Psychological Stress and Disease
- Sheldon Cohen, PhD;
- Denise Janicki-Deverts, PhD;
- Gregory E. Miller, PhD
- Author Affiliations: Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Drs Cohen and Janicki-Deverts); and Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (Dr Miller).
- Corresponding Author: Sheldon Cohen, PhD, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (scohen{at}cmu.edu).
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
- KEYWORDS:
- AIDS
- CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASES
- DEPRESSIVE DISORDER
- HIV INFECTIONS
- NEOPLASMS
- RISK FACTORS
- STRESS, PSYCHOLOGICAL
Despite widespread public belief that psychological stress leads to disease, the biomedical community remains skeptical of this conclusion. In this Commentary, we discuss the plausibility of the belief that stress contributes to a variety of disease processes and summarize the role of stress in 4 major diseases: clinical depression, cardiovascular disease (CVD), human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/AIDS, and cancer.
What Is Psychological Stress?
Psychological stress occurs when an individual perceives that environmental demands tax or exceed his or her adaptive capacity.1 Operationally, studies of psychological stress focus either on the occurrence of environmental events that are consensually judged as taxing one's ability to cope or on individual responses to events that are indicative of this overload, such as perceived stress and event-elicited negative affect. In this article, the definition of stress excludes psychiatric disorders that may arise as downstream consequences of stressful exposures and also excludes dispositions often linked to stress, such as hostility …
