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MEASURING STRESS:Environmental Stress, Physiological Arousal

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Health Psychology­ PSY408
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Lesson 17
MEASURING STRESS
In our previous lecture, we talked about the various sources of stress.
Of the many sources of stress in the family, we focused on three: adding a new family member, divorce, and
illness and death in the family. Then we talked about the job-related stress. How the demands of the task
can produce stress; and how the job-responsibilities such as those of medical professionals, fire-fighters, and
police etc. can produce stress.
Factors Which Increase Worker's Stress
Several other Factors of jobs can increase workers' stress. For example, stress can result from:
· The physical environment of the job. Stress increases when the job involves extreme levels of noise,
temperature, humidity, or illumination.
· Perceived insufficient control over aspects of the job. People experience stress when they have little
influence over work procedures or the pace of the work, such as when a machine feeds work to them at a
predetermined speed.
· Poor interpersonal relationships. People's stress on the job increases when their boss or a co-worker is
socially abrasive, being insensitive to the needs of others or condescending and overly critical of the work
other individuals do.
· Perceived inadequate recognition or advancement. Workers feel stress when they do not get the
recognition or promotions they believe they deserve.
· Job loss. People experience stress when they lose their jobs or think their jobs are threatened. Workers
who believe they are likely to be fired or laid off feel a sense of job insecurity--and this is stressful,
particularly if they have little prospect of finding another lob. Studies have, shown that unemployment is
associated with psychological and physiological signs of stress, such as in people's loss of self-esteem and
heightened blood pressure.
· Retirement. Many elderly people approach retirement with expectations of blissful freedom and leisure.
But it does not always turn out that way. Retirees often find that they have lost opportunities for social
interaction and an important part of their identity. They may miss the power and influence they once had,
the structure and routines of a job, and the feeling of being useful and competent. The stress from these
circumstances can affect not only the retirees, but their spouses, too. What's more, many retirees have the
added problem that their income is not sufficient for their needs.
Environmental Stress
Have you ever been at a big noisy event with thousands of people jammed into an arena and felt
physiologically aroused, tense, and uncomfortable? Events like these can be stressful because of the noise
and the crowded conditions. Crowded conditions reduce your control over interpersonal interaction and
restrict your ability to move about freely or obtain resources, such as seats. Also, you may feel that other
people are physically closer than you usually prefer people to be-- they are intruding into your personal
space.
Some environmental conditions are intensely stressful--imagine how you would react to learning that a
hazardous substance has seeped into the water supply where you live.
How much of it have you and your family already drunk? Has it damaged your bodies already? Will you
develop serious illnesses because of it in the future? Can the substance be removed? And after it is, will you
believe there is no more danger? Can you sell your house now without suffering a great financial loss? Many
people who are exposed to hazardous substances or other continuous threats in their environment worry
for years about what will happen to them. Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, have the added difficulty
of long-term disruptions in social relationships, which worsen the stress.
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In the late 1970s, attention was focused on this type of situation at Love Canal in New York State, where a
chemical dump site had contaminated a residential community. In many ways this situation is more stressful
than a natural disaster--at least a tornado ends quickly, its damage can be assessed, and much of the
damage can be repaired in time. At Love Canal, however, "the nightmare goes on and on".
Another example of the psychological effects of living in a hazardous environment comes from the nuclear
accident at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania. More than a year after the accident,
researchers compared the stress of nearby residents to that of people who lived near a different nuclear
facility that had not had an accident. This comparison revealed greater psychological and physiological
evidence of stress among the residents around Three Mile Island than among those near the other facility.
So far, we have seen that stress involves Biopsychosocial reactions, and that all sorts of events or
circumstances can be stressors, including extreme temperatures, noise, taking an exam, being stuck in a
traffic jam, having a painful medical test, getting married, and losing a job. The possible stimuli and
reactions, and the appraisal processes that link them, make for an interesting question: If you were doing
research and needed to know whether different people had experienced different amounts of stress, how
could you assess this variable?
