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Maybe we should ask a vietnam vet if he feels less stress in nature than inside a building.
I think the reason we feel tense inside is because we've been conditioned to expect stressful situations to happen while inside, so we're on guard for it (ie tense). Nothing bad has ever happened to us while sitting on a park bench listening to the birds chirp. Now,...
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Beta blockers (β1-Blockers) lower norepinephrine release (Berg, 2014), however it seems that the jury is still out on whether there is an effective and ethical way to prevent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Donovan (2010) states that there isn't enough strong evidence on its efficacy. Another point it makes (on page 11) is that...
Using any beta-...
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This is only one possible pathway. There are many potential ones. Further the fact that this is possible does not mean that it is the case always.
Stress activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. For example, a meta-analysis by Dickerson et al. (2004) demonstrated that an acute laboratory based stressor reliably increased cortisol levels, ...
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In this article, the authors note that natural sounds promote faster stress recovery than artificial sounds. One of the main reasons is because the natural sounds are more familiar than the artificial sounds. According to Eleanor Ratcliffe, natural sounds (such as bird song) may evoke memories of different seasons. This in turn, produces positive affect.
...
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Yup; basically, it works. Varvogli and Darviri (2011) review research on diaphragmatic breathing, reporting:
Deep breathing has been successfully used to decrease the fatigue associated with haemopoietic stem cell transplantation patients 55, to reduce the anxiety and asthma signs/symptoms of children with asthma 56, in the management of acute stressful ...
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A little stress is good, as it leads to greater psychological arousal, but lots of stress will decrease performance. This is known as the Yerkes–Dodson law, from the famous experiment by Yerkes and Dodson (1908) which related strength of motivational electric shocks to performance; performance increased up to a point and then plummeted.
One more comment ...
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There is a large and diverse literature on this topic which paints a complex picture of the relationship between trauma and empathy.
Some studies have found significant trauma symptoms to be related to less empathy. A study of Israeli children who had experienced the trauma of Arab missile attacks found that 66% of children with very negative attitudes ...
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One of the older theories suggested that a person literally runs out of brain-fuel when they hit the wall (Baumeister et al, 1998). They called this state "ego depletion" and it refers to the kind of mental burnout you are talking about. There is currently a lot of research activity on this topic because we (psychologists) assumed for over a decade that some ...
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The research literature on stress in general and burnout in particular would be relevant. The stress literature is massive and there are studies that have a particular focus on students.
For example Jacobs and Dodd did a study on college student burnout:
Measures of social support (Multidimen- sional Scale of Perceived
Social Support), personality (...
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There are many different uses for the word "stress" that should not be confused with one another. For example, Self-destructive behaviour may be used to cope with psychological stress. Other examples are stress response, and biological stress, both of which have very different meanings. An important driving force of natural selection - a key process in ...
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Decision-making or decision theory is its own subdiscipline under cognitive science (also often studied by statisticians, philosophers, economists, and faculty in business schools). Within this discipline, understanding how stress affects your behavior is very important and not understudied area. For a recent survey with a neurobiological focus, see:
...
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There is little evidence that stress affects structural MRI (reduction in the volume of the hippocampus). The review article (Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behaviour and cognition Lupien et al., 2009) synthesizes the current knowledge in the field. Another article might be of interest (MRI measurement of hippocampal volume in post-...
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When your goals is to measure one option over the other
As part of a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) study I also needed to measure cognitive load in order to assess whether a particular user interface could reduce perceived cognitive load (as compared to a control group). Because of practical reasons (and not to intrude too much in 'ordinary' computer ...
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I have not been able to find any term, medical or non-medical, which includes the word asynchronous, but to add to the answer by @user20460 there is the non-medical term hobbies.
Taking part in hobbies and other interests is recommended to anyone who suffers from anxiety and/or depression because not only can it provide a distraction, but it can also ...
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Typically, questionnaires where all items are on the same response scale are coded differently to composite variables where you have variables on different metrics (e.g., a set of ability tests).
Sums and means: For questionnaires like yours, you would commonly just take the mean or the sum of items that belong to a given subscale (note that you may need to ...
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So there's a lot of things to talk about here.
First off, there are many strategies one can use to regulate stress. James Gross, for example, has put forward an incredibly influential process model of the strategies we might use. His work and others have pointed to:
Distraction
Reappraisal (reinterpreting the situation)
Expressive suppression
Thought ...
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The interactions among several factors probably account for variability in reactivity to stressful events, including genetics, epigenetics, early life experience, and culture (e.g., Alexander et al., 2009; Boyce & Ellis, 2005; Francis, Frances, Liu, & Meaney, 2006; Gunthert et al., 2007; Meaney, 2001). And individual differences are observable at ...
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This is the paper you would want to read on this topic. The paper empirically compares four modes of managing interruptions. It is a great (and long) read so I'll try to summarize the bit for you:
There are thus four modes of managing interruptions:
Immediate interruptions. There is no management whatsoever. As soon there is a distracting stimulus/task, it ...
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Although it is not exactly stress, there are many self-rating scales for workload. The most popular one is the NASA-Task Load Index (NASA-TLX; Hart & Staveland, 1988; see also here). The NASA-TLX consists of six dimensions, which a.o. describe temporal demands, mental effort and frustration. Although there is some weighting procedure accompanied with it, ...
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I have found the following
Older people's cardiac responses as indicators of stress in familiar and unfamiliar environments (Lewis & Phillips, 2012)
I also found:
Padilla, A. M., Alvarez, M., & Lindholm, K. J. (1986). Generational status and personality factors as predictors of stress in students. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 8(3), 275-...
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With looking at the possibility of calmness during stress and trauma, you only have to look at the situation with rape victims and soldiers witnessing severe traumatic events who dissociate (Ellert, et al. 2011)(Waller, et al. 2001) during the event.
Dissociation is a psychological defence mechanism (Cardeña, 1994) which helps the person to get through the ...
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As with many mental health concerns, the situation for each individual is unique and therefore what we do and how we deal with the concern is also unique. Nothing said in this answer is a hard and fast rule, but are loose guidelines, for more information please check out these helpful links (thanks to @ChrisRogers):
ASIST Suicide Intervention, for Canadian
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The term eustress was coined by endocrinologist Hans Selye, consisting of the Greek prefix eu- meaning "good", and stress, literally meaning "good stress".
There is also the Yerkes–Dodson law which is an empirical relationship between arousal and performance dictating that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point.
...
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Anxiety and stress are very available states, and since you want to know how people currently feel (rather than some more implicit construct), you probably can't do much better than just asking them. A single-item anxiety measure as suggested by mlt should work.
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What is Anxiety?
Give this a read.
I like this explanation of anxiety best, however:
A feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.
What is Stress?
Give this a read also.
For an explanation of stress as it pertains to your question, I like this best:
A state of mental or emotional ...
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It really depends on the timing of the stressful event, as well as anticipation. From an evolutionary standpoint, "stress" developed for a reason in the context of heightened arousal, attention, preparation for action, etc. Say you encounter a lion in your backyard: Not only will your sympathetic nervous system be on full speed, but several cortices are also ...
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Personality is generally theorised to be a stable individual difference variable. Research has shown it to be highly stable over time. Thus, from a theoretical perspective it typically has a primacy in causal models.
Stress can be an ambiguous construct. It can refer to the objective existence of stressful stimuli or the way that individuals perceive ...
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