Effects of life stress on psychobiological responsivity and health behaviors

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Health psychology has increasingly embraced three essential questions : First, who becomes sick and why? Second, how important is stress, in comparison with other factros that are known to affect illness? Third, how does stress lead to Nl-health? What are the mechanisms or processes linking the experience of stress with physical changes in the body. This study is to investigate these questions by the method of experimental-field study of stress and health.We followed 30 universitudents men wo had been screened from the general population of 700 students according to the scores of stress questionnaire. Subjects classfied as high stress group reported more instances of illness such as infectious disease during follow-up period of 1.5 years than subjects classfied as low stress group did. In addition to this, high stress students significantly greater psychobiological stress responsivity at each of four mental stress testing over 1.5 years follow-up period.Although it would be quite wrong to conclude that for certain individuals, the onset of illness is caused purely by stress factors, this study clearly demonstrated the evidence that there is real role of stress in leading to poor health and even physical illness.