MEASURING STRESS
Researchers have used several different approaches for measuring stress. The three most commonly used
approaches involve assessing people's physiological arousal, life events, and daily hassles.
Physiological Arousal
Stress produces physiological arousal, which is reflected in the functioning of many of our body systems.
One way to assess arousal is to use electrical/mechanical equipment to take measurements of blood
pressure, heart rate, respiration rate, or galvanic skin response (GSR). Each of these indexes of arousal can
be measured separately, or they can all be measured and recorded simultaneously by one apparatus called
the polygraph.
Miniaturized versions of these devices are available with recording units that can fit in a pocket, thereby
allowing assessments during the person's daily life at home, at work, or in a stressful situation, such as while
flying in an airplane or receiving dental treatment. Using one of these devices, researchers have shown that
paramedics' blood pressure is higher during ambulance runs and at the hospital than during other work
situations or at home.
Another way to measure arousal is to do biochemical analyses of blood, urine, or saliva samples to assess
the level of hormones that the adrenal glands secrete profusely during stress. Using this approach,
researchers can test for two classes of hormones: corticosteroids, the most important of which is cortisol,
and catecholamines, which include epinephrine and nor-epinephrine. A chemist does the analysis using
special procedures and equipment.
There are several advantages to use measures of physiological arousal in assessing stress. Physiological
measures are reasonably direct and objective, quite reliable, and easily quantified. But there are
disadvantages as well. Assessing physiological arousal can be expensive, and the measurement technique
may itself be stressful for some people, as may occur when blood is drawn or when electrical devices arc
attached to the body Lastly, measures of physiological arousal are affected by the person's gender, body
weight, activity prior to or during measurement, and consumption of various substances, such as caffeine.
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Life Events
If you wanted to know whether people were feeling stress, you might simply ask them. Using a self-report
method is easy to do. But in doing research, you would probably want to get a more precise answer than,
"Yes, I am," or even, "Yes, I'm under a lot of stress For this reason, a number of different scales have been
developed to measure people's stress and assign it a numerical value.
The Social Readjustment Rating Scale
One approach many scales have used is to develop a list of life events--major happenings that can occur in
a person's life that require some degree of psychological adjustment. The scale assigns each event a value
that reflects its stressfulness. The most widely used scale of life events has been the Social Readjustment
Rating Scale (SRRS) developed by Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe (1967). To develop this scale, these
researchers constructed a list of events they derived from clinical experience. Then they had hundreds of
men and women of various ages and backgrounds rate the amount of adjustment each event would require,
using the following instructions:
Use all of your experience in arriving at your answer. This means personal experience where it applies as
well as what you have learned to be the case for others. Some persons accommodate to change more readily
than others; some persons adjust with particular ease or difficulty to only certain events. Therefore, strive to
give your opinion of the average degree of readjustment necessary for each event rather than the extreme.
The researchers used these ratings to assign values to each event and construct the scale.
The values for the life events in the SRRS range from 100 points for death of a spouse to 11 points for
minor violations of the law. To measure the amount of stress people have experienced, respondents are
given a survey form listing these life events and asked to check off the ones that happened to them during a
given period of time, usually not more than the past 24 months. The researcher sums the values of the
checked items to get a total stress score.
How commonly do life events like those in the SRRS occur? A study of nearly 2,800 adults used a modified
version of the SRRS and found that the three most frequent events reported were took a vacation (43%),
"death of a loved one or other important person" (22%), and illness or injury (21%). The number of life
events the subjects the reported decreased with age from early adulthood to old age and increased with the
number of years of schooling. Single, separated, and divorced people reported larger numbers of events
than did married and widowed individuals.
Strengths and Weaknesses of the SRRS
If we examine the list of life events included in the SRRS, we can see that many of the events are ones we
have already discussed as stressors, such as the death of a spouse, divorce, pregnancy, and occupational
problems. One of the strengths of the SRRS is that the items it includes represent a fairly wide range of
events that most people do, in fact, find stressful. Also, the values assigned to the events were carefully
determined from the ratings of a broad sample of adults.
