Causes and Symptoms of Stress - Research Paper Example

Causes and Symptoms of Stress Stress is a commonly acknowledged fact of life. Everyone is susceptible to feeling it from the small child to the adolescent to the college student to the working parent to the elderly. This is not a profound statement, however, it has only been in recent years that the effects of stress have become widely acknowledged and the professional fields have taken a more proactive approach in helping people cope with stress. Major life changes are stressful for anyone and the effects may be different for different individuals based on their own coping skills, specific life circumstances and other factors. How people react to stress will depend a great deal on their own personal experiences and life conditions. Often, these experiences and conditions are the result of factors beyond their control, such as their age, race or gender. In addition, stress experienced will be different depending upon the factors causing it, whether they are economic/financial, regular life events or periods of great transition. In “Age and Gender as Determinants of Stress Exposure,” it was discovered that there are some significant differences between the way girls and boys experience stress. Researchers Takeuchi, Williams and Adair investigate “Economic Stress in the Family and Children’s Emotional and Behavioral Problems” to determine whether children’s behavior is adversely affected by the economic stress levels of the household and whether this effect is increased with persistent as opposed to one-time dependence on social services. Dual-income households have their own set of stressors to face, however, which are explored in Windle and Dumenci’s “Parental and Occupational Stress as Predictors of Depressive Symptoms among Dual-Income Couples” (1997). “Race Differences in Depressive Symptoms” (2003) discusses how the differences between stress-induced depression in older blacks and whites in Northern Carolina differed very little, with differences being contained primarily in the larger degree of variance and greater linear growth evident in black individuals. Earlier studies had already indicated no correlation between mental health and availability of support systems in helping these older adults deal with stresses caused by life events, but indicated a consistent steady rate of recovery for these individuals in studies such as “Transitory Impact of Life-Event Stress on Psychological Symptoms in Older Adults” (Norris & Murrell, 1987). Karen Rudolph and Constance Hammen (1999) concluded in their study on how experience and consequences of life stress varied depending upon age and gender differences that there are significant differences between the types of stress experienced between pre-adolescent and adolescent boys and girls. Of the 88 children who participated in their study, it was determined that while adolescent girls experienced the highest levels of interpersonal stress, adolescent boys experienced the highest levels of non-interpersonal stress. Preadolescent girls experienced the highest levels of independent stress and conflict in the family unit. In addition, it was determined that a great deal of this stress was generated by the children themselves. The study was designed to “examine bidirectional paths between children and stressful events in their environments. In particular, we examined whether a transactional perspective would shed additional light on observed age and gender differences in life stress” (Rudolph & Hammen, 1999, p. 660). The research also had a secondary goal of identifying “age and gender differences across multiple domains of stress” (Rudolph & Hammen, 1999, p. 660). Relevant areas of life stress research were discussed in the areas of stress exposure versus stress generation, the role of social context and stress reactions vulnerability to depressive outcomes. In discussing stress exposure versus stress generation, the authors stressed the importance of distinguishing between independent (or uncontrollable) and dependent (at least partially controlled) life events. Previous research is cited that suggests the role of social context places girls under more interpersonal stress and boys under more non-interpersonal stress, both as a result of dependent actions. Predictions that adolescent girls will be more susceptible to depression following stress are based upon further cited research, with discussion into the issues and problems in trying to predict age-related susceptibility. The study consisted of a semi-structured interview based on the Episodic Life Stress Interview. Strengths of this method were listed including how the “application of the contextual threat methodology allowed for more sophisticated assessment, coding and analysis of life stress and for a clearer determination of event dependence” (Rudolph & Hammen, 1999). Children were able to identify their own stressors rather than having them selected for them, allowing for a more developmentally sensitive assessment of age-related stressors and children and parents were involved in the interviews, enabling researchers to compare how parent and child perceptions differed. Weaknesses of the study were only obliquely addressed, including the difficulty in evaluating the relative degree to which