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  • Essay / The relationship between physiology and stress behavior

    Is stress entirely mental? It is argued that stress is a response and begins in the mind as a weighing between our perceived demands and our perceived coping capacity and that when these do not match it triggers a psychological and physiological response. Symptoms of stress can affect your body, mind and behavior. In this essay, we will look at two research studies that examine the relationship between physiology and behavior under stress. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"?Get the original essayOne of the research methods was Freidman and Rosenman's investigation into the link between Type A behavior and disease cardiac. The conventional Type A person is ambitious, competitive, and time-conscious. Type B personalities have the same level of ambition, but do it in a non-competitive and casual way. Friedman and Rosenman conducted a study of 1,000 California men with Type A or Type B personality over a nine-year period to see if their personality affected their stress levels. They found that Type A behavior increases vulnerability to heart disease since 257 men who participated died of heart attacks, 70% of whom were Type A. Although their observations found a strong correlation between behavior type A and heart disease, this does not prove that type A causes cardiovascular disease. This claim has been disputed by critics for many reasons. First, Type A personality varies too much and it is difficult to determine whether a person has it. They also say their stress levels were more likely related to negative emotions such as frustration and anger. are not permanent characteristics of a person's personality and that other similar studies have failed to show a link between the two. The sample size and practicality of the experiment are good because they experimented on a large number of people and observation conditions, and demand characteristics were unlikely to change the results of the experiment. individual. The sample they used was not as good as it lacked generalizability as all participants were male, aged 39-59 and from California, this is only a small fraction of the population and does not represent the population as a whole. There is also little evidence to suggest that stress levels are different between men and women. Another research method that attempted to establish a relationship between stress and illness was the Social Rehabilitation Rating Scale by Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe. They reviewed the medical records of 5,000 patients and identified that they had experienced significant life events just before becoming ill. They then created a scale measuring the level of stress caused by 43 different life events by assessing the degree of social adaptation required. For example, the death of a spouse is rated at 100 because it would require a substantial readjustment from a minor law. violation which is rated at 12. They gave the SRRS to 2,500 US sailors to determine how many life events occurred to each of them in the last 6 months and recorded each's score. Over the next 6 months, they also recorded each participant's health status and found a positive correlation of +0.118 between SRRS score and disease scores, such that the frequency of..