In this video I discuss how we define stress. I begin with Walter Cannon’s “fight or flight” response and the activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Next I discuss the distinction between stressors and the stress response. I consider Holmes and Rahe’s Social Readjustment Rating Scale for comparing the severity of different types of stressors and then discuss how chronic stressors can gradually wear us down and impact our health.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video we introduced health psychology and we thought about this relationship between psychological factors and their potential influence on health and illness. In this video we’re going to start thinking about how this might occur, and one of the main ways this occurs is via stress. So what is stress?
Of course, we all have a common-sense understanding of this word; you probably use it on a regular basis. You say that you have stress at work or stress at school or that you feel a lot of stress. So what exactly are you referring to? Well one way we can think about this is to return to an idea that I introduced in the unit on biology and that is the fight–or–flight response. Now I also mentioned that a freeze response has been added to this, but the original term fight-or-flight response was coined by Walter Cannon. Here’s a picture of Cannon here, and we also learned about Cannon in the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion. Cannon proposed thinking about a reaction to threats as having this fight or flight response and he was one of the first people to use this term “stress” in this setting. This was picked up by other researchers including Hans Selye, who we’re going to go into detail on in a future video.
But there was criticism of the use of this word “stress” because it was being used for the cause and the effect. So you say that you have stress at work and that you feel stress as a result. In other words you’re saying stress causes stress and that’s not very clear. So Hans Selye helped to clarify this and be more precise by using the terms “stressor” and “stress response“. So a stressor refers to something that’s a threat to our well-being or something that places demands on our resources; that’s a stressor. And that causes a stress response and this refers to the physiological reaction of our body; the activation of the sympathetic nervous system in response to this stressor.
Now if we think about stressors and the stress response we can think about whether there are different types of stressors; different stressors might cause different stress responses in the body. So if we think about different types of stressors this brings us to work by Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe and what Holmes and Rahe worked on is called the “social readjustment rating scale“. This is a way of trying to categorize the perceived stress of different life events. Some stressors are more severe than others. So at the high end of this social readjustment rating scale we have things like being diagnosed with a terminal illness, or the death of a close friend or family member. These are very stressful events. And then we have sort of mid–level stressors; things like moving to a new city or getting into a physical fight with somebody. Quite stressful but not as extreme as the major stressors. And then we have more minor stressors. We have things like having to make a speech in front of a crowd, or dealing with some sleep deprivation, or fighting off the common cold, or fighting traffic in your morning commute.
And what we can see by thinking about these different types of stressors is that already we recognize that there are individual differences; the same event might be more or less stressful for different people. So we could imagine a clogged highway and some of the drivers might be incredibly stressed by this event and others might not mind it. So we have individual differences in the severity of stressors and that might relate to some psychological factors.
We can also think about the frequency of different stressors. So hopefully the severe stressors like being diagnosed with an illness or the death of a friend or family member, hopefully these are very rare events. They do happen unfortunately but hopefully not very frequently. On the other hand, things like traffic on your morning commute might happen twice a day five days a week and so it’s much higher frequency. So these things that occur quite often and evoke stress response can be called chronic stressors. These are the daily hassles that evoke a stress response and that we have to deal with on a regular basis.
We can also think about environmental stressors; these are often chronic stressors and these are things in the environment that cause a stress response and they often invoke this stress response continually. So things like living on flight path noise, or schools that are located on flight paths noise, or think about crowding on the subway or living in cramped living conditions. These are things that are environmental stressors and they are often chronic stressors because we have to deal with them on a very regular basis. This is where we start to see the potential danger of these chronic stressors because if we’re continually evoking a stress response in our body and we don’t have time or the resources to recover from this, then we can end up with some damage and that’s what we’ll look at in some future videos. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel. Thanks for watching!