children perceived stressors. Measures used to assess participants included the Children’s Depressive Inventory, the Revised Child Manifest Anxiety Scale and the Child Episodic Life Stress Interview. Detailed descriptions of how the information collected from these tests was coded, rated and analyzed is provided with results posted in mathematical formulas for total objective stress, total independent stress, total dependent stress and total conflict stress in interpersonal and noninterpersonal situations. These situations include interpersonal parent-child relationships, family and peer groups and non-interpersonal school and other environments. A large degree of the stressors experienced in the interpersonal relationships of particularly adolescent females is caused by their own actions and that a large degree of the non-interpersonal stressors experienced by adolescent boys is also caused by their own actions. The hypothesis for this is that adolescent girls place more importance on their peer relationships as they work to distance themselves from their families to attain a degree of independence. They experience more stress in these peer relationships as they work to avoid conflict and they experience more stress when conflict does arise, tending to internalize the blame. At the same time, boys tend to blame the peer with whom they quarreled for any conflict that arises but feels more stress regarding external issues such as grades and behavior. There remains little evidence regarding just how this condition affects the children. Studies indicate increases in child abuse, neglect and decreased living conditions, but do little to demonstrate how the family’s economic condition works to directly affect the mental state and stress levels of the child. The study developed its sampling by using data it collected from the National Survey of Children conducted in 1976. The target of the survey project was all children aged 7-11 who lived in households in the 48 contiguous United States. The sampling was pulled in an effort to yield approximately 2000 interviews, 500 of them with black children specifically. Interviews were completed with 2,279 children residing in 1,747 households, providing researchers with an 80 percent response rate. Another study was conducted in 1981 to compare the results. “Since the principle investigators were primarily interested in marital disruption, they constructed the follow-up sample to include a high proportion of children from high conflict families” (Takeuchi, Williams & Adair, 1991, p. 1034). The follow-up study collected interviews from 1,377 children in 1,047 families, represented 78 percent of the families identified. In addition to interviewing the children, the study also interviewed the primary caregiver of the children. The final sample size included 1,270 children. Assessment of these interviews resulted in families classified as either being in perceived financial stress or one of four classifications of families on welfare: those families who were persistently on welfare (had reported AFDC as their primary source of income during both interviews), those families who were on welfare during the second interview but not the first, those families who exited welfare between the first and the second interviews and those who had not been on welfare during either interview. In addition, three measures of parental assessment of children’s behavior were used based on the Child Behavior Checklist in terms of depressive symptoms and anti-social and impulsive behavior. Because of the limited range of the dependent variables, Tobit analyses are used to test the hypotheses. The first hypothesis was tested using two categories of economic stress and the second set compares the persistence of welfare status and perceived financial status with other stress categories. Results of the study showed that children from families that were persistently on welfare did display higher than average levels of depressive symptoms, anti-social and impulsive behavior. However, the only place in which significant differences between children in all the other groups and children in this group existed was in the arena of anti-social behavior with children in the other groups scoring significantly lower on the anti-social scale. “Children from families under persistent financial stress have significantly higher mean scores on anti-social behavior and depressive symptoms than children whose families were under no financial stress or who perceived financial difficulties only at Time 2” (Takeuchi, Williams & Adair, 1991, p. 1036). Though the study showed that the well-being of children who were persistently on welfare is worse than that of children who were former welfare recipients, they were shown to be no worse off than the children who were recently placed on welfare. This study was strong in terms of analyzing the differences between children from problem homes that had experienced financial difficulty at some point in their lives, but didn’t seem to add much in terms of how economic stress truly affected them. While it showed that children who were a part of the welfare system at both interview times had persistently more problems than children who had only been on it once, it didn’t take into account outside variables such as neighborhood