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IB DP Psychology — Health and Well-Being | SL & HL | Paper 2
🎯 Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define stress, the stress response, and allostatic load using IB-aligned terminology.
- Explain the physiological mechanisms of the HPA