Assessing Stress – Clinical and Research Applications
Assessing Stress
Clinical and Research Applications
Paula Williams & Daniel Bride, PSY 3330
Review: Stress Componenent Processes
Remember from Module 1 that it can be useful to define stress as a four-component process:
exposure,
reactivity,
recovery, and
restoration.
In this illustration, the blue "stressor" arrows obviously represent stress exposure, but as we’ll learn later on, worry can also function as stress exposure—our brains are so advanced we can stress ourselves out just by thinking of something stressful!
This figure shows that the components of stress are distinct but are linked to one another. The distinctness and connectedness of stress components can help us come up with strategies for how to measure (assess) stress usefully in a person.
There’s a lot going on here, so let’s start by identifying the four components of stress we’re familiar with: exposure, reactivity, recovery, restoration.
We learned in Module 3 that stress can influence physical and mental health in lots of important ways (hence the arrows to the top box).
In Personality and Stress, you’ll learn how individual differences in personality can influence stress at any point in the stress process.
"Endophenotypes" = stable clusters of characteristics with a clear genetic connection. Physiology and brain circuitry (e.g.) aren't the same as personality, but they help to shape personality. These important factors can be affected by certain stress exposures or disrupted restoration.
Endophenotypes are also altered significantly by developmental factors – things that might happen to you in childhood.
Because all of these things can affect how you, as an individual, experience stress, we need to have a meaningful way to measure these things. That’s the purpose of stress assessment.
Central Ideas:
- What is assessment & why do we do it?
- Personality Assessment – Individual differences in stress regulation (reading this week)
- Assessment of stress components
- Stress exposure
- Stress reactivity – emotions, cognitions, physiology
- Pre-sleep arousal (recovery)
- Sleep (restoration)
- Daily evening and morning assessments
What is assessment & why do we do it?
A good assessment helps us know what’s going on with something so that we know if changes are needed and, if they are, how we can best make those changes.
Assessment is important for stress management because stress involves many components interacting in complex ways.
Without proper tools to assess different components of stress, we can only guess about how to improve stress management.
Thankfully, psychologists have developed valid, reliable ways of measuring stress components so you can understand your unique stress profile.
Methods of assessment: Clinical / Self-Management
Interview
Most often used in treatment settings
Questionnaires/checklists
The questionnaires and checklists you will be using are scientifically validated. That means researchers have used them to assess large groups of people and have observed how people’s results relate to different parts of the stress process.
Psychophysiology
We can’t measure your heartrate through your keyboard (yet!), but if we could measure your physiology we could learn about how your body reacts to stress, how quickly you recover from a stress reaction, and how “keyed up” you are when there’s nothing to react to.
Self-monitoring / Daily Diaries
Self-monitoring means keeping track of something in a systematic way over the course of a few days, weeks, or longer. It can be very useful in two ways. At the end of the monitoring period, you have a record of whatever you’ve been tracking, so you can see patterns in your behavior and environment. But also, when you take time out of your day to track a behavior, you pay more attention to that behavior and are more likely to make positive changes.
Actigraphy (sleep movement) & polysomnography (sleep architecture[stages])
Actigraphy and polysomnography both require specialized equipment. They can provide some very useful insight about your sleep patterns (a central part of stress restoration). We’ll rely on your own report of a few sleep-related items, but we'll make it straightforward to track your sleep over time.