These values provide an estimate of the relative impact of the events, distinguishing fairly well between such
stressors as death of a close family member" and "death of a close friend". Another strength of the SRRS is
that the survey form can be filled out easily and quickly.
One of the main uses of the SRRS has been to relate stress and illness. Many studies have found that
people's illness and accident rates tend to increase following increases in stress. But the correlation between
subjects' scores on the SRRS and illness is only about 0.30--which means that the relationship is not very
strong. One reason that the relationship is not stronger is that people get sick and have accidents for many
reasons other than stress. But another factor is that the SRRS has several weaknesses.
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Some researchers have criticized items in the SRRS as being vague or ambiguous. For example, "change in
responsibilities at work" fails to indicate how much change and whether it involves more or less
responsibility. As a result, someone whose responsibility has decreased a little gets the same score as
someone whose responsibility has increased sharply. Similarly, "personal injury or illness" does not indicate
the seriousness of the illness--someone who had the flu gets the same score as someone who became
paralyzed. Vague or ambiguous items reduce the precision of an instrument and the correlation it is likely to
have with other variables.
Another criticism is that the scale does not consider the meaning or impact of an event for the individual.
For example, two people who each had a mortgage for $50,000 would get the same score for "mortgage
over $l0, 000" even though one of them made ten times the income of the other. Similarly, the score people
get for "death of spouse" is the same regardless of their age, dependence on the spouse, and the length and
happiness of the marriage. These items do not take the person's subjective appraisal into account, and this
may also reduce the precision of the instrument.
One other problem with the SRRS is that it does not distinguish between desirable and undesirable events.
Most people view some events, such as "marriage" or "outstanding personal achievement." as desirable; but
"sex difficulties" and "jail term" are undesirable. Other items could be either desirable or undesirable, for
example, "change in financial state"; the score people get is the same regardless of whether their finances
improved or worsened. This is important because studies have found that undesirable life events are
correlated with illness, but desirable events are not.
Despite its weaknesses, the overall approach SRRS uses to measure stress is clearly useful, and following
this approach, researchers have constructed other life event scales in an effort to develop more precise
instruments.
Other Life Events Scales
Among the several life events scales that have attempted to improve on the method of the SRRS are the
following:
1. The life Experiences Survey (LES)
2. The PERI Life-Events Scale
3. The Life Events Record
Daily Hassles
Not all of the stress we experience comes from major life events. Lesser events can also be stressful, as
when we give a speech, misplace our keys during a busy day, or have our quiet disrupted by a loud party
next door. These are called daily hassles. Some people experience more daily hassles than others do.
Richard Lazarus and his associates developed a scale to measure people's experiences with day-to-day
unpleasant or potentially harmful events. This instrument-- called the Hassles Scale--lists 117 of these
events that range from minor annoyances, such as "silly practical mistakes," to major problems or
difficulties, such as "not enough money for food". Respondents indicate which hassles occurred in the past
month and rate each event as "somewhat severe," "moderately severe," or "extremely severe". These
researchers tested 100 middle- aged adults monthly over a 9-month period. The half- dozen most frequent
hassles reported were concerns about weight," "health of a family member," "rising prices of common
goods; "home maintenance," "too many things to do," and "misplacing or losing things."
Because the researchers felt that having desirable experiences may make hassles more bearable and reduce
their impact on health, they also developed the Uplifts Scale, which lists 135 events that bring peace,
satisfaction, or joy. The respondents who filled out the Hassles Scale completed this scale, too.
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Can Stress be good for you?
Is it possible that some types or amounts of stress are neutral or, perhaps, good for you? There is reason to
believe that this is the case. How much stress may be good for people? Some theories of motivation and
arousal propose that people function best, and feel best, at what are, for them, an optimal level of arousal.
