Essay
Health psychology: stressors
Learning outcomes: Describe two stressors and discuss two physiological, psychological and social aspects of stress.
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Word count: 2, 823 wordsLearning outcomes:
Describe two stressors and discuss two physiological, psychological and social aspects of stress.
Stress is a negative emotional experience, accompanied by various physiological,
cognitive, and behavioral changes. The factors that are considered by psychologists are the
stressors themselves (which can be any stressful situation such as pain, exams, even noise), the
stress response (or how people often experience the stressor, whether it is a physiological or
psychological change such as increase in hormones), and stress experience (this is how the
situation is dealt with and what can be done to help). Sapolsky (1998) found that the stressful
event must be perceived as stressful by the person experiencing it in order to activate the stress
response, also when people imagine stressors, they feel the same psychological and
physiological stress as they would from external environmental factors. Acute stressors are a
sudden stressful event that has occurred recently, such as being involved in an accident, death of
a loved one, etc. Chronic stressors are stress events that have occurred over time and the stress
builds up, such as poverty, unemployment, being bullied, etc. Work stressors are the stress that
is associated with the workplace such as no recognition, harassment, poor leadership, etc.
Holmes and Rah (1967) found, based on observations that major life changing stressors
can lead to illness. The event could be positive or negative in order to affect a person and just
needs to be considered stressful. This is because there is a lot of change that the person has to
go through and they have to adapt to the new situation which, depending on the social
readjustment rating scale, can either take a longer or a shorter time.
Steptoe and Marmot (2003) carried out a survey to test social, psychological, and
physiological aspects of stress, or in one word, the “biopsychosocial” aspect of stress. The aim of
the study was to see the differences in the response of different seven social and cognitive
stressors to physiology. The researchers found that if a person scored a high ranking on one of
the stressors, it did not necessarily mean that they would score high on the others. The
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