areas and parental involvement. In addition, the study uses the term persistent to indicate families that were on welfare at both interview periods, but there is no distinction between those families that were on welfare consistently throughout the period and those families that just happened to be on welfare at both periods but that had experienced less financial strain in the intervening years. However, having two incomes isn’t necessarily the answer either, as discussed in Windle and Dumenci’s “Parental and Occupational Stress as Predictors of Depressive Symptoms among Dual-Income Couples” (1997). The study indicates that higher levels of parental and occupational stress are equally predictive of depressive symptoms for both halves of the couple. In addition to this, lower marital satisfaction, less family cohesion and lengthier marriages are predictive of depressive symptoms. The literature review for this study indicates a great deal of research was conducted regarding the effect of entering the working world on the stress levels of women. The reason for the focus on women is given as the world of men didn’t change all that much. The benefits of this shift were that women gained greater self-esteem and perceived worth. More recent research has focused on the differing social roles and how these related to mental functioning in both men and women. In assessing these studies, researchers indicate the necessity of considering additional factors such as marital satisfaction, family cohesion, number of children and family income into account when considering causes of stress and reasons for depression. In conducting the study, Windle and Dumenci worked to extend previous research conducted by Barnett that used a matched pair design with dual-earner heterosexual couples with children that focused on gender differences in the quality of the job role in relation to psychological distress. This study focused on covariates such as marital satisfaction and income level in a multi-level modeling approach that included data on parental role stress and occupational role stress. The researchers hypothesized that there would be a “statistically significant relationship between occupational role stress and depressive symptoms. Furthermore, we hypothesized that the magnitude or strength of this relation would not differ for husbands and wives with regard to their self-reporting of occupational stress and depressive symptoms” (Windle & Dumenci, 1997, p. 627). To determine depressive symptoms, researchers used the Center of Epidemiologic Studies – Depression Scale. They developed seven Likert-scaled items to determine the emotional toll of parental stress in ratings of frustration, worry, insecurity and another seven items to assess the daily toll of emotional stress in areas such as feeling tense, relaxed, worried or upset. Marital satisfaction was measure with the Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale and family cohesion was evaluated with the Family Cohesion subscale of the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales III. Results indicated that while husbands often had significantly higher levels of education, occupational stress and marital satisfaction than women, they had less family cohesion than their wives. At the same time, while husbands and wives didn’t differ all that much on mean levels of depressive symptoms, a larger percentage of wives met the criterion score for serious depression. Both men and women demonstrated higher levels of depression in conjunction with higher levels of parental stress and occupational stress and lower levels of marital satisfaction and family cohesion, but women who had been married longer had higher levels of depression. Results indicated that there are no significant gender differences between the types of stress affecting men and women and their associated levels of depressive states. This research seemed well designed for its purpose, being careful to include both halves of a couple confidentially in order to obtain truthful responses within matching demographics for both men and women. The methods used left room for doubt as to the secrecy or truthfulness of the couples involved, but the methodologies employed to evaluate the data submitted seemed sound and scientifically based. The study was very limited in its sample group, only reflecting the small demographic unit of white, middle-class and Christian perspectives from a small area of the country. In “Race Differences in Depressive Symptoms” (2003), researchers also investigated the effect of stress on the susceptibility to depression between white and black individuals. The study hypothesized that stress growth would increase in tandem with depressive symptom growth and that black people will experience greater stress growth than white people. According to the authors, “Stress growth exhibited a linear increase for blacks but not for whites, and predicted depression growth for both races, but explained more variance for blacks than for whites” (George & Lynch, 2003, p. 353). Meanwhile, other studies indicate additional stress factors need to be included in the general body of research. These other factors included operant stress, which is defined as the aggregate degree of the various stressors affecting an individual at any