People differ in the amount of arousal that is optimal, but too much or too little arousal impairs their
functioning.
Let's consider an example of how different levels of stress affect functioning. Imagine that you are in class
one day and your instructor passes around a surprise test. If the test would not be collected or count toward
your final grade, you might be under-aroused and answer the questions carelessly or not at all. But if it were
to count as 10% of your grade, you might be under enough stress to perform well. And if it counted a lot,
you might be overwhelmed by the stress and do poorly.
Finally, in discussing whether stress is harmful, one other point should be made: individuals seem to differ
in their susceptibility to the effects of stress. John Mason (1975) has proposed that these differences are like
those that people show to the effects of viruses and bacteria. That is, not all people who are exposed to a
disease-causing antigen, such as a flu virus, develop the illness--some individuals are more susceptible than
others.
Susceptibility to the effects of antigens and to stress varies from one person to the next and within the same
individual across time. These differences result from biological variations within and between individuals,
and from psychosocial variations, as we will see in our coming lectures.
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Table of Contents:
  1. INTRODUCTION TO HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY:Health and Wellness Defined
  2. INTRODUCTION TO HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY:Early Cultures, The Middle Ages
  3. INTRODUCTION TO HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY:Psychosomatic Medicine
  4. INTRODUCTION TO HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY:The Background to Biomedical Model
  5. INTRODUCTION TO HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY:THE LIFE-SPAN PERSPECTIVE
  6. HEALTH RELATED CAREERS:Nurses and Physician Assistants, Physical Therapists
  7. THE FUNCTION OF NERVOUS SYSTEM:Prologue, The Central Nervous System
  8. THE FUNCTION OF NERVOUS SYSTEM AND ENDOCRINE GLANDS:Other Glands
  9. DIGESTIVE AND RENAL SYSTEMS:THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM, Digesting Food
  10. THE RESPIRATORY SYSTEM:The Heart and Blood Vessels, Blood Pressure
  11. BLOOD COMPOSITION:Formed Elements, Plasma, THE IMMUNE SYSTEM
  12. SOLDIERS OF THE IMMUNE SYSTEM:Less-Than-Optimal Defenses
  13. THE PHENOMENON OF STRESS:Experiencing Stress in our Lives, Primary Appraisal
  14. FACTORS THAT LEAD TO STRESSFUL APPRAISALS:Dimensions of Stress
  15. PSYCHOSOCIAL ASPECTS OF STRESS:Cognition and Stress, Emotions and Stress
  16. SOURCES OF STRESS:Sources in the Family, An Addition to the Family
  17. MEASURING STRESS:Environmental Stress, Physiological Arousal
  18. PSYCHOSOCIAL FACTORS THAT CAN MODIFY THE IMPACT OF STRESS ON HEALTH
  19. HOW STRESS AFFECTS HEALTH:Stress, Behavior and Illness, Psychoneuroimmunology
  20. COPING WITH STRESS:Prologue, Functions of Coping, Distancing
  21. REDUCING THE POTENTIAL FOR STRESS:Enhancing Social Support
  22. STRESS MANAGEMENT:Medication, Behavioral and Cognitive Methods
  23. THE PHENOMENON OF PAIN ITS NATURE AND TYPES:Perceiving Pain
  24. THE PHYSIOLOGY OF PAIN PERCEPTION:Phantom Limb Pain, Learning and Pain
  25. ASSESSING PAIN:Self-Report Methods, Behavioral Assessment Approaches
  26. DEALING WITH PAIN:Acute Clinical Pain, Chronic Clinical Pain
  27. ADJUSTING TO CHRONIC ILLNESSES:Shock, Encounter, Retreat
  28. THE COPING PROCESS IN PATIENTS OF CHRONIC ILLNESS:Asthma
  29. IMPACT OF DIFFERENT CHRONIC CONDITIONS:Psychosocial Factors in Epilepsy