Chapter 7
Stress Biomarkers as an Objective
Window on Experience
Daniel E. Brown
Introduction
General stress can be viewed as having several components: stimuli/situations that
act as stressors, the cognitive appraisal process that identifies a situation as being a
stressor, the physiological stress response, and the conscious experience of the
situation and/or the response as being stressful (Ursin and Eriksen 2004 ). Stress
exists in many forms: acute versus chronic,“good”versus“bad”(or eustress versus
distress), general versus specific, etc. Most studies of stress have focused on the
detrimental effects of chronic stress. The notion of allostatic load, or allostatic
overload, has been introduced to signify the accumulation of chronic stress that
leads to potential health problems for the individual (McEwen 1998 ). In this
chapter, the focus will be on the experience of stress as opposed to its cumulative
effects. Specifically, the biological markers of the stress response provide a window
for understanding how others experience the travails of daily life.
We have all experienced stress. In fact, thefirst experience in life for all people,
childbirth, is highly stressful (Levina 1980 ; Costa et al. 1988 ). Just what is the
experience of stress? How much of stress is innate versus learned; that is, do we
have to learn what is a stressful experience, or do we all know it when we see it? Do
all people have the same experience when they are in a condition that they deem as
stressful?
Many believe they know what“stress”is, although many of these understand-
ings differ from person to person. Since the word“stress”is in common usage, it
has taken on multiple meanings, from ideas about mental tension to concepts of
physical forces or pressures. Most believe that general stress—particularly the form
further defined as psychosocial stress—is an important factor for health and quality
of life, with modern environments seen as creating far too high levels of stress. Full
D.E. Brown (&)
Department of Anthropology, University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hilo, HI, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
L.L. Sievert and D.E. Brown (eds.),Biological Measures of Human
Experience across the Lifespan: Making Visible the Invisible,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44103-0_7
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