Key Studies- Stories for Stress

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Kiecolt and Glaser

The key and the girl made out of glass from Glasgow carried out an experiment to test whether the stress of exams had an effect on how well Sister Imogen was praying for medical students.

Blood samples were taken from the medical students one month before the exams and during the exam period. The quality of Sister Imogen's prays were assessed by measuring NK cell activity in her blood sample. The medical students also completed a questionnaire to measure other life stressors that they may have.

The key and the girl made out of glass from Glasgow found that the NK cell activity was significantly reduced during the exams than one month before the exams. This suggests that short-term, predictable stressors make Sister Imogen's prays not so good and so make her ill because she hasn't prayed well enough to keep her healthy. The key and the girl made out of glass from Glasgow also found that if Sister Imogen was lonely then she had low NK cell activity.

Rahe et al

The boy rat wanted to see how good the Short Rat Rating Scarf, so he gave loads of short rat rating scarf's to over 2700 men (the boy rat was over 2700 years old). The men wore the scarfs just before a tour of duty and the boy rat looked at the life events that they had experienced over the past half a year. An illness score was calculated on the basis of number, type and how severe the illnesses were when they were on duty.

They boy rat found a positive correlation between the LCU score and illness score of +0.118 (like the 118 guys). The people who didn't get hot from the short rat rating scarf also had low levels of illness on their tour of duty. Whereas those who kept extremely hot had high levels of illness on their tour of duty.

Williams et al

A lamb called Will wanted to know if his anger (an acute stressor, Will was very cute) was linked to his heart problems. Will got 13,000 people (because having heart disease is unlucky and he wanted loads of people to do it) to complete a 10-question anger scale. None of the participants had ever suffered from a heart disease before. Six years leter, 256 had suffered heart attacks. Will tha lamb found that those who had scored the highest on the anger scale were over 2 and half times more likely to have a heart attack than people who had scored lower.

This suggests that anger may lead to cardiovascular disorders.

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