HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY

THE TRANSACTIONAL
THEORY OF STRESS
BY RICHARD LAZARUS.
DATE PRESENTED BY
15/12/2023 Tanika Chib
 WHAT IS STRESS?

Earlier theories, like that of Hans Selye , defined stress as a

response or some of them defined stress as a stimulus i.e stress
as significant life event or change that demands response ,
adjustment or adaptation.
In attempting to explain stress as more of a dynamic process,
Richard Lazarus and his colleagues defined stress as a
transaction.
Transaction is the process involving continuous interactions
and adjustment with the person and environment each
affecting and being affected by the other.
 WHAT DOES THE THEORY SAY:
Lazarus and Folkman addressed some of the psychosocial triggers of stress that critics
noted are not included in Selye’s GAS theory. They believed that we cannot study a
person’s response to stress independent of understanding his or her perception of the
stress provoking event.
Lazarus takes the view that stress is not a property of the environment, nor is it a
property of the individual , rather it is transaction between the individual and the
environment( Lazarus, 1990).
Individual or personal factors includes or physiological, psychological and emotional
factors like values , commitments, goals, personality, personal resources, age , sex etc.
Environmental factors include the demands, constraints, temporal aspects, ambiguity,
uncertainty , predictability or timing of the event or situation.
Therefore , stress is triggered when an external stressor( or event) exceeds a person’s
personal resources to effectively cope with the event.
Stress is not a static event. Rather it involves a person’s continuous interaction with ,
and adjustment to, the events.
According to this view, stress is not just a stimulus or a response, but rather a process in
which the person is an active agent who can influence the impact of a stressor through
behavioral, cognitive, and emotional strategies.
 So, Stress is defined as a circumstance in which transactions leads a person to perceive a
discrepancy between the physical or psychological demands of a situation and the
resources of his or her biological, psychological ,or social systems.
The four main components used in this definition are defined as follows:
1. Resources: Stress taxes the person’s biopsychosocial resources for coping with difficult
events or circumstances.
2. Demands: The phrase” demands of a situation” refers to the amount of our resources the
stressor appears to require.
3. Discrepancy: Where there is a poor fit, or a mismatch, between the demands of the
situation and the resources of the person, a discrepancy exists.
4. Transactions: In our transactions with the environment, we assess demands ,resources and
discrepancies between them.
An important point to keep in mind is that a demand, resource , or discrepancy may either
be real or just believed to exists. Stress often results from inaccurate perceptions of
discrepancies between environmental demands and the actual resources. Stress is in the
eye of the beholder.

SO WHAT MAKES AN EVENT STRESSFUL ?

