PS499 Unit 2 History and Perspectives Paper Example

From Selye's Rats to a Sunrise on a Parking Ramp: A PS499 Unit 2 History and Perspectives Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS499: Bachelor's Capstone in Psychology

Unit 2 History and Perspectives Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, her hospital and her crew are composite; the historical and research sources cited are real.

Why History Matters for This Question

My capstone is about a quarter hour of walking, aimed at wonder, for the housekeepers I supervise on nights in Lansing, Michigan, and whether it lowers how stressed they feel. The question combines two subjects that psychology arrived at a century apart: stress, which the field studied as a problem from early on, and awe, which it began to study seriously only in the last twenty-five years. Tracing how each became a subject of research explains why the study is possible now and what it inherits.

Emotion and the Body

In 1884 the philosopher-psychologist James asked what an emotion is and gave an answer that still provokes debate. He argued that emotion follows the bodily changes produced by perceiving something, rather than causing them: we feel afraid because we tremble, not the reverse (James, 1884). Whatever its accuracy, the theory placed the body at the center of emotional experience, and every later account of stress and positive emotion has had to address it. An awe walk, which changes what a person perceives and how the body moves, sits squarely in the territory James opened.

Stress Becomes a Science

In a one-page letter to Nature, Selye (1936) reported that rats exposed to many different harmful agents, from cold to injury to drugs, showed the same pattern of bodily responses, including enlarged adrenal glands and shrunken immune tissue. He called this a general response to damaging agents and later described it as a stress syndrome. Selye's work established that very different demands produce a common physiological reaction, and that prolonged exposure wears the body down.

The limitation of Selye's model was that it treated stress as something done to an organism. Lazarus and Folkman (1984) shifted the focus to appraisal: what matters is how a person judges a situation and their resources for coping with it. Their model made stress partly psychological and therefore partly changeable, which is the premise of any intervention aimed at perceived stress. My crew faces the same shifts, but they do not all appraise them the same way. One coworker treats a code in the emergency department as a chance to prove how fast she can turn a room; another dreads the same call all night. Their bodies are doing the same work, but their appraisals differ, and appraisal is what an intervention can reach.

Selye showed that stress wears down the body; Lazarus and Folkman showed that how people see their circumstances decides how much of that wear they feel.

Positive Emotion Enters the Field

For most of the twentieth century, research on emotion focused on negative states. Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) argued that psychology had become a science of repairing damage and called for a positive psychology that would study what makes life worth living, including positive emotions, character strengths and supportive institutions. The movement brought new attention to emotions like gratitude, hope and awe.

Keltner and Haidt (2003) then offered the first major scientific account of awe. They proposed that awe has two central features: perceived vastness, something much larger than the self in size, power or meaning, and a need for accommodation, the sense that one's existing understanding must stretch to take it in. They traced awe's history in religious and philosophical writing and argued that it was worth studying as a distinct emotion. That paper made a study like mine possible.

Seven Perspectives on Awe Walks and Stress

The biological perspective predicts that awe walks could reduce stress through the body. Stellar et al. (2015) found that among several positive emotions, the tendency to feel awe was the strongest predictor of lower levels of a marker of inflammation linked to stress. Walking itself also lowers physiological arousal. This perspective predicts that changes might appear in physiological measures as well as in self-reported stress.

The cognitive perspective focuses on appraisal and attention. Piff et al. (2015) found that awe produced a sense of a smaller self, in which personal concerns felt less central, and that this shift increased generosity and helping. A smaller self could make the night's problems feel less overwhelming. This perspective predicts that the effect on stress will run through changes in how workers appraise their worries.

The behavioral perspective emphasizes routines and reinforcement. A walk scheduled three times a week, ending at sunrise, could become a reinforcing habit that replaces sitting in the break room scrolling on a phone. This perspective predicts that regular attendance will matter more than any one walk.

The humanistic perspective connects awe to Maslow's idea of peak experiences, moments of wonder and meaning that contribute to growth. It predicts that awe walks will affect meaning and satisfaction as well as stress, and that workers' own accounts of what the walks mean to them will be important evidence.

The sociocultural perspective notes that night housekeepers are often invisible within the hospital, and that many on my crew are immigrants from Nepal, Bhutan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, with different traditions of awe and nature. It predicts that walking together might matter as much as awe itself, and that the meaning of the walks will vary by culture.

The evolutionary perspective, following Keltner and Haidt (2003), suggests that awe evolved partly to bind individuals to groups, orienting them toward shared goals. It predicts that awe walks will increase feelings of connection to the crew.

The psychodynamic perspective has the least to say about awe walks directly, though it would ask what personal meanings the night shift and sunrise carry for each worker.

What the Perspectives Mean for the Study

The perspectives point to more outcomes than perceived stress alone. A study faithful to them would measure stress as the main outcome but also include measures of awe, connection to coworkers and perhaps a brief physiological indicator. It would compare awe walks with ordinary walks, to separate awe from exercise and companionship. And it would collect workers' own descriptions, which the humanistic and sociocultural perspectives treat as essential. These decisions will shape the proposal in Unit 4.

Conclusion

Psychology reached this question through two separate histories, the long study of stress from James and Selye to Lazarus and Folkman, and the recent rise of positive psychology and the science of awe. The seven perspectives each predict something different about what awe walks might do for a night-shift crew, and those differences will become the study's hypotheses and measures.

References

James, W. (1884). What is an emotion? Mind, 9(34), 188-205. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/os-IX.34.188

Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297-314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297

Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer.

Piff, P. K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., Stancato, D. M., & Keltner, D. (2015). Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(6), 883-899. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000018

Seligman, M. E. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist, 55(1), 5-14. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.5

Selye, H. (1936). A syndrome produced by diverse nocuous agents. Nature, 138(3479), 32. https://doi.org/10.1038/138032a0

Stellar, J. E., John-Henderson, N., Anderson, C. L., Gordon, A. M., McNeil, G. D., & Keltner, D. (2015). Positive affect and markers of inflammation: Discrete positive emotions predict lower levels of inflammatory cytokines. Emotion, 15(2), 129-133. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000033