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Stress: Historical Approaches to Allostasis

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Biopsychosocial Factors of Stress, and Mindfulness for Stress Reduction

Abstract

The present chapter considers the history of stress research evolving from early pioneers such as Walter Cannon’s “fight-or-flight” research and Hans Selye’s cornerstone research on General Adaptation Syndrome to more recent advances in understanding allostasis and its mechanisms in human health. Early stress researchers, such as Cannon and Selye, provided the foundations for understanding stress’s role in physiology and paved the way for early human stress researchers such as Richard Lazarus and his cognitive appraisal theory as well as Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe’s group and their work on the Social Readjustment Rating Scale. The findings of these early stress researchers have provided the opportunity for more narrow focus on research related to the physiological mechanisms underlining how the cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and immune systems respond to chronic stress. The present chapter will examine the role of the aforementioned systems within the context of two of the most commonly understood models of stress on human health: the allostatic load model and the allostatic calibration model.

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  1. University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

    Tori Humiston & Amy Hughes Lansing

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  1. Tori Humiston
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  2. Amy Hughes Lansing
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Correspondence to Amy Hughes Lansing .

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

    Holly Hazlett-Stevens

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Humiston, T., Lansing, A.H. (2021). Stress: Historical Approaches to Allostasis. In: Hazlett-Stevens, H. (eds) Biopsychosocial Factors of Stress, and Mindfulness for Stress Reduction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81245-4_1

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