Stress Portrait Of A Killer Essay

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In my first class for Psych 203, we watched a documentary video called “Stress, Portrait of a Killer”. It was an interesting video about Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist who has spent over 30 years studying stress and how it affects people. He has been studying wild baboons in East Africa and how stress affects them. Baboons have large brains and are closely related to humans. They also have a lot of free time to stress each other out so Sapolsky decided to study these animals in order to get a better understanding on how stress affects humans. He discovered that baboon hierarchy and stress is linked. He took blood samples, measuring the stress hormone levels and found that a high ranking baboon has less stress than a submissive animal. The low ranking animals had high blood pressure, a weakened immune system and overall lower health. In the 1960’s, a professor named Michael Mormot lead a study in England named the…show more content…
A rat’s brain memory was shrunk when exposed to this chronic stress. This goes for human brains as well. The human body takes a toll when exposed to excessive stress. Dr. Carol Shively found that stress produces fat hormones that lead to abdominal fat, or unhealthy fat. Another fascinating study was the Dutch Hunger Winter study. Women who were pregnant and stressed during this terrible time in Holland actually delivered babies that were more likely to suffer from mental illness later in life. Dr. Tessa Roseboom found that many of these Dutch people, who are in their 60’s now, still suffer from the effects of stress hormones found in the blood of their pregnant mothers. It’s crazy to think that such early exposure to stress can have such effects and mental scars that last for a lifetime. Dr. Elissa Epel found that stressed mothers taking care of children with special needs on average have a shortened their life by 6 years. That is pretty scary

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