given point in time, and cumulative stress, somewhat self-identifiable as referring to the combination of current stresses and past stresses that are significant because they have become permanent causes of stress for the individual. The reason these factors are considered important is because they have been identified as being stronger predictors of depression and because they are “significant mediators of relationships between social statuses and depression” (George & Lynch, 2003, p. 355). The study was based on informational sample of black and white adults aged 65 and older who lived in a defined geographic area. Weaknesses indicated in using this type of approach were listed as including the fact that older adults report fewer life events than younger persons and certain types of events are more common among older adults, such as the illnesses and deaths of peers. Sample participants represented both urban and rural areas with approximately 55 percent of the sample being black. The original sample size was 4,162, but ended with only 1,972 participants still in the study. Of the missing 2,190, 1,310 died prior to the final interview and 752 attrited due to severe physical or cognitive disability, relocation or refusal to continue. The study itself consisted of a series of in-person interviews conducted in years 1, 4 and 7 of the study and telephone interviews conducted between these. Depressive symptoms were measured with the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. The latent growth curve analysis was used to determine whether levels of stress are related to depressive symptoms and whether growth patterns in stress are related to growth patterns in depressive symptoms. The results show a steady decline in male participants across each age group, which is to be expected given the gender differences in survival rates. Educational attainment among the blacks is perceptively lower across all age groups than that of whites, but younger ages show increasing levels of achievement, indicating a cultural shift. While declining health across age is evidenced among both blacks and whites, blacks evidenced greater impairment than whites at all ages. Overall, however, there was little difference reported between the stress-induced depressive states of whites over blacks. An earlier study conducted by Fran Norris and Stanley Murrell (1987) looked into how increases in stress at older ages influenced or impacted levels of symptoms. The study found that social support and education had very little influence over the reaction to or recovery from stress and symptoms remained fairly stable throughout the one-year period of the study. “Overall, the results depict older adults as quite consistent and resilient” (Norris & Murrell, 1987, p. 197). The questions for the study included whether older adults, regardless of resources, demonstrated an increase in their psychological symptoms following periods of highly undesirable life events; how lasting the effect of life-events stress are on the psychological symptoms of older adults and whether the availability of resources influence the extent to which older adults are capable of recovering from the symptoms of the stress reaction. Life events are acknowledged to be equally capable of being a result of a psychological state as they are of being its cause. The sample consisted of adults aged 55 years and older who reflected the various different geographic regions and degrees of urban living prevalent in Kentucky. The study was conducted in waves, with 2,931 persons interviewed in the original survey. During the following two years, the researchers attempted to re-interview these respondents four more times for a total of five interviews. The study required three consecutive interviews completed for inclusion in the final data set. Of the original respondents, only 1,937 completed the necessary three consecutive interviews and 1,429 furnished complete data on all measure of the study. The high rate of attrition is discussed, but is not considered to have seriously undermined the validity of the study. “We found that life events were unrelated either to the amount of subsequent attrition or to the reasons for subsequent attrition. Subjects who had reported high stress in their last interview were no more likely to have dropped out because of death, physical disability, or psychological problems than were subjects who had reported low stress in their last interview” (Norris & Murrell, 1987, p. 200). The results of the interviews were analyzed with the Linear Structural Relations Program, Version VI (LISREL-VI), which was developed by Joreskog and Sorbom. This method of analysis was considered appropriate because it consists of two parts, the measurement model, which “specifies the relationships of the observed measures to the underlying constructs or latent variables”, and the structural equation model, which “specifies the causal relationships among the latent variables” (Norris & Murrell, 1987, p. 200). When an event had occurred, researchers asked an additional five questions that allowed these events to be scaled on different stressful dimensions like desirability or readjustment and were based on stressors that were considered undesirable. Finally, the hypotheses of the study were tested within the