Stressed Out: The Science and Nature of Human Stress
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2024
Pages: 260
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$84.00 USD
This text emerged from a course that Dr. White developed in 2003, designed to offer new perspectives about stress and strategies to better manage stress with students at the University of New Hampshire. Over the years, the popular course has incorporated new information uncovered through research as well as added a wider variety of ways to better understand personal stress vulnerabilities and strengths. This text brings to a wider audience what many students have reported as significantly changing their perspectives on stress and developing a personal stress profile built for resilience and antifragility. The text also blends both authors’ areas of expertise and interests. We hope that both instructors and students alike find something meaningful and constructive within this text!
Chapter 1: What exactly is stress? The nature of stress, evolution of the stress response.
Chapter 2: How do we measure stress?
Chapter 3: Anatomy and physiology of the stress response.
Chapter 4: Stress influences on prenatal development through adulthood.
Chapter 5: How culture and social experiences influence stress.
Chapter 6: Personality and emotions.
Chapter 7: Basic components of the immune system
Chapter 8: How does stress contribute to pain, aging, disease, and health risk factors?
Chapter 9: What does stress cost our health care system?
Chapter 10: Stress interventions and methods for developing personal stress management toolkits.
Chapter 11: What will my own personal stress-balanced life look like?
Dr. White is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). She began her career as a pediatric occupational therapist, and after several years of practice and the birth of three children, she entered a graduate program in developmental/educational psychology at the University of Minnesota. Her intention was to better understand the transactional nature of how relationships and environments either supported or impaired the development of children and youth. Her studies under the mentorship of Dr. Megan Gunnar (UofMN, Institute of Child Development) in stress neurobiology forged new perspectives that embraced both conceptual and scientific underpinnings of development with practical interventions from her previous therapy experiences. It is on the basis of these new perspectives that the original Stressed Out: Science and Nature of Human Stress course and subsequently, this text was built. During his graduate studies in stress neurobiology at UNH, Dr. Nathaniel (Nate) Stafford assisted with several course lectures and lab instruction for the course. His interest and enthusiasm to carry forward the information and messages to students in his own academic and teaching career, as well as add additional neuroscience expertise to the course, made him a perfect partner for this project.
Dr. Stafford is a behavioral neuroscientist specializing in the neurobiology of stress. He received his PhD under the direction of Dr. Robert Drugan from the University of New Hampshire (UNH). His research examines novel behavioral and brain measures to predict vulnerability or resilience to stress exposure. Dr. Stafford is particularly interested in the concept of innate resilience, understanding the mechanisms that allow some of us to be better at coping than others. His interests in coping began as an undergraduate, conducting research on coping with early life stress and the link between stress, depression, and inflammation. Dr. Stafford’s graduate and current research investigates the novel use of rodent ultrasonic vocalizations to predict stress resilience, identifying physiological and neurochemical correlates. While at UNH, Dr. White served as one of his mentors, and this connection and co-lecturing for Stressed Out led to the development of Dr. Stafford’s own version of the course.
Dr. Stafford is currently a faculty member in the Behavioral Neuroscience Program within the Department of Psychology at Quinnipiac University.