Conceptual and Operational Definitions
Depression. According to Laura (2019) on website Medical News Today with the
tittle “What is depression and what can I do about it?” are being define “depression”
as a types of mood that make someone not able to do a daily life routine like a normal
person. This type of mental illness is profoundly serious medical condition that
everyone must to take care also. It is not about Monday blue and the persons who are
suffered with depression must take the appropriate treatment with the right person for
instance the psychiatric. Based on the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
they said major depression is a quite common mental disorder in the United States and
“that’s 7.1% of all US adults age 18 and older. Adult females have a higher
prevalence of experiencing a major depressive episode than their male counterparts8.7% compared to 5.3% in adult males. (Dina Cagliostro n.d para.5).
The symptoms of depression are different among men and women and the children
for instance in mood, emotional well-being, behaviour, sexual interest and others. The
factor why the person was suffered with depression due to family history, early
childhood trauma, the brain structure, medical conditions and drug use. (Valencia
Higuera and Kimberly Holland, 2020).
According to Amy Morin, LCSW (2020), there was different perspective on the
late centuries which is on the second millennium B.C.E in Mesopotamia, depression
was define as a spiritual rather than a physical condition and was dealt with by priests
rather than physicians. Based on the second millennium, the causes of depression are
because the demons and evil spirits through many cultures. During the Age of
Enlightenment, depression was discuss as an attitude from the family history that
can’t be change and the effect due to this beliefs was make people who are suffered
with depression being as a strangers by the normal persons. During the 1895, Emil
Kraepelin who is the German Psychiatrist was the first people distinguish manic
depression as we know today “bipolar disorder”, as a Schizophrenia or they called
“dementia praecox” on that time.
The operational definition of depression is a mental condition that make
someone cannot control their self in whatever he or she do. It is examined by
Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (RAM-D) by Max Hamilton which is a
psychiatrist at Leeds University in the late 1950s.
Stress. According to Jeanne Segal, Melinda Smith et.al (2020), stress is your
body responding in whatever kinds of events and it is quite common illness among
humans. Basically, stress can be as a positive perspective which is it helps us to be
more focused, energetic and alert. When someone feel threatened, him or her
“nervous system responds by releasing a flood of stress hormones, including
adrenaline and cortisol, which rouse the body for emergency action.” (Jeanne Segal,
Melinda Smith et.al 2020 para.5). This process known as “fight-or-flight” or the stress
response. Every person who are suffered with stress was different because some of
people able to control their stress than others (Jennifer Casarella 2019).
(SYMTOMPS STRESS)
However, too much stress can affect mental and physical health, particularly if it
becomes chronic(ongoing) or overwhelming. Stress can affect your body, your
thought and feelings and your behaviour. If you are experiencing any symptoms of
stress, it is best to see your doctor as it can contribute to health problems, such as high
blood pressure, heart disease, obesity and diabetes.
Body