APPRAISING EVENT AS STRESSFUL:
All individuals do not respond to the same stressors in the same way. A situation or event
would cause stress only if the individual interprets it as threating. The way our mind works is
very intriguing indeed. The incidents of placebo effects , psychosomatic illness are strong
evidences to support that the thoughts, labels and expectations have powerful influence on
stress reaction and health processes.
Psychologists studying cognitive processes have tried to explain the working of human mind
as working of a computer called the information-processing model. According to Lazarus
and colleagues, stress involves an assessment process, which they call cognitive appraisal.
Cognition is a process involving thinking, reasoning, deciding, attention, perception, memory,
problem solving etc , and appraisal means to assess, to estimate, to rate etc.
Therefore, cognitive appraisal is a mental process that people use , when faced with
a stress causing stimulus, to evaluate the situation as stressful or not.
People tend to evaluate the situation by taking into consideration two main factors:
1. Whether a demand threatens their physical and psychological well-being( in long term
or immediate).
2. The resources available for meeting the demands . i.e whether the individual has
adequate abilities and resources to overcome or tackle the threating situations and
avoid the potential harm.
First factor is called primary appraisal and the second one is secondary appraisal.
PRIMARY APPRAISAL:
When we encounter a potentially stressful circumstances, like feeling symptoms of pain or
nausea, we try to assess the meaning of the situation for our well-being. This assessment
process is called primary appraisal.
3 results/ judgments of the primary appraisal:
1. It is irrelevant: Based on past events or experience . e.g : as you might decide if you
had had a similar pain or symptoms before that lasted only for a short while and was not
followed by an illness.
2. It is good ( benign-positive): you already wanted to skip school or work and now you
have a reason for it.
3. It is stressful: Symptom is judged as of some serious illness. Circumstances we appraise
as stressful receive further appraisal for three implications, that are:
_ Harm Loss: Amount of damage that has already occurred, as when someone is in pain
following a serious injury. Sometime people experience minor stressor but exaggerate it
(personal impact) and increase the feeling of stress.
_ Threat: Expectation of future harm. For example- hospitalized patient think about their
medical bills, difficult rehabilitation, loss of income etc.
_ Challenge: Opportunity to achieve growth, mastery, profit by using more than routine
resources to meet a demand. For ex- a worker might view an offer of higher level job as
demanding , but some may not.
 Appraisal can influence stress even when the stressor does not relate to us directly-even that
is, when the transaction is vicarious. If we see other people in stressful circumstances, such as
suffering from pain, we may empathize with their feelings and feel vulnerable ourselves, but
our responses are still influenced by appraisals.
. A classic experiment demonstrated empathic appraisal by showing college students a film
called Subincision (Speisman et al., 1964). The film showed a rite of passage for young
adolescent boys in a primitive society in which the underside of the penis is cut deeply from the
tip to the scrotum, using a sharp stone. Before seeing the film, the students were divided into four
groups, so that each group would see the film a different way. Each group saw the film with
either:
1. No sound track.
2. A sound track with a ‘‘trauma’’ narrative that emphasized the pain, danger, and primitiveness
of the operation.
3. A narration that denied any pain and potential harm to the boys, describing them as willing
participants in a joyful occasion who ‘‘look forward to the happy conclusion of the ceremony.’’
4. A ‘‘scientific’’ narration that encouraged the viewers to watch in a detached manner—for
example, the narrator commented, ‘‘As you can see, the operation is formal and the surgical
technique, while crude, is very carefully followed.’
 Physiological (such as heart rate) and self report measures of stress showed that,
compared with the subjects who saw the film with no sound track, those who heard the
trauma narration reacted with more stress during the film; those who heard the denial
and scientific tracks displayed less stress. Thus, people can experience stress vicariously,
and their reactions depend on the process of primary appraisal.
Therefore in primary appraisal we try to mentally calculate whether it will affect our
happiness, security, health, comfort, prestige, interest or anything that they value.

SECONDARY APPRAISAL:
Secondary appraisal refers to our assessment of the resources we have available for
coping. Although these assessments occur continuously in our transactions, we are
especially aware of our secondary appraisals when we judge a situation as potentially
stressful and try to determine whether our resources are sufficient to meet the harm
threat, or challenge we face.
Examples of secondary appraisal judgments include: • I can’t do it—I know I’ll fail, I’ll
try, but my chances are slim. , I can do it if Ginny will help., If this method fails, I can try
a few others., I can do it if I work hard. • No problem—I can do it.
WHAT FACTORS LEAD TO STRESSFUL APPRAISAL?
Appraising events as stressful depends on two types of factors—those that relate to the
person and those that relate to the situation (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Let’s begin by
looking at how personal factors can affect appraisals of stress.
Personal factors include intellectual, motivational, and personality characteristics.
One example is self esteem: people who have high self-esteem are likely to believe
they have the resources to meet demands that require the strengths they possess. If
they perceive an event as stressful, they may interpret it as a challenge rather than a
threat. Another example relates to motivation: the more important a threatened goal
,the more stress the person is likely to perceive (Paterson & Neufeld, 1987). One other
example involves the person’s belief system: as psychologist Albert Ellis has noted,
many people have irrational beliefs that increase their stress. . The tendency to
appraise even minor issues as major problems is often called perfectionism, and this
thinking style not only often causes emotional distress but also can pose a serious
threat to long-term health (Fry & Debats, 2009).
About situations that make them stressful, One answer is that events that involve very
strong demands and are imminent tend to be seen as stressful (Paterson & Neufeld, 1987).
Thus, patients who expect to undergo a physically uncomfortable or painful medical
procedure, such as surgery, tomorrow are likely to view their situation as being more
stressful than, say, expecting to have a blood pressure test next week.
Table below shows the characteristics of stressful situations:
 So, The condition of stress that we experience often depends on the outcome of the
appraisals we make. When we judge our resources as sufficient to meet the demands
,we may experience little or no stress; but when we appraise demands as greater than
our resources, we may feel a great deal of stress. These processes determine everyday
stress responses, but also influence much more severe reactions, such as the
development of post-traumatic stress disorder (Carek et al., 2010; Meiser-Stedman et
al., 2009).

