Problems occur when long-term stress affects the immune system (Text B, Paragraph/Text A, paragraph 2. The A.N.S and the endocrine system try to find out why this happens and whether psychological factors contribute to the breakdown.
‘Autonomic’ means self-controlling, we control our bowel, bladder and eyes although we do learn to control our bladder it is hard to learn to control our blood pressure or our heart rate. A technique called Biofeedback has been taught to people suffering high blood pressure (Text A, Page 2). This involves patients having their blood pressure and muscle tension measured, and then practising meditation and muscle relaxation.
The A.N.S. contains two sections, the Sympathetic section and the Parasympathetic section, both of these have nerve ‘links’ to all the internal organs. When one of these systems is in control of the body, the other isn’t, both sections can’t control the body at the same time (Text B, page 2).
The Sympathetic section controls the body when it is active; it raises heart rate, dilates blood vessels, dilates the pupils and releases glucose. If during this time you do no eat properly cells can’t produce antibodies and because glucose has been released you may have a craving for something sugary.
When the stressor is dealt with the parasympathetic section is put into control to bring our body to normal levels and to store bodily resources.
The hypothalamus is activated by activity in the C.N.S. the pituitary gland is then activated and this close link means the pituitary gland can be immediately involved in the stress process (Text B, page 2, column 2).
The release of adrenocorticotrophic hormone by the anterior pituitary gland then activates the release of glucocorticoids from the adrenal cortex.
In the short term these affect blood pressure, metabolic rate and in the long term raised amounts of steroids during stress can suppress the immune system, leading to disease although it is difficult to show this cause and effect relationship in research.
The immune system consists of many different cells to repel infections and illness. B-cells can live up to two days, there is many B-cells producing their antibodies at the same time (Text B, page 3, column 3). Normally in the immune system millions of different types of cells are producing their antibodies, as cells die they are replaced. When cells aren’t replaces as fast as they die it is called immunosuppression. T-cells begin by ‘helping’ B-cells and eventually respond to infections.
Text A, page 1, paragraph 2 says ‘the suppression of the immune system may leave the person vulnerable to other illnesses and infections.
The high levels of impact on the immune system means that the cells in the body can’t function properly, the high level of white blood cells doesn’t necessarily mean a healthy immune system as these cells may not producing a response to infections (Text B, page 4, column 2).
In conclusion stress can be both physical and psychological, it also affects every one differently. It is also shown that the response to stressors is controlled by two systems , both of which affect the way the immune system functions.
From research there is no definite cause and effect relationship between stress and illness but the variables that may be used in the research can’t be generalised over the population e.g. the amount of Glucocorticoid in a persons blood sample will be different in each individual this may be due to inheritance and individual differences.
Both of the sources were written to inform readers and both were formal pieces. The language used was not colloquial, as people who had not studied psychology would not understand such technical terminology.
Text A didn’t prove to be very useful although it linked in with the section in Text B about Biofeedback.
Text B proved to be very useful as it had a strong focus on the immune system and what happened to it during the stress processes.
I think that neither of the articles were biased towards anything and they both made very good reading material.
Aim:
To try and find a correlation between stressful life events and illnesses.
Hypothesis:
A positive correlation will be found between the score of a participant’s stressful life events score and their illness score.
There will be no correlation between the score of a participant’s stressful life events score and their illness score.
Method:
To produce the questionnaire a discussion was held in small groups. In the discussion it was decided that questions should be closed to avoid there being many different answers, and then many stressful life events that affect teenagers were given a number of points. The discussion then went on to discuss illnesses, and then in the discussion many common illnesses were also given a number of points. These points went from low where stress and illness wasn’t serious to high where there was high amounts of stress and illness.
The questionnaire started by giving information of confidentiality, participants were told that we didn’t need to know their name, that their questionnaires would not be shown to anybody else and also that they could pull out of the experiment at any point they wanted.
Questionnaires were given out to people who happened to be in college at the time so the sample was from opportunity only, although this was a sample of both males and females so the research wasn’t andocentric although because everyone was from the same area and culture the research could be classed as ethnocentric.
After the participants had completed the questionnaires the number of stressful life event points were added up and also how many illness points each participant had this data is shown in a table below, from the data a graph was also produced.
Results:
Table of results:
Summary Table
Discussion:
Conclusion:
The results from this experiment were expected as the alternate hypothesis stated: ‘A positive correlation will be found between the score of a participants stressful life events score and their illness score’ and a positive correlation of +0.493 agreed with this.
When males and females were analysed separately it showed that females had a lower rate of stressful life event points and illness points this is true even though there was 20% more females that had replied to the questionnaire.
The results from this study agreed with the positive correlation that Rahe et al. found after doing the same type of correlation study another study that supports the findings is another Rahe study in which he found that there was an increase of illness in those who had a higher life events score.
A result that supported Kobassas study was that there was male who had a high amount of stressful life event points but a low illness score this maybe because the person is hardy and because everyone is different it may just be because genetics made the person hardier than others.
Evaluation:
The first weakness of this study is that it was all conducted in one area thus making the research endocentric. Also the study didn’t take into account the daily hassles that people may have and the events and illnesses that were rated were based on a group discussion and these events would affect each individual differently.
The investigation could be improved by: asking more people to complete the questionnaire and giving the questionnaire to equal amounts of males and females. Also by using a random sample instead of an opportunity sample as a random sample would avoid most bias.
The fact that cause and effect cannot be inferred is also a weakness, as it is not proved that a stressful life event causes illness.
