Specifically, we will look at...
Stress and the immune system (Cohen & Williamson, 1991, from Cohen's lab page)
Stress/depression and cardiovascular disease (from here)
Stress/anxiety and pregnancy (from research by one of my faculty mentors when I was an undergraduate at UCLA, Christine Dunkel-Schetter)
During some earlier units, when we were talking about racism, I mentioned how there had been a lot of recent research on racism as a stressor, and its health consequences. Here's an article I found from the Boston Globe. It mentions both major pathways from stress to disease, physiological and behavioral. It also talks about how researchers have used the “controlled conditions of the laboratory.”
Finally, several general sources on stress, hormones, and disease progression are available from the Wikipedia, Society for Neuroscience, News Target, Medical News Today, and the Mayo Clinic.
5 comments:
Today's discussion in class about John Henry-ism, and the relationship between stress and health reminded me of this article published in psychology today sometime back -
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20060424-000002&page=1
Essentially, the relationship between stress (good and bad) seems to work both ways - "success brings happiness, improves immune system and better health." On the flip side, Duke researchers are suggesting that to "digest" that success, you also have to prime your body psychologically - to receive it, sort of think that you "deserve" that success. Unless one has the self esteem to match the incoming success, it can have negative consequences on the immune system and health.
To quote from the article - "Stress can prime the immune system, making us stronger. Too much optimism may be an immunological drain. And health improves when self-esteem and success stay in sync."
A most interesting article!
It's interesting how research progresses and new connections are made. I remember reading a bunch of articles in high school about the effects of chronic stress, and we can all deduce that racism causes stress. Who knew to connect the two together?? Racism --> chronic stress --> health problems. It's really cool.
Stress works in a "bell-shaped" manner. That is to say that both abnormally low and abnormally high levels of stress hormones are maladaptive. There is an optimal level of stress/stress response - everyone needs some. However, chronically high stress response doesn't improve your immune system. Instead, it lowers the immune response and is associated with poor physical AND mental health. Enceph's point about processing stress is a great one. Your interpretation of the stress you're experiencing can affect your stress response.
A good topic that I would have loved to discuss in the class would have been is the ever-growing technology from ipods, computers, cell-phones, etc. improving our interpersonal relationships with one another or are they causing more family stress? For example, for the new generation, do you find yourself ever using a land-line phone? Are families in the future not going to use household phones and instead replace that with each individual family member having a cell-phone?
In response to Chris's comment, a Marriage and Family Therapy Ph.D. student from Texas Tech, Branden Henline, conducted his final (dissertation) project on technology use and relationship quality. I was on the committee that advised him and questioned him at his dissertation defense. If you go to the following link, the first thing that will come up is a summary page of his dissertation, with a link at the bottom to a PDF of the full report.
http://etd.lib.ttu.edu/theses/available/etd-07232006-151132/
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