Headaches
Other aches and Pain

Sleep disturbances


Upset stomach, diarrhoea


High blood pressure
Weekend immune system


Fatigue
Muscle tension
Change in sex drive (Male or female)
MIND

Anxiety, worry

Inerrability

Depression or sadness

Feeling overwhelmed and out of control

Feeling restless

Feeling moody, tearful

Difficulty concentrating

Low self-esteem, lack of confidence
Behaviour

Overeating or Undereating

Outbursts of anger

Relationship problems

Alcohol, smoking or drug abuse

Avoiding people.
(DEFINITON STRESS AMONG PSYCHOLOGIST DULU2/HISTORY OF
STRESS)
The term of stress was borrowed from the field of physics by one of the father of
stress research Hans Salye.In physics, stress describes the force that produces strain of
physical body(I.e. bending a mental until it snaps occur because of the
force,stress,exerted on it.) Hans Selye began using the term stress after after
completing his medical training at the university of Montreal in the 1920’s.He noticed
that no matter what his hospitalized patient suffer from, they all had one things in
common. They all looked sick.in his view. They all were under physical stress.
He proposed that stress was a non-specific strain on the body caused by
irregularities in body functions. The stress resulted in the released of stress of
hormones. He called this the “General Adaptation syndrome” (a closer look at general
adaptation syndrome, our body’s short term and look term reactions to stress).
The great Debate
Selye pioneered the field of stress research of provided convincing arguments
that stress impacted stress. But not all agreed with his physiological of view stress as a
non- specific phenomenon though. What about psychological stress? Many physicians,
psychologists and researcher thought so. A physician named John mason an
experiment in which group of monkeys were deprived of food for short period of
time.
In group 1 monkey were alone, while in group 2 monkeys watched others
received food. Even though both groups of monkeys were under physical stress of
hunger, those that saw others eat had higher stress hormones levels. He therefore
showed that psychological stress was as powerful as physical stress at inducing the
body’s stress levels. In one interesting experiments, researchers measured the stress
hormone levels of experienced parachute jumpers. Jumping out of plane had to be
stressful! Strangely, their stress hormone were levels were normal.
Stress hormone levels were then measured in both people jumping for the first
time and their instructors. They found a big difference! On the day before the jump,
student’s levels were normal while instructors’ levels were extremely high. On the
jump day, students’ levels were extremely high, while instructor’s levels were normal.
They concluded that 24 hours before the jump, the instructors’ anticipation resulted in
higher stress hormone levels because they knew what to expect.
In Hans Selye’s theory, General adaptation syndrome had three stages.
Stage 1 Alarm Reactions
This is the immediate reaction to a stressor. In the initial phase of stress,
humans exhibit a «fight or flight» response. This stage takes energy away from other
systems increasing our vulnerability to illness.
Stage 2 Resistance
If alarm body continue, the body begins getting’s to be used stressed. But this
adaptation is not good for your health. Since concentrated energy on stress reactions.
Stage 3 Exhaustions
In Selye’s view, patients who experience long-term stress could succumb to
heart attacks or severe infection due to their reduced resistance to illness.
(OPERATIONAL DEFINITION STRESS & SCALE APA YG DIGUNAKAN
UNTUK KIRA STRESS)
An operational definition is a definition of a variable in terms of precisely how it
is to be measured. These measures generally fall into one of three broad categories.
Self-report measures are those in which participants report on their own thoughts,
feelings, and actions, as with the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. This is an extremely
broad category that includes the observation of people’s behavior both in highly
structured laboratory tasks and in more natural settings. A good example of the former
would be measuring working memory capacity using the backward digit span task. A
good example of the latter is a famous operational definition of physical aggression
from researcher Albert Bandura and his colleagues Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961).
They filmed each child and counted the number of acts of physical aggression he or
she committed. These included hitting the doll with a mallet, punching it, and kicking
it. Their operational definition, then, was the number of these specifically defined acts
that the child committed in the 20-minute period.
For any given variable or construct, there will be multiple operational
definitions. Stress is a good example. A rough conceptual definition is that stress is an
adaptive
response
to
a
perceived
danger
or
threat
that
involves
physiological, cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. But researchers have
operationally defined it in several ways. The Social Readjustment Rating Scale is a
self-report questionnaire on which people identify stressful events that they have
experienced in the past year and assigns points for each one depending on its
severity. For example, a man who has been divorced, changed jobs, and had a change
in sleeping habits in the past year would have a total score of 125. The Daily Hassles
and Uplifts Scale is similar but focuses on everyday stressors like misplacing things
and being concerned about one’s weight. The Perceived Stress Scale is another selfreport measure that focuses on people’s feelings of stress. Researchers have also
operationally defined stress in terms of several physiological variables including
blood pressure and levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
When psychologists use multiple operational definitions of the same
construct—either within a study or across studies—they are using converging
operations. The idea is that the various operational definitions are «converging» on
the same construct. When scores based on several different operational definitions are
closely related to each other and produce similar patterns of results, this constitutes
good evidence that the construct is being measured effectively and that it is
useful. The various measures of stress, for example, are all correlated with each other
and have all been shown to be correlated with other variables such as immune system
functioning. (Segerstrom and Miller, 2004),2 This is what allows researchers
eventually to draw useful general conclusions, such as «stress is negatively correlated
with immune system functioning, as opposed to more specific and less useful
ones, such as people’s scores on the Perceived Stress Scale are negatively correlated
with their white blood counts.
.
References
Segerstrom & Miller 2004, 2
Google scholar the open university of Hong Kong.
https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/stress-symptoms