Introduction          Introduction         Introduction          Introduction         

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.

 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.