Perceived social support has been hypothesized to protect against the pathogenic effects of stress. How such protection might be conferred, however, is not well understood. Using a sample of 404 healthy adults, we examined the roles of perceived social support and received hugs in buffering against interpersonal stress-induced susceptibility to infectious disease. Perceived support was …
Tag Archives: health
Azagba, S., &Sharaf, M. F. (2011). Psychosocial working conditions and the utilization of health care services. BMC Public Health, 11(1), 642.
Background While there is considerable theoretical and empirical evidence on how job stress affects physical and mental health, few studies have examined the association between job related stress and health care utilization. Using data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey from 2000 to 2008, this paper examines the association between stressful working conditions, as …
Gardner, J., &Oswald, A. (2004). How is mortality affected by money, marriage, and stress?. Journal of health economics, 23(6), 1181-1207.
It is believed that the length of a person’s life depends on a mixture of economic and social factors. Yet the relative importance of these is still debated. We provide recent British evidence that marriage has a strong positive effect on longevity. Economics matters less. After controlling for health at the start of the 1990s, …
Ryff, C. D., &Singer, B. (1998). The contours of positive human health. Psychological inquiry, 9(1), 1-28.
The primary objectives of this article are (a) to put forth an explicit operational formulation of positive human health that goes beyond prevailing “absence of illness” criteria; (b) to clarify that positive human health does not derive from extant medical considerations, which are not about wellness, but necessarily require a base in philosophical accounts of …
Ruhm, C. J. (2000). Are recessions good for your health?. The Quarterly journal of economics, 115(2), 617-650.
This study investigates the relationship between economic conditions and health. Total mortality and eight of the ten sources of fatalities examined are shown to exhibit a procyclical fluctuation, with suicides representing an important exception. The variations are largest for those causes and age groups where behavioral responses are most plausible, and there is some evidence …
Easterlin, R. A. (2003). Explaining happiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(19), 11176-11183.
What do social survey data tell us about the determinants of happiness? First, that the psychologists’ setpoint model is questionable. Life events in the nonpecuniary domain, such as marriage, divorce, and serious disability, have a lasting effect on happiness, and do not simply deflect the average person temporarily above or below a setpoint given by …
Duncko, R., Cornwell, B., Cui, L., Merikangas, K. R., &Grillon, C. (2007). Acute exposure to stress improves performance in trace eyeblink conditioning and spatial learning tasks in healthy men.
The present study investigated the effects of acute stress exposure on learning performance in humans using analogs of twoparadigms frequently used in animals. Healthy male participants were exposed to the cold pressor test (CPT) procedure, i.e.,insertion of the dominant hand into ice water for 60 sec. Following the CPT or the control procedure, participants completeda …