Effects of life stress on psychobiological responsivity and health behaviors

健康心理学越来越多地涉及三个基本问题：首先，谁会生病，为什么会生病？第二，与其他已知的影响疾病的因素相比，压力有多重要？第三，压力是如何导致健康的？什么机制或过程将压力体验与身体的生理变化联系起来？本研究就是用应激与健康的实验研究方法来探讨这些问题。我们根据压力问卷的分数从700名普通学生中筛选了30名男性大学生。在1.5年的随访期间，高压力组比低压力组报告了更多的疾病，如传染病。此外，在1.5年的随访期内，高压力学生在四次心理压力测试中的心理生物压力反应均显著提高。虽然对某些人来说，疾病的发作完全是由压力因素引起的结论是完全错误的，但这项研究清楚地证明了压力在导致健康状况不佳甚至身体疾病方面确实起着作用。

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.