COPING WITH STRESS:

Stress coping, as described by researchers such as Lazarus and Folkman, implies a
more specific process of cognitive appraisal to determine whether an individual
believes he or she has the resources to respond effectively to the challenges of a
stressor or change (Folkman & Lazarus, 1988; Lazarus & Folkman, 1987). The appraisal
literature explains the response or coping process in terms of problem-focused
coping or emotion-focused coping (Folkman & Lazarus, 1980; Lazarus & Folkman,
1984), also referred to as active and passive coping styles (Jex, Bliese, Buzzell, &
Primeau, 2001). As well, approach and avoidance-style measures of coping exist
involving assertiveness or withdrawal (Anshel, 1996; Anshel & Weinberg, 1999; Roth &
Cohen, 1986).
When faced with a challenge, an individual primarily appraises the challenge as either
threatening or non-threatening, and secondarily in terms of whether he or she has the
resources to respond to or cope with the challenge effectively. If the individual does not
believe he or she has the capacity to respond to the challenge or feels a lack of control,
he or she is most likely to turn to an emotion-focused coping response such as wishful
thinking (e.g., I wish that I could change what is happening or how I feel), distancing (e.g.,
I’ll try to forget the whole thing), or emphasizing the positive (e.g., I’ll just look for the silver
lining) (Lazarus & Folkman, 1987).
If the person has the resources to manage the challenge, he or she will usually develop a
problem-focused coping response such as analysis (e.g., I try to analyze the problem in
order to understand it better; I’m making a plan of action and following it). It is theorized
and empirically demonstrated that a person’s secondary appraisal then determines
coping strategies (Lazarus & Folkman, 1987).

COGNITIVE REAPPRAISAL takes place. It is the re-evaluation of the event as it develops.

When the situation is appraised as threating or non threating, the individual may reassess
the situation ,perhaps more than once, to determine whether it continues to be as
threatening as it seemed at first.
 CRITICISM :
Amongst the many advantages of the transactional approach and its cognitive appraisal
theory is that it is compatible with both biological and social models, acknowledging as it
does the role of the stimulus, of emotional and behavioural responses, of individual
differences and of the external environment. There is a large body of supporting empirical
evidence, and few studies of coping with stress or illness are conducted
without acknowledging the central role of individual difference variables and appraisal. (
However, no model or theory escapes without criticism, as this is one way in which
academic understanding is advanced. Some criticisms include:
Lazarus’s framework has an inherent circularity and little research has attempted to
examine the nature of interaction between primary and secondary appraisals, i.e.
between perceived demands and perceived coping resources. Perceived demand and
perceived coping capacity are not defined separately, leading to claims of the model
being tautological (Hobfoll 1989) – put simply, this means that whether an event is
demanding or not depends on perceived coping capacity, and whether coping
capacity is perceived as adequate or not is dependent on perceived demand!
It is still unclear whether both primary and secondary appraisals are necessary; for example,
Zohar and Dayan (1999) found positive mood outcomes in their sample to be affected mainly by
coping potential variables and not by primary appraisal variables. Additionally, stress arose and
increased as the stakes or motivational relevance of an event increased, even in situations where
coping potential was unlimited. Any slight uncertainty about coping potential modified the effect
of ‘stakes’ (primary appraisal) on stress. For example, imagine a situation where you believe that
a forthcoming mid-term examination is a ‘mock’ and does not count towards your final grade, but
on turning up to the exam you are told that it is not a ‘mock’ but a ‘real’ exam. In spite of having
revised the subject seriously and having no major concerns about your ability to answer the
questions, this new situation is likely to be appraised differently because its value has changed
(raised stakes), and the stress experience will therefore also change (increase), even though your
resources (secondary appraisals of coping potential) have not.