BACKGROUND The experience of uncontrollability and helplessness in the face of stressful life events is regarded as an important determinant in the development and maintenance of depression. The inability to successfully deal with stressors might be linked to dysfunctional prefrontal functioning. We assessed cognitive, behavioural and physiological effects of stressor uncontrollability in depre...

The degree of behavioral control that an organism has over an aversive event is well known to modulate the behavioral and neurochemical consequences of exposure to the event. Here we review recent research that suggests that the experience of control over a potent stressor alters how the organism responds to future aversive events as well as to the stressor being controlled. More specifically, ...

This paper discusses the continued development, theoretical framework, and utility of the Urban Hassles Index (UHI), which was designed to measure stressors affecting adolescents in the urban environment. These stressors are chronic and differ in context and content from the more acute life events that are usually measured in adolescent stressor indices. This paper highlights factor analysis re...

In the context of efforts to regulate emotion during chronic stressors, both dispositional response tendencies (affect intensity, negative and positive expressivity) and stressor-related coping through emotional approach (processing and expressing emotions) are relevant to adjustment. In women with metastatic breast cancer (N = 103), contributions of self-reported emotional processing and expre...

Exposure to stressful situations is among the most common human experiences. These types of situations can range from unexpected calamities to routine daily annoyances. In response to stressors, a series of behavioral, neurochemical, and immunological changes occur that ought to serve in an adaptive capacity. However, if those systems become overly taxed, the organism may become vulnerable to p...

A growing literature reports that stressful life events are associated with exacerbation and the subsequent development of brain lesions in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). The evolution an MS exacerbation occurs over a period of many months and involves many different biological processes that change over time. Likewise, the experience of stress also occurs over time, with an onset, a sh...

OBJECTIVE Negative social exchanges detract considerably from older adults' emotional health, but little is known about the specific factors that make some older adults more vulnerable than others to such exchanges. This study examined whether stressful life experiences compound the impact of negative social exchanges on emotional distress. We examined both linear and nonlinear models of the jo...

Understanding stress and coping among individuals with psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) may have important treatment implications. 40 patients with PNES, 20 with epilepsy (EPIL), and 40 healthy control (HC) participants reported the frequency of various stressful life events (both positive and negative) and appraised the distress these events induced. They also described their habitual ...

Relationships among a modifiable situational factor (unit cohesion), prior stressful life events, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms were assessed in 1,579 U.S. Army soldiers with no history of contemporary war zone deployment. It was predicted that unit cohesion would attenuate the dose-response relationship between past stressor exposures and PTSD symptoms at relatively moderat...

Bacground: This study aimed the relationship between some demographic and clinical characteristics of suicide attempt with hopelessness, distressing life events prior to the attempt in individuals who attempted suicide and compares the outcomes with healthy volunteers with respect to several sociodemographic variables. Methods: We applied the Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders (SCID...