The Causes And Effects Of Stress

2260 Words10 Pages
Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION A.Background of the Study What is stress? Stress can be defined in such many ways in accordance on how it is use in different fields of science. As most people know, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are associated with a period of intense scientific and industrial progress. As the sciences developed so language adapted in order to both accommodate and articulate these changes. The physical sciences, most notably engineering, began to use terms like stress, strain, resilience, pressure, elasticity, etc, to describe the effects of materials. Nearly everyone will recognize these as expressions commonly used within medicine and psychology. Still others, like ‘snapping' or ‘breaking point', tend not to be used within the professions these days but they retain a position in everyday language relating to emotions or behavior. The adoption of the term stress as a psychological concept is frequently, if wrongly, attributed to Hans Selye in 1936. By 1956, Selye had added to the developing ideas about stress by putting forward a three stage process known as the general adaptation syndrome (GAS). Selye stated that in response to some external stressor we first react by mobilizing our physical resources to deal with or escape from the stressor. Selye called this the ‘alarm' stage. The second stage, called ‘resistance', involves ways of coping with the alarm stage by trying to reverse it. Thirdly, the stage of ‘exhaustion' occurs if an individual is repeatedly exposed to the stressor and is unable to escape. As historians of psychology would be quick to point out, Selye actively avoided using the term stress until 1946. He was acutely aware of the fact that stress was much more closely associated with notions of ‘nervous strain' and he was at pains to try to avoid criticism that his use was inappropriate. In terms of accuracy, it was Walter
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