MEASURING STRESS:Environmental Stress, Physiological Arousal

<< SOURCES OF STRESS:Sources in the Family, An Addition to the Family

PSYCHOSOCIAL FACTORS THAT CAN MODIFY THE IMPACT OF STRESS ON HEALTH >>

Health Psychology PSY408

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.

Health Psychology PSY408

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.

Health Psychology PSY408

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.

Health Psychology PSY408

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.

Health Psychology PSY408

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.

Table of Contents: