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Heather Holtrop PSY 4332 Article Review Paper For this article review paper, I decided to find a news article and a peer-reviewed article about stress and how it effects a person’s health. The news article I found was from Medical News Today and it was titled Stress: its surprising implications for health . The peer-reviewed article I read was called Effects of lifetime stress exposure on mental and physical health in young adulthood: How stress degrades and forgiveness protects health and I found it from the Journal of Health Psychology. Both articles talked about stress and related it to health problems and then explained how the two aspects were related. The news article, Stress: its surprising implications for health, talked about how high stress levels can cause health problems such as sleep problems, headache and increase the risk of depression. The article then went on to discuss how stress causes our bodies to engage in the “flight-or-fight” response and we secrete hormones that help us to manage the threat, whatever the threat may be. The main goal of this response is to protect ourselves from any potential harm, whether that be an internal or external threat. We discussed this “flight-orfight” response during class and how the sympathetic nervous systems releases specific hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine to deal with the threat. Next the article talked about how Americans have too high of stress levels and why these stress levels are so high. The major cause of stress appears to come from money issues, the article says that the “primary cause of stress among Americans is money, with 72% of respondents reporting feeling stressed about finances at some point over the past month” (Whiteman). Financial issues are obviously a major problem and cause many Americans to worry and all this worrying is what causes these spiked stress levels. Other sources of stress came from work problems, economy issues, family responsibilities and health concerns. Before reading this article, if someone had asked me what the main cause of stress for Americans is, I would have said financial issues but I was still very surprised that 72% of the people interviewed responded with saying money issues was their main source of stress. I know money problems can be scary and create unstable living situations and many other problems but I think that it’s a shame that something so insignificant and not meaningful such as money can cause us all so many problems. I wish that people didn’t have to worry about these kind of problems and could just focus on their families, friends and other things that are so much more important in life instead of being burdened with financial problems. The article then talked about how "stress is significantly associated with virtually all the major areas of disease" (Whiteman). Stress has correlations with heart problems, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, fertility and depression. I don’t think people realize what a negative impact and how detrimental the effects of too much stress are to a person. Stress is obviously apart of life and no one can go through life experiencing no stress at all, but it is crucial that people know how to regulate and control their stress levels. I really enjoyed the part of this article where they talk about stress not always being a negative thing. The article discussed how sometimes a little bit of stress is a good thing because it puts some pressure on a person and pushes them to try harder and do better at something. This is very true and I think this is another important thing for people to realize. Stress is going to come but it is better to regulate it and your behaviors and handle all life’s threats appropriately so that the stress doesn’t take over your life and your health.

Heather Holtrop PSY 4332 For my peer-reviewed article, I read an article from the Journal of Health Psychology called Effects of lifetime stress exposure on mental and physical health in young adulthood: How stress degrades and forgiveness protects health. The article started off by talking about and proposing a hypothesis about how life stress is associated with poor mental and physical health. The article also described how stress can actually hurt your health more than things such as tobacco use or alcohol consumption. It then went on to talk about how cumulative stress throughout the course of a person's lifetime really adds-up and causes many health problems. A main factor discussed that can work to try to counteract the effects of cumulative stress is forgiveness. Forgiveness is associated with releasing negative things such as negative emotions or feelings and making room for more positive emotions, feelings and behaviors. This concept the article presented reminded me of our discussion from class about positive psychology and how it is important to focus on the positive things in your life and not to dwell over the negative things. Forgiveness has been linked to many positive outcomes such as less anxiety, depression and other major psychiatric disorders. The article then talked about how forgiveness is an emotion-focused coping process, another concept we learned about in class. Emotion-focused coping is where people focus more on controlling their emotional reactions and their feelings about a problem rather than problem-focused coping where the problem itself is dealt with. The article then moved on to talked about how mental and physical health was assessed in 148 young adults (college students). First the adults completed a computer test that asked them different questions about their lives and potential stress-causing situations. They were asked to rank their level of stress based on the potential stressor. The participants then responded to questions using the Heartland Forgiveness Scale to rank their level of forgiveness. Mental health and physical health symptoms were evaluated using the K6 method and a 14-item Physical Health Questionnaire. The results of all these methods were examined based on the effects of life stress on health at low, moderate and high levels of forgiveness. The results agreed with the proposed hypothesis that forgiveness significantly moderated the effects of lifetime stress severity on mental health. However, the results did contradict the hypothesis because the results showed that forgiveness did not moderate the effects of cumulative lifetime stress severity on physical health. These results made sense to me because forgiveness involves thinking and evaluating a situation and uses someone’s mental capacity to do so. This is directly associated with someone’s mental health so it would make sense that forgiveness and mental health would be closely related and have a correlation. I really enjoyed both these articles. I thought they presented and talked about stress in different ways but they both got the important point across that stress isn’t just stress, stress can cause a multitude of other heath problems. The news article Stress: its surprising implications for health, focused mainly on the causes of stress and how American stress levels are higher than they should be. That article then went on to talk in detail about how stress effects other tings such as fertility and heart problems. On the other hand, the peer-reviewed article Effects of lifetime stress exposure on mental and physical health in young adulthood: How stress degrades and forgiveness protects health talked more about how researchers developed their hypothesis that forgiveness helps protect one’s physical and mental health and how stress hurts people’s mental and physical health and then went on to explain their methods for testing this hypothesis. The results revealed that forgiveness did moderate the effects of lifetime stress severity on mental health. So in the news article, more health issues were

Heather Holtrop PSY 4332 discussed and evaluated while in the peer-reviewed article, forgiveness and stress were examined and researchers tried to explain their correlation. I also feel that the peer-reviewed article took more of a positive psychology approach to evaluating stress than the news article did, the news article was more factual and talked less about trying to focus on positive things and positive emotions. Both these articles provided very important information and I would recommend them to everyone because I don’t think people realize how big of an effect high stress levels can have on a person’s health. On the other hand, it is also important to understand that stress sometimes has a positive role. I know that especially for me, stress motivates me and helps me stay on-top of my school work and responsibilities. Stress keeps me from slacking off and getting behind but I understand that I should always keep my stress levels in check and never let myself get too stressed out or overwhelmed. This is the positive side of stress but the negative side of stress includes things such as heart problems, diabetes and depression. This is why I think it is so important for articles like these to exist to help to try to educate the population about this issue because I know many people do not associate high stress levels with health problems and in reality, stress actually plays a very prominent role in the development of many different health problems.

Heather Holtrop PSY 4332

Reference Page

Whiteman, Honor. (2016, January 11). Stress: its surprising implications for health. Medical News Today. Retrieved from http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/289969.php.

Toussaint, L., Shields, G., Dorn, G., Slavich, G. (2014, August 19). Effects of lifetime stress exposure on mental and physical health in young adulthood: How stress degrades and forgiveness protects health. Journal of Health Psychology. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1359105314544132....