Stress Dimensions and Their Effects on Health

Abstract

The concept of stress as a cause of ill health has received much attention in social sciences. In the present, biomedical research stress is conceptualized as a situation when the environmental demands are perceived as taxing or exceeding the resources available to the organism to deal with these challenging demands. Stress is multidimensional, including stressful events and cumulative life stress, individual vulnerability vs. resilience to stress, stress exposure vs. perceived stress severity, coping with stress etc. Social life introduces additional sources of stress, integrating socio-cultural and socio-economic factors into the complexly entwined biological, psychological and ecological determinants of health. Stress literature typically distinguishes between different kinds of stress that vary in terms of their ability to leave a mark on human health. While the existing theoretical models differ in the details of their causal arguments, they converge on (1) the destructive impact of childhood stress on physiological and emotional health in later life and (2) the importance of early years of life in formation of psychosocial resources of resilience to stress. Exploring various dimensions of stress opens new avenues for effectively measuring and understanding the impact of stress on physical and emotional health. 

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