Stress — AQA A-Level Psychology
Test yourself on Stress with AQA A-Level practice questions.
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Stress explained
Stress runs on two routes at different speeds.
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An acute threat takes the sympathomedullary pathway: the hypothalamus fires the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, the adrenal medulla floods the blood with adrenaline and noradrenaline, and heart rate, blood pressure and glucose rise within seconds for fight or flight. A prolonged threat recruits the slower axis, where hypothalamic CRH tells the anterior pituitary to release ACTH, driving the adrenal cortex to secrete cortisol; cortisol holds blood glucose up but damps immune activity, and negative feedback shuts the axis down. Selye exposed rats to cold, injury and toxins, got one common pattern, and called it alarm, resistance, exhaustion. Mason later found hormone profiles differ by stressor, undercutting that non-specificity.
The role of stress in illness, including reference to immunosuppression and cardiovascular disorders.
The link is not magic; it is cortisol. Sustained cortisol reduces lymphocyte production and blunts natural killer cell activity, so infections take hold. Kiecolt-Glaser took blood from seventy-five medical students a month before exams and again during them: natural killer activity fell in the exam sample, furthest in students also reporting loneliness. Her wound-healing work found biopsy wounds in carers of relatives with Alzheimer's took roughly nine days longer to close than in matched controls. On the heart, repeated adrenaline surges raise blood pressure and scour artery walls, encouraging plaque and clotting; Williams found the angriest of thirteen thousand adults were about two and a half times likelier to have a heart attack. All of it is correlational, and stressed people also smoke and sleep badly.
Sources of stress: life changes and daily hassles. Workplace stress, including the effects of workload and control.
Two rival accounts of what wears people down. Holmes and Rahe argued it is major change, desirable or not: they scaled forty-three life events in life change units, anchoring marriage at fifty, so bereavement of a spouse scores a hundred and divorce seventy-three. Rahe then found only a weak correlation, around 0.118, between units accumulated and later illness in US sailors. Kanner countered that the daily grind matters more, and his hassles measure outpredicted life events for psychological symptoms. At work two things bite. Johansson's Swedish sawmill finishers, machine-paced and isolated, showed adrenaline far above baseline and more absence than cleaners; Marmot's Whitehall civil servants showed low job control, rather than sheer workload, tracking heart disease.
Measuring stress: self-report scales (Social Readjustment Ratings Scale and Hassles and Uplifts Scale) and physiological measures, including skin conductance response.
Two ways to put a number on stress, each carrying the other's weakness. Self-report asks the person. Holmes and Rahe's scale lists forty-three major events, the respondent ticks those experienced in the past year, and the life change units are totalled, high totals meaning raised illness risk. Kanner's scale instead samples the previous month's small demands and pleasures, each rated for frequency and severity. Skin conductance measures the body: two electrodes pass a tiny current across the fingertips, sympathetic arousal opens the eccrine sweat glands, and conductance rises within seconds. The trade is objectivity against meaning. Self-reports are retrospective and open to social desirability; conductance cannot tell stress from excitement, a warm room or caffeine.
Individual differences in stress: personality types A, B and C and associated behaviours; hardiness, including commitment, challenge and control.
Why the same pressure floors one person and not another. Friedman and Rosenman interviewed around three thousand Californian men and sorted them by manner: Type A competitive, time-urgent and hostile, Type B relaxed and tolerant. Eight and a half years later, of the 257 who had developed coronary heart disease, roughly twice as many were Type A. Later work narrowed it: hostility, not hurry, does the damage. Temoshok's Type C suppresses anger to keep the peace and is linked, far more weakly, to poorer cancer outcomes. Kobasa found executives who stayed well under heavy strain scored high on three Cs: commitment to what they do, seeing change as challenge not threat, and a sense of control. The categories are crude, the samples male, and hardiness may just be tagging optimism.
Managing and coping with stress: drug therapy (benzodiazepines, beta blockers), stress inoculation therapy and biofeedback. Gender differences in coping with stress. The role of social support in coping with stress; types of social support, including instrumental, emotional and esteem support.
Physical fixes first. Benzodiazepines enhance GABA, the brain's inhibitory neurotransmitter: GABA opens chloride channels, making the neuron harder to excite, and anxiety drops. Beta blockers do not work on thoughts; they occupy beta-adrenergic receptors on the heart and vessels so adrenaline cannot raise heart rate or blood pressure, stopping tremors. Both treat symptoms, but benzodiazepines risk dependence, whereas beta blockers risk rebound effects on withdrawal. Meichenbaum's stress inoculation therapy attacks appraisal in three phases: conceptualisation, skills rehearsal using positive self-statements, then graded real-world application. Biofeedback teaches voluntary control of arousal from a live readout. Taylor argued women tend and befriend rather than fight or flee, and the support sought may be instrumental, emotional or esteem-building.
Your focus
- Describe the sympathomedullary pathway in order from hypothalamus to adrenal medulla and the effects of adrenaline.
- Describe the HPA axis through CRH, ACTH and cortisol, and state what cortisol does to glucose and immunity.
- Explain which pathway a given stressor recruits by judging whether the threat is acute or prolonged.
Show all 29 objectives
- Explain Selye's alarm, resistance and exhaustion stages and where stress-related illness appears.
- Evaluate general adaptation syndrome using Mason's stressor-specific hormones and Taylor's tend-and-befriend criticism.
- Explain how sustained cortisol suppresses immunity through lymphocyte numbers and natural killer cell activity.
- Describe Kiecolt-Glaser's exam and wound-healing studies and state the direction of each finding.
- Explain the cardiovascular route from repeated adrenaline surges to artery damage, plaque and clotting.
- Apply the indirect behavioural route to explain why a stressed smoker's illness may not be immunosuppression.
- Evaluate the stress-illness link given correlational evidence in which illness may precede the stress.
- Describe the Social Readjustment Rating Scale, using marriage at 50 and bereavement at 100 to explain life change units.
- Explain why Kanner argued daily hassles predict psychological symptoms better than discrete life events.
- Explain how Johansson's sawmill workers and Marmot's civil servants separate workload from job control.
- Apply the control finding to explain why a junior employee may be more at risk than a busier senior one.
- Evaluate life events research using retrospective recall coloured by current illness and Rahe's correlation of 0.118.
- Describe how the Social Readjustment Rating Scale and the Hassles and Uplifts Scale differ in content and time window.
- Calculate a respondent's total life change units from a year of ticked events and state what a high total predicts.
- Explain how skin conductance measures sympathetic arousal through eccrine sweat gland activity between two electrodes.
- Evaluate self-report against physiological measures, weighing social desirability against a lack of specificity.
- Describe the components of Type A, Type B and Type C personality and the behaviour that marks each.
- Explain Friedman and Rosenman's prospective design and the doubled coronary heart disease rate in Type A men.
- Explain hardiness by saying what commitment, challenge and control each mean rather than listing them.
- Apply the finding that hostility is the pathogenic component to judge which Type A person is most at risk.
- Evaluate personality type research using male American samples and categories imposed on continuous traits.
- Explain how benzodiazepines enhance GABA and how beta blockers act only on the body rather than on thoughts.
- Describe the three phases of stress inoculation therapy in order and what the client does in each.
- Explain how biofeedback brings autonomic arousal under voluntary control using a live physiological readout.
- Apply instrumental, emotional and esteem support to say which type a given offer of help provides.
- Discuss drug therapy against stress inoculation therapy on cause, speed, effort and side effects.
Stress exam tips
Marking Points
- The acute route named and sequenced: hypothalamus, sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, adrenal medulla.
- Adrenaline and noradrenaline described by effect: raised heart rate, raised blood pressure, dilated pupils, glucose released for fight or flight.
- The chronic route named and sequenced: hypothalamus releases CRH, anterior pituitary releases ACTH, adrenal cortex releases cortisol.
- Cortisol's job given, not just its name: it sustains blood glucose and suppresses inflammation and immune function, and negative feedback terminates the response.
- Selye's three stages in order, with resistance identified as costly coping and exhaustion as the point where stress-related illness appears.
- AO3: Mason's finding that different stressors produce different hormone patterns, so the response is not as non-specific as Selye claimed.
- AO3: Selye worked on rats, and Taylor argues the fight-or-flight account is androcentric because women show a tend-and-befriend pattern.
- The mechanism first: chronic cortisol suppresses immune function, reducing lymphocyte numbers and natural killer cell activity.
- Kiecolt-Glaser's medical students, with the direction of the finding stated: natural killer cell activity was lower during exams than a month before.
- The wound-healing study on carers, where healing took around a quarter longer than in controls.
- The cardiovascular mechanism: raised blood pressure and heart rate, damage to artery linings, plaque formation and increased clotting.
- Cohen's common cold study, where a higher proportion of the high-stress group developed colds after controlled exposure to the virus.
- AO3: the evidence is correlational, so illness could precede or cause the stress rather than follow it.
- AO3: the indirect behavioural route, since stressed people smoke, drink, sleep less and eat worse, which confounds the direct immune explanation.
- Life changes explained as readjustment: any change, positive or negative, uses up adaptive resources, which is why marriage sits on the scale alongside bereavement.
- Named values from the scale to anchor the answer, and the weak size of Rahe's naval correlation.
- Daily hassles as the rival account: minor, repeated irritations accumulate and predict symptoms better than discrete life events.
- Workload evidence: Johansson's sawmill finishers, whose repetitive machine-paced work produced raised adrenaline, more illness and more absenteeism than cleaners.
- Control evidence: Marmot's civil servants, where the lowest grades with least job control had the highest cardiovascular risk.
- AO3: the data are correlational and often retrospective, so recall of life events may itself be coloured by current ill health.
- AO3: individual differences in appraisal mean the same event carries a different weight for different people, which a fixed score cannot capture.
- Self-report defined by what it depends on, the person's own account, with the life events scale summing units across a fixed recent period.
- The hassles and uplifts measure described by its content and window: everyday demands and pleasures over the past month, rated for frequency and severity.
- Skin conductance explained mechanistically: sympathetic arousal increases eccrine sweat gland activity, which raises conductance measured between two electrodes.
- Its strengths stated as objectivity, speed and freedom from demand characteristics.
- AO3: self-report is retrospective, so recall is imperfect, and socially desirable answering distorts reports of drinking, arguments and coping.
- AO3: a fixed score assumes an event means the same to everyone, which appraisal research contradicts.
- AO3: skin conductance lacks specificity, since arousal from excitement, heat or caffeine produces the same trace, so triangulating it with cortisol and self-report is stronger than either alone.
- Type A broken into its components, competitiveness, time urgency and hostility, with Type B as the relaxed, tolerant contrast rather than a stress-free person.
- Friedman and Rosenman's prospective design: a large cohort of men classified by structured interview and followed for years, with Type A showing about double the coronary heart disease rate.
- The refinement that hostility is the pathogenic component, so the original package was too broad.
- Type C characterised by emotional suppression, compliance and difficulty expressing anger, associated with poorer cancer prognosis.
- Hardiness with each C explained, not merely listed: commitment as involvement, challenge as construing change as opportunity, control as belief in personal influence over events.
- AO3: the classic samples are male, middle-aged, white-collar and American, so generalisation beyond them is unsafe.
- AO3: types impose categories on continuous traits, and hardiness measured by self-report overlaps with neuroticism and negative affectivity.
- Benzodiazepines explained by mechanism: they enhance the action of GABA, opening chloride channels so neurons are less easily excited.
- Beta blockers explained as peripheral: they block adrenaline and noradrenaline at beta-adrenergic receptors, lowering heart rate and blood pressure without touching the cause.
- Drug evaluation: fast, effective and requiring no effort, but side effects occur. Benzodiazepines risk dependence and tolerance, while beta blockers risk rebound effects upon sudden withdrawal.
- Stress inoculation therapy's three phases named in order, with what happens in each, and the point that it targets appraisal rather than symptoms.
- Biofeedback described as a physiological readout plus relaxation and reinforcement, bringing autonomic activity under voluntary control.
- Gender differences: tend and befriend against fight or flight, with women more likely to use emotion-focused coping and seek support.
- The three types of social support separated with an example each: instrumental practical help, emotional comfort and empathy, esteem support that restores confidence.
- AO3: therapy is durable and transferable but slow, costly and demanding, so a direct comparison with drugs on cause, speed and side effects is what the AO3 marks reward.
Examiner Tips
- 💡Outline questions here are marked on the chain, so give the organs in order rather than a loose list of hormone names.
- 💡A short question about a sudden fright wants the sympathomedullary pathway only; adding the three stages of general adaptation syndrome earns nothing.
- 💡In extended evaluation questions, pair each part of the description with a criticism or piece of evidence rather than describing all elements first, to build a coherent argument.
- 💡Use the figures. A stated percentage or a stated number of days is credited where a vague claim that more people got ill is not.
- 💡Application items put a character under a deadline or in a caring role, so name the measure and the study that fits that scenario.
- 💡For evaluation, the third-variable lifestyle confound and the difficulty of measuring immune function are the two strongest lines available.
- 💡Application items describe a job, so decide whether the stressor is workload, control, or both, and say which before evaluating.
- 💡Discuss questions reward setting life events against daily hassles as competing explanations rather than describing each in turn.
- 💡Attach at least one figure or named sample to each study you use; it is what separates a top band answer from a vague one.
- 💡Questions commonly want one strength and one limitation of each type, so plan them in pairs rather than emptying everything about one measure first.
- 💡If the stem names one scale, criticise that scale specifically rather than self-report in general.
- 💡The word objective in a stem is a signal to bring in physiological measurement.
- 💡Scenario questions hand you a character sketch, so quote the detail from the stem that identifies the type before you name it.
- 💡If asked to evaluate hardiness, the narrow sample and the reliance on self-report are the two safest and quickest criticisms.
- 💡Do not open by defining stress. The marks sit on the individual differences, not on background.
- 💡Comparison answers should apply the same criteria to both approaches: speed, effort required, side effects, durability, and whether the cause is addressed.
- 💡When a scenario names a bodily symptom such as shaking before a performance, match it to the treatment that targets that symptom and justify the match.
- 💡In an extended answer, one evaluation point developed with evidence and a consequence outscores three points merely asserted.
Common Mistakes
- Swapping the adrenal medulla and the adrenal cortex, so adrenaline gets attributed to the slow axis and cortisol to the fast one.
- Treating the resistance stage as recovery. Resistance is the body coping at a cost, with resources draining, not the stressor going away.
- Saying ACTH is released by the adrenal glands when it comes from the anterior pituitary.
- Calling cortisol simply harmful. Short-term cortisol is adaptive; it is sustained release that does the damage.
- Writing that stress causes illness when the studies are correlational or quasi-experimental and cannot show causation.
- Claiming stress always weakens immunity. Brief acute stressors can temporarily boost immune activity, so the relationship is not a straight line.
- Naming Kiecolt-Glaser without saying which way the result went, which earns no credit for the finding.
- Treating immunosuppression as just meaning catching colds, instead of a measurable change in immune cells.
- Explaining cardiovascular damage as stress hormones being toxic, rather than through blood pressure, vessel damage and clotting.
- Saying the life events scale measures bad events only. Marriage, holidays and promotion are on it because the theory is about change, not misery.
- Reporting the Whitehall finding backwards as senior managers being the most stressed. Control protects, so risk was highest at the bottom.
- Quoting a correlation of around 0.118 as though it were strong evidence.
- Blurring hassles into life events. Hassles are ongoing daily irritations; life events are discrete changes in circumstance.
- Discussing workplace stress only as too much work, and never mentioning control.
- Saying skin conductance measures stress directly. It measures sympathetic arousal, of which stress is only one cause.
- Classing the life events scale as a physiological measure because it predicts physical illness.
- Losing the time frames, which differ: the life events scale covers months, the hassles measure the past month.
- Writing that self-report is subjective and stopping there, without naming the cost as recall error, social desirability or differing appraisal.
- Praising physiological measures as fully objective while ignoring baseline differences between people and the diurnal rhythm in cortisol.
- Listing the three Cs as bare words. Challenge must be explained as viewing change as an opportunity rather than a threat.
- Saying Type A causes heart disease, when the evidence is a prospective correlation and hostility accounts for most of it.
- Presenting Type C as an established cause of cancer, which the evidence does not support.
- Describing Type B as experiencing no stress, rather than responding to it differently.
- Confusing hardiness with simply being resilient, without naming the three components AQA specifies.
- Saying beta blockers calm anxious thinking. They act on receptors in the body, which is why performers use them for tremor and not for worry.
- Giving increased serotonin as the main action of benzodiazepines instead of enhanced GABA activity.
- Naming the three phases of stress inoculation therapy without saying what the client actually does in each.
- Treating social support as one undifferentiated thing, when the statement requires instrumental, emotional and esteem support to be distinguished.
- Claiming women cope better than men. The claim is a difference in style, and much of the supporting evidence is self-report.