Stress | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Stress is an engineering concept that is applied metaphorically in the life sciences and social sciences. The ethical implications of stress in the social sciences lie in its perceived significance for work and health in technologically advanced societies. Stress provides an exemplary case for the interactions of science, technology, and ethics.

Although the word stress existed long before it became a technical term—it originally meant hardships and afflictions, as in "the stress of weather"—the earliest modern meanings of the term belong to engineering. In the nineteenth century considerations of stress in a modern sense took shape in several fields: strength of materials, thermodynamics, and medicine. William Rankine (1820–1872), who did pioneering work in civil engineering and thermodynamics, defined stress as the forces a material exerts in response to external forces applied to it. Those engineering developments applied not only in theory but also in practice as the steam engine, railroads, and heavy industry transformed the everyday world. If the resultant stresses are not taken into consideration, buildings and bridges collapse.

At that time physicians turned their attention to engineering aspects of the human body. In the eyes of nineteenth-century physicians, "overstrain" and "overpressure" of the nervous system and the heart produced serious and even fatal diseases. In part, "overstrain of the heart" and "neurasthenia" expressed people's anxiety over the "strange disease of modern life" (Arnold 1853 [1965]) with its harried pace and engineered infrastructure.

In the twentieth century the experimental psychologist Walter B. Cannon (1871–1945) developed the concept of homeostasis to call attention to an organism's response to emergency situations: the fight or flight syndrome. In "The Stresses and Strains of Homeostasis" (1935) Cannon reviewed the forces that lessen the efficiency of homeostatic processes in an organism. The physiologist Hans Selye (1907–1982) studied other endocrine responses to external threats, leading to his concept of stress as "a specific syndrome which consists of all the nonspecifically-induced changes within a biologic system" (Selye 1976, p. 64). Laboratory studies represented the intersection of clinical work in psychosomatic medicine and psychiatry, especially the work of the migraine identifier Harold G. Wolff (1898–1962) and others. Two military psychiatrists, Roy Grinker (1900–1993) and John Spiegel (1911–1991), who treated U.S. Army Air Corps crews published their findings in Men under Stress (1945). Through such investigations stress emerged as a central category to describe the effects of modern warfare and then was extended to include all of modern life. The meaning of stress was complicated by the fact that Selye's definition referred to the response, whereas in the other cases it referred to the stimulating cause of psychosomatic distress.

In the 1970s the related notion of trauma, or excessive stress, became a key to legitimating posttraumatic stress disorder as a diagnosis for American veterans of the Vietnam War. Stress as a cause of war neuroses later was extended backward to include puzzling illnesses that appeared during the American Civil War (irritable heart and nostalgia), World War I (shell shock, traumatic neurosis, neurasthenia), and World War II (combat fatigue). Trauma and stress became emblematic of the violence, productive and destructive, of technologically advanced societies.

After the 1950s stress became a key term in cybernetics and the social sciences. In cybernetics and systems theory the concept of stress was applied to all levels of organization, from the cellular to the global, organism and machine. One result has been vagueness in the meaning of the term, especially in the social sciences: Stress can refer to objective features of life events measured by psychological instruments such as the Social Readjustment Rating Scale of Thomas H. Holmes (1918–1988) and Richard H. Rahe (b. 1936), subjective features as in Richard S. Lazarus's (1922–2002) notion of the cognitive appraisal of threat as vital in the stress-coping process, and an interaction between situational and dispositional factors.

Stress as a category has had the most significant impact in the areas of health and work. A stress-diathesis model of illness causation proposes that excessive demands (stress) on adaptive capacities interact with psychosocial and biological predispositions (the diathesis), resulting in the breakdown of the weakest link in an individual's biopsychosocial systems. Thus, one person develops asthma, another depression, and a third cardiovascular disease. Although oversimplified, this suggests the thrust of contemporary thinking about possible causal links between stress and disease. Insofar as considerations of stress affect health, they affect work, and stress management has become important in the regulation of behavior in technologically advanced societies.

The ethical implications of stress are twofold. First are the implications that arise from the experience of what is called stress. Stress plays a role in defining the limits of human performance: If demands are excessive, psychological or physical illness can result. Individual, corporate, and social responsibilities for minimizing stress and its effects have become significant. Excessive stress has become the basis for legal action. Although social inequalities are sources of stress, the emphasis in some societies, such as the United States, has been on individuals assuming increased personal responsibility for lifestyle choices that can result from and/or lead to stress and its deleterious effects.

Second are the implications that arise from the way that stress frames the trials and troubles of living. The construct of stress reframes the tribulations of living in rationalized or engineered terms: Stress is what individuals and organizations seek to manage. Ethical considerations thus appear in terms of efficiency and control. Management as the norm for dealing with stress reduces the ethical act to devising means to adjust to ends that may not be questioned.

Psychology;; Social Indicators.

Arnold, Matthew. (1853 [1965]). "The Scholar–Gipsy." In The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott. New York: Barnes & Noble.

Cannon, Walter B. (1935). "The Stresses and Strains of Homeostasis." American Journal of the Medical Sciences 189: 1–14.

Cooper, Cary L., and Philip Dewe. (2004). Stress: A Brief History. Oxford: Blackwell. This useful volume gives special attention to work-related stress and to Lazarus's concept of cognitive appraisal.

Grinker, Roy R., and John Spiegel. (1945). Men under Stress. Philadelphia: Blakiston. A study of American aviators in World War II and the psychosomatic illnesses many suffered as a result of the stress of war.

Kugelmann, Robert. (1992). Stress: The Nature and History of Engineered Grief. Westport, CT: Praeger. A phenomenological and historical study focusing on how it is that people describe life's difficulties as "stressful," and dealing with the ethical implications of stress management.

Selye, Hans. (1950). The Physiology and Pathology of Exposure to Stress. Montreal: Acta. Selye here summarized the physiological research on stress, the general adaptation syndrome, and diseases of adaptation.

Selye, Hans. (1976). The Stress of Life, revised edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. Selye's classic statement, written for a general audience. Includes what he saw as the ethical implications of his research.

Brown, Stephen D. (1997). "The Life of Stress: Seeing and Saying Dysphoria." Unpublished Ph.D. diss. Reading, UK: University of Reading. Available from http://devpsy.lboro.ac.uk/psygroup/sb/t hesis.htm. The history of stress through a poststructuralist approach, looking at theories, practices, and discourses of stress, including the self-help literature. Examines the role of technology and the ethics involved in stress.

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