• Join over 1.2 million students every month
  • Accelerate your learning by 29%
  • Unlimited access from just £6.99 per month

To what extent does research support the link between stress & illness

Extracts from this document...

Introduction

To what extent does research support a link between stress & illness? (12 marks). There is proven to be correlation between stress & illness, however its questionable how far stress causes illness or whether illness can cause stress. It is thought that the cardiovascular system refers to the heart & the circulatory system (blood). Stress can cause problems within this system; Hypertension (high blood pressure), Coronary heart disease which is causes by atherosclerosis, & Stroke. Supporting a link between stress & illness, Kiecolt-Glaser et al (1995), studied the slowing of wound healing in relation to psychological stress (especially how stress damages the immune system). He took 26 participants (recruited from a newspaper advertisement) in a field experiment, all were given a small cut into their arms, & participants were given a 10-item perceived stress scale & asked to state how stressed they felt. ...read more.

Middle

The time take for the wound to heal was significantly longer for carers (48.7 days) compared to the control group (39.3 days) & also were significantly a larger average size. Another researcher who found a supportive link between stress & illness was Russek (1962), who aimed to find a link between work-related stress & heart disease. He tested Medical professionals & labelled them as high-stress or low-stress according to their role. GPs (high-stress) had the greatest rate of heart disease (11.9%) & dermatologists (low-stress) had the least heart disease (3.2%). This showed that there is a link between heart disease & stress within a job. However the dermatologists may have a higher stress job than predicted & also professional lives may not be the only cause of stress e.g. ...read more.

Conclusion

Williams (2000) investigated the link between anger & heart disease. He asked 13,000 participants without a heart condition to fill out a questionnaire to measure their anger. Six years later 256 of participants had had a heart attack. Participants with the highest anger rating made up 73% of this number, meaning that participants with high anger ratings were 2.7 times more likely to have a heart attack than those with a low anger rating. There is however a question of how reliable & accurate this questionnaire is, can it really tell the anger of a person? Also anger can't be rated as a general characteristic as people may have been feeling more angry when filling out the questionnaire than others, but are normally very un-angry. ?? ?? ?? ?? Charlotte Higgins ...read more.

The above preview is unformatted text

This student written piece of work is one of many that can be found in our AS and A Level Physiological Psychology section.

Found what you're looking for?

  • Start learning 29% faster today
  • 150,000+ documents available
  • Just £6.99 a month

or


Here's what a teacher thought of this essay

3 star(s)

The essay provides some relevant research and evaluation with more focus on evidence for stress and illness having a link. There is a need for a conclusion especially given the title of the question. - 'to what extent'? If stress is not the whole reason for illness then what else might there be contributing to it? Remember to proofread.

Marked by teacher Stephanie Porras 21/03/2013

Not the one? Search for your essay title...
  • Join over 1.2 million students every month
  • Accelerate your learning by 29%
  • Unlimited access from just £6.99 per month

See related essaysSee related essays

Related AS and A Level Physiological Psychology essays

  1. Marked by a teacher

    Discuss research into stress-related illness and the immune system

    5 star(s)

    There are various strengths and limitations of this research, and it is important to evaluate how these affect the studies and the conclusions that they have drawn about the relationship between stress and the immune system. Firstly, the findings have important implications on how the improper functioning of the immune system could affect our bodies.

  2. Marked by a teacher

    Peer Pressure Speech

    3 star(s)

    Teenage boys are at more risk of getting into trouble than girls, however the amount of 'girl gangs committing crimes is becoming more and more common. In 1957 girls accounted for only one crime in eleven. These days girls commit more than one in four of all juvenile crimes.

  1. Stress can be explained as the stimulus in the environment that triggers a stress ...

    This asked questions about their feelings of anger. * At the beginning of the study, all participants were healthy. Those with high score's on the anger questionnaire were much more likely to have had a heart attack when the sample was checked 6years ago.

  2. Psychology, Stress and the Immune system

    All the findings show that the researcher's experimental hypothesis was correct. Discussion: Strengths Weaknesses Modifications The Extraneous Variables were controlled. Individual Differences were not taken into account. These are such things as reaction time before caffeine intake. If the researcher was to conduct the ruler tests both before and after

  1. To What Extent can psychological research provide useful forms of stress management techniques?

    Such significant differences were found in all but two of the groups of rats that were investigated. As the rats were paralysed they could not be using any voluntary control and therefore control of involuntary muscles [in this case the heart] could be learned via operant conditioning.

  2. An outline of stress stating signs and symptoms as well as causes.

    In extreme cases reliance on alcohol to cope with stressful situations can lead to alcoholism, serious illnesses and eventually death, as such alcohol does not appear to be a good way to deal with stress. People can sometimes turn to drugs to release themselves from stress but the release from

  1. Describe & discuss how each psychological perspective explains smoking using empirical evidence to support ...

    Behaviourism also believes in scientific methodology (e.g. controlled experiments) and that only observable behaviour should be studied because it can be objectively measured. The behaviourist approach would site social factors as a cause of smoking behaviour, since most smokers take up the habit in their adolescence.

  2. Discuss the role of endogenous pacemakers and exogenous zeitgebers in the sleep/wake cycle, and ...

    This would make sense, because that is the time when a woman is most likely to conceive. It was once thought that the menstrual cycle was a completely internal process, controlled by the hypothalamus, the endogenous pacemaker of the menstrual cycle.

  • Over 160,000 pieces
    of student written work
  • Annotated by
    experienced teachers
  • Ideas and feedback to
    improve your own work