Stress And Its Relationship To Health And Illness

This book discusses the relationship between stress and health status and traces the evolution of stress theory, emphasizing such areas as hormonal responses to stress and the cognitive and social factors that affect people's abilities to cope with stressful situations, including illness.

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To discuss the relationship between stress and health status, it is first necessary to define the term "stress." This is not a mundane issue, because the term "stress" is popularly used to refer to a wide range of physiological changes, psychological states, and environmental pressures in the health/illness literature. Stress was first described as a biological syndrome by Selye (1936, p. 32): Experiments on rats show that if the organism is severely damaged by acute non-specific nocuous agents such as exposure to cold, surgical injury, production of spinal shock ... a typical syndrome appears, the symptoms of which are independent of the nature of the damaging agent ... and represent rather a response to damage as such.