structural equation model in order to find the best overall model within which to test the significance of the target parameters. The results supported the initial hypothesis that everyone experiences life stressors and reaction to them is normal and normative regardless of support structures or strength of resources. The answer to the second question of the research, whether there were any long-term effects of stress on symptoms, it was determined that when high stress occurred, symptoms did indeed increase at first, but then decreased, representing a recovery from the stress reaction. “In short, apart from the experience of subsequent stress, there was no evidence that the stress of a given interval had either persistent or lagged effects at points six months and one year after the events occurred” (Norris & Murrell, 1987, p. 205). Finally, the study did not find any significant differences between an individual’s ability to recover from stressful situations and the level of his or her social support and educational level. Despite the living situation, the age group, the economic condition or the ethnicity of the group involved, it seems that stress can have a tremendous impact upon the way in which an individual reacts to the world. A great deal of stress has been proven to have significant detrimental effects on a person’s health, not the least of which is a greater incidence of depressive symptoms, sometimes severe. While people do tend to recover from stress easier in their later years, long-term stress of any kind in the home can also have negative effects on the children in terms of their behavior and social abilities. However, it is nearly impossible for any of these studies to completely take into account all of the factors and issues raised by the introduction of stress into the lives of their subjects as the reactions and responses to stress differ from one individual to another depending upon the type of stress involved and the experiences and background of the person dealing with it. Although stress can affect anyone at any age for a variety of reasons, there are several ways it can be alleviated. Social services, connections and support groups can provide outside assistance to alleviate stress on an individual, but the individual can also go a long way toward helping him- or herself. Basic concepts such as reducing the activities in one’s schedule, delegating responsibility or simply taking care of basic health can contribute much toward the immediate alleviation of stress. There are many methods for people to reduce the amount of stress they are experiencing. One means is by finding a support group. This can be anything from as formal as counseling to as informal as a day out with friends. There are methods of self-help people can utilize such as investing in and using a planner to help make large tasks or overwhelming schedules seem somehow less daunting. Saying no once in a while to taking on more work than can be reasonably accomplished by a single person in a day is an important skill to learn, particularly for women (Brantley, 2007), while delegating responsibilities within the family unit can also go a long way toward relieving stress. Time must be allocated to free oneself from the pressures of work and family life. “To avoid stress … you must schedule free time for yourself. This means that there must be a time of the day where you can just kick back and watch TV or listen to music. If you spend all of your time working, you will quickly become stressed and irritable” (Brantley, 2007). Taking care of one’s health by eating right, getting enough rest and exercising can also be very effective means of reducing stress. Endorphins activated during exercise act as natural anti-depressants while the physical activity of moving and stretching muscles work out the tension caused by stress. References Brantley, Amy. “Tips to Help You Avoid Stress in College.” Associated Content. (2007). Available May 30, 2011 from George, Linda K. & Lynch, Scott M. (September 2003). “Race Differences in Depressive Symptoms: A Dynamic Perspective on Stress Exposure and Vulnerability.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Vol. 44, N. 3, Special Issue: Race, Ethnicity, and Mental Health, pp. 353-369. Available May 30, 2011 from Norris, Fran H. & Murrell, Stanley A. (June 1987). “Transitory Impact of Life-Event Stress on Psychological Symptoms in Older Adults.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Vol. 28, N. 2, pp. 197-211. Available May 30, 2011 from Rudolph, Karen D. & Hammen, Constance. (May/June 1999). “Age and Gender as Determinants of Stress Exposure, Generation and Reactions in Youngsters: A Transactional Perspective.” Child Development. Vol. 70, N. 3, pp. 660-667. Available May 30, 2011 from Takeuchi, David T.; Williams, David R. & Adair, Russell K. (November 1991). “Economic Stress in the Family and Children’s Emotional and Behavioral Problems.” Journal of Marriage and the Family. Vol. 53, N. 4, pp. 1031-41. Available May 30, 2011 from Windle, Michael & Dumenci, Levent. (August, 1997). “Parental and Occupational Stress as Predictors of Depressive Symptoms among Dual-Income Couples: A Multi-Level Modeling Approach.” Journal of Marriage and the Family. Vol. 59, N. 3, pp. 625-634. Available May 30, 2011 from Read More