Chapter 1: Introduction

Contents:

Stress is being stopped by a policeman after running a red light.

Most of us have more firsthand experience with stress than we care to remember. Stress is being stopped by a policeman after running a red light. It is waiting to take a test when you are not sure that you have prepared well enough or studied the right material. It is missing a bus on a rainy day full of important appointments. (Taylor, 1999, p.168.)

It is virtually impossible to read extensively in any of the biological or social sciences without running into term stress. The concept is even more extensively discussed in the health care fields, and it is found as well in economics, political sciences, business, and education. At the popular level, we are flooded with messages about how stress can be prevented, managed, and even eliminated (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984, p.1).

No one can say for sure, why interest in stress has gained such widespread public attention. It is fashionable to attribute this to rapid social change, to growing anomie in an industrial society which we have lost some of our sense of identity and our traditional anchors and meaning, or to growing affluence which frees many people from concerns about survival and allows them to turn to a search for higher quality of life.

The issues, encompassed by the concept of stress, are certainly not new. The term stress antedates its systematic or scientific use. It was used as early as the 14^th century to mean hardship, straits adversity or affliction. In the late 17^th century Hooke used stress in the context of the physical sciences although this usage was not made systematic until the early 19^th century. The concepts of stress and strain survived and in the 19^th century medicines. Stress was conceived as a basis of ill health.

Although, scientific interest in stress had been developed in many sciences like sociology, anthropology, physiology psychology, medicine and endocrinology, there are two disciplines that had more interest than others in stress research. The first is biology and the second is psychology (Fleming et al., 1984). One of the earliest contributions to stress research in the 20^th Century was Walter Cannon’s (1932) description of the fight – or flight response. Cannon proposed that when the organism perceives a threat, the body is rapidly aroused and motivated via the sympathetic nervous system and the endocrine system. This concerted physiological response mobilizes the organism to attack the threat or the flee; hence, it is called the fight or flight response.

The fight or flight response is adaptive

Cannon reasoned, on one hand, the fight or flight response is adaptive because it enables the organism to respond quickly to threat. On the other hand, he concluded, stress can be harmful to the organism because it disrupts emotional and physiological functioning and can cause medical problems over time. In particular, when an organism is unable to either fight or flee and is exposed to prolonged stress, the state of psychological arousal may continue unabated, laying the groundwork for health problems. (Taylor, 1999, p. 169).

Important early contribution

Another important early contribution to the field of stress is Hans Selye’s work on the general adaptation syndrome. Although Selye initially explored the effects of sex hormones on physiological functioning, he became interested in the stressful impact his interventions seemed to have. Accordingly, he exposed rats to a variety of prolonged stressors – such as extreme cold and fatigue – and observed their physiological responses to his surprise, all stressors, regardless of type, produced essentially the same pattern of all led to an enlarged adrenal cortex, shrinking of the thymus and lymph glands and ulceration of the stomach and duodenum, Thus we can say that Selye’s work more closely explored adrenocortical responses to stress (Alloy et al., 1996, p.208; Oltmanns & Emery 1998, p. 288; Taylor, 1999, p.169).

The general adaptation syndrome consists of three phases

The general adaptation syndrome consists of three phases. In the first phase, alarm, the organism becomes mobilized to meet the threat. In the second stage, resistance, the organism makes efforts to cope with the threat, as through confrontation. The third stage, exhaustion, occurs if the organism fails to overcome the threat and depletes its physiological resources in the process of trying (Taylor, 1999, p.170).

On the strictly individual psychological side, stress was, for, a long time, implicit as an organizing framework for thinking about psychopathology, especially in the theorizing of Freud and later psychodynamically oriented writers. However, anxiety was used rather than stress. The word stress did not appear in the index of psychological abstracts until 1949. World War II had a mobilizing effect on stress theory and research. Indeed one of the earliest psychological applications of the term stress is found in a landmark book about the war by Grinker and Spiegel (1945) entitled “Men under stress”. (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984, p. 5).

 Richard Lazarus (1966) has been an important figure in the study of psychological stress and has elaborated it in several ways. (Davison and Neale, 1994, p. 191). The importance of Lazarus’s work arises from his concern by the process of coping, that others called stress management.

Since the 1960s there has been growing recognition that while stress is an inevitable aspect of the human condition, it is coping that makes the big difference in adaptational outcome.

Measurement of stress

Holmes and Rahe must be remembered when we talk about the measurement of stress. They put a list of life events that constitute the famous instrument for measuring the stress, which is called, the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) (Ibid., p.192).

In Egypt, many researchers conducted more than one research in stress and stressful life events. They used to use some instruments like SRRS by Holmes and Rahe and the life event that used by Hammen and other tools. Now there are some trials to design local questionnaires that consider cultural differences.  We can say that there are a large literature about stress and stressful life events in its relation with many other variables. Many of Egyptian researches are treating stress as it is equal to pressures or psychological pressure (See: Yousef, 2000, a,b,c).

We can say after all that stress was the subject of research in many fields in the past and still in the present and will be in the future for sure.