Heavy rain and storm surges have made 2014 pretty miserable for many of us (so far), and have been devastating for many of those affected by the widespread flooding in southern parts of the UK. What are the psychological impacts of flooding like this? The Health Protection Agency (HPA) published a document in 2012 […]
Read moreStress
A team of Californian researchers, led by Susan Charles, recently published a study linking daily hassles to depression ( Charles et al., 2013 ). A group of just over 700 participants were studied for eight consecutive days. On each day they reported daily hassles and also how negative they were feeling. Ten years later the same participants were re-assessed. […]
Read moreYou will have heard of the nature-nurture debate. In the last decade researchers have come to a deeper understanding of how the two interact. The field is called epigenetics and there is an interesting example of this in the link between stress and attachment. Research has shown that rats who have been raised by mothers […]
Read moreHere’s an interesting application of understanding stress. People who have spinal injuries usually lose control of their autonomic nervous system as well as their limbs, which means that their bodies do not respond to stress signals from the brain in the same way that normal people do – ‘normally’ an athlete, at the start of […]
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A recent study by Ramona Scotland (just published ) is described on a recent edition of Healthcheck (listen here ). The study did involve animals but points clearly to significant gender differences – females have stronger immune systems which means they become less ill and recover faster. There is a downside because women are also more susceptible […]
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Women in our culture generally have richer social networks than men, and this observation has been used as part of the explanation for women coping better with stress and living longer. Now a meta-analysis has shown that a low number of friends, family, colleagues etc. in a person’s social network has similar negative effects on […]
Read moreThere really are some beautiful charts and diagrams here …. truly ‘descriptive statistics’. I can’t really do any of it justice by cramming it into a tiny blog post, but it’s well worth having a look at this venn diagram about drugs, for example. Or this interactive representation of the link between stress and work.
Read moreA team at the University of London have just published a report of their study linking stress to atheroschlerosis (narrowing of the arteries), which is a major factor in heart attacks. Hamer et al. (2010) worked with 514 healthy men and women (mean age 62.9 years). The participants were given various tasks to increase their stress […]
Read moreDiathesis-stress is an example of nature AND nurture, as it can be interpreted as a gene or genes switched on by environmental factors. Recently it’s been suggested that being lonely and stressed could affect the expression of cancer-linked genes, triggering their action. The research has been done in the USA on rats, comparing those kept […]
Read moreResearch due to be published this autumn in the USA journal Cancer suggests that too much stress can impact on surviving cancer. This stu dy was a meta-analysis of 3.8 million people, cancer sufferers diagnosed between 1973 and 2004. Married people were found to have a 5 year survival rate of 63% compared to a 45% rate […]
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