Stress

Stress at work linked to heart disease

overworked manPeople who have highly demanding jobs and little freedom to make decisions are 23 per cent more likely to experience a heart attack compared with their counterparts without such work stress, according to a study of nearly 200 000 people from seven European countries.

Professor Mika Kivimäki from UCL Epidemiology & Public Health led the research which is published today in The Lancet.

The pooling of published and unpublished studies allowed us to investigate the association between coronary heart disease (CHD) and exposure to job strain – defined by high work demands and low decision control – with greater precision than has been previously possible,” explains Professor Kivimäki.

Our findings indicate that job strain is associated with a small, but consistent, increased risk of experiencing a first CHD event such as a heart attack.

Previous studies examining the impact of job strain on CHD have been inconsistent in their findings, limited in scope, and plagued by methodological shortcomings including publication bias and reverse causation bias.

In this collaborative meta-analysis, Professor Kivimäki and colleagues analysed job strain in employees without CHD who participated in 13 European national cohorts conducted in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK between 1985 and 2006. All participants completed questionnaires at the start of the studies to assess job demands, excessive workload, the level of time-pressure demands, and their freedom to make decisions.

People who have highly demanding jobs and little freedom to make decisions are 23 per cent more likely to experience a heart attack compared with their counterparts without such work stress, according to a study of nearly 200 000 people from seven European countries.

Professor Mika Kivimäki from UCL Epidemiology & Public Health led the research which is published today in The Lancet.

“The pooling of published and unpublished studies allowed us to investigate the association between coronary heart disease (CHD) and exposure to job strain – defined by high work demands and low decision control – with greater precision than has been previously possible,” explains Professor Kivimäki.

“Our findings indicate that job strain is associated with a small, but consistent, increased risk of experiencing a first CHD event such as a heart attack.”

Previous studies examining the impact of job strain on CHD have been inconsistent in their findings, limited in scope, and plagued by methodological shortcomings including publication bias and reverse causation bias.

In this collaborative meta-analysis, Professor Kivimäki and colleagues analysed job strain in employees without CHD who participated in 13 European national cohorts conducted in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK between 1985 and 2006. All participants completed questionnaires at the start of the studies to assess job demands, excessive workload, the level of time-pressure demands, and their freedom to make decisions.
UCL

Stressed Men Are More Social

Indecisions

Freiburg researchers refute the common belief that stress always causes aggressive behavior

 
A team of researchers led by the psychologists and neuroscientists Prof. Markus Heinrichs and Dr. Bernadette von Dawans at the University of Freiburg, Germany, examined in a study how men react in stressful situations – and have refuted a nearly 100-year-old doctrine with their results. According to this doctrine, humans and most animal species show the “fight-or-flight” response to stress. Only since the late 1990s have some scientists begun to argue that women show an alternate “tend-and-befriend” response to stress – in other words, a protective (“tend”) and friendship-offering (“befriend”) reaction. Men, in contrast, were still assumed to become aggressive under stress. Von Dawans refuted this assumption, saying: “Apparently men also show social approach behavior as a direct consequence of stress.”

With this study, the research team experimentally investigated male social behavior under stress for the first time. The results are published in the prestigious international journal Psychological Science. The economists Prof. Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Prof. Urs Fischbacher of the University of Konstanz, Germany, as well as the psychologist Prof. Clemens Kirschbaum from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, also participated in the study. Last year, Heinrichs and von Dawans already developed a standardized procedure for inducing stress in groups using a public speaking task. The researchers examined the implications of this stressor for social behavior using specially designed social interaction games.. These games allowed them to measure positive social behavior – for example, trust or sharing – and negative social behavior – for example, punishment.

In the study, subjects who were under stress showed significantly more positive social behavior than control subjects who were not in a stressful situation. Negative social behavior, on the other hand, was not affected by stress. For Markus Heinrichs, this has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the social significance of stress: “From previous studies in our laboratory, we already knew that positive social contact with a trusted individual before a stressful situation reduces the stress response. Apparently, this coping strategy is anchored so strongly that people can also change their stress responses during or immediately after the stress through positive social behavior.”

Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Original Publication:
von Dawans, B., Fischbacher, U., Kirschbaum, C., Fehr, E., & Heinrichs, M. (2012). The social dimension of stress reactivity: Acute stress increases prosocial behavior in humans. Psychological Science, in press.

Further Information:
www.psychologie.uni-freiburg.de/abteilungen/psychobio

Image: Flickr by Hckyso

Stress Changes How People Make Decisions

overworked manTrying to make a big decision while you’re also preparing for a scary presentation? You might want to hold off on that. Feeling stressed changes how people weigh risk and reward. A new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reviews how, under stress, people pay more attention to the upside of a possible outcome.

It’s a bit surprising that stress makes people focus on the way things could go right, says Mara Mather of the University of Southern California, who cowrote the new review paper with Nichole R. Lighthall. “This is sort of not what people would think right off the bat,” Mather says. “Stress is usually associated with negative experiences, so you’d think, maybe I’m going to be more focused on the negative outcomes.”

But researchers have found that when people are put under stress—by being told to hold their hand in ice water for a few minutes, for example, or give a speech—they start paying more attention to positive information and discounting negative information. “Stress seems to help people learn from positive feedback and impairs their learning from negative feedback,” Mather says. [continue reading…]

Stress in America

Stress in America headerSince 2006, theAmerican Psychological Association has commissioned an annual nationwide survey as part of its Mind/Body Health campaign to examine the state of stress across the country and understand its impact. The Stress in America™ survey measures attitudes and perceptions of stress among the general public and identifies leading sources of stress, common behaviors used to manage stress and the impact of stress on our lives. The results of the survey draw attention to the serious physical and emotional implications of stress and the inextricable link between the mind and body.

The 2011 Stress in America report was released today, January 11, 2012. link here to preview the report