ill-advised strategies for managing conflict. One strategy for episodic control involves how you can reframe the source of stress as an event you can do something about. Covey (Seven Lessons) argues that people should prioritize their tasks according to what is important in addition to what is urgent. Giving priority to important activities would enable you to remove unimportant com­mitments. The research regarding stress leads to the following:

Conclusion 4.9: Be mindful that stress is bidirectional—it can instigate interpersonal­conflicts, and interpersonal conflicts can increase stress.

Suggestion 4.12: Increase your episodic control by (a) re-appraising the causes of your stress, and by (b) re-examining the importance of each task to determine which stay and which go.