Biological Influences of Stress
In this unit, you are learning more about the biological influences in psychology, as well as the genetic endowments that shape your behavior. In this discussion, you will consider how stress impacts you biologically, considering concepts such as genetic influences, nervous system activity, and hormonal influences.
Below is a peer-reviewed research article that provides some current scientific information in this area. As you review this article, please remember that these peer-reviewed research articles are dense and complex, but by looking through them, you can often pull some information out that makes sense to you. You may also refer to the Video: How to Read Scholarly Materials resource.
Please respond to the following:
What do you think causes stress in college students' lives? Describe any information that you were able to pull from the above peer-reviewed research article and how it could relate.
Based on your learning about biological influences in psychology, consider how these influences may impact or be impacted by this source of stress. Could heredity play a role in the experience of this stress?
Action potential can be a complex concept to explain. What does it mean to you after reading about it in Chapter 3?
Biological Influences of Stress
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Biological Influences of Stress
Kaubrys et al. (2021) studied 181 college students to determine their between and within-person link between sleep and daily stress. In particular, the common causes of stress among college students are poor time management, examinations, and meeting assignment deadlines. The article also depicts that childhood maltreatment and poor quality of sleep are stressors among college students (Kaubrys et al., 2021). For example, participants who experienced childhood maltreatment had low-quality of sleep and did not feel rested upon waking up. Those with more stressors had low-quality sleep and short sleep duration.
Stress influences an individual’s genetics, hormones, and nervous system activity. As discussed above, college students are exposed to various stressors. For instance, more stress modifies a person’s deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) methylation, which alters gene expression and leads to disease phenotypes (Vidrascu et al., 2019). During stress, cortisol is produced to mobilize fatty acids and glucose to provide the required energy. However, chronic stress impairs the communication between the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the immune system. In other words, stress influenc...