Definition
Laboratory mental stress tasks are commonly used in behavioral medicine to assess the physiological responses to a standardized stressor in a controlled setting (Turner, 1994).
Description
Even though originally it was thought that particularly exaggerated physiological responses to mental stress can be predictive of cardiovascular disease (Obrist, 1981), there is now growing evidence that blunted physiological responses can also be associated with poor health (Carroll, Lovallo, & Phillips, 2009). Other evidence is available that not the responses to mental stress itself, but the physiological recovery upon completion of the stress task can be related with the poor health outcomes (Larsen & Cristenfeld, 2011). There is a large body of research that explores the associations between psychological traits (e.g., competitiveness and hostility) as well as mental disorders (e.g., depression and...
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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media, New York
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van Zanten, J.V. (2013). Stress Test. In: Gellman, M.D., Turner, J.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1005-9_496
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1005-9_496
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-1004-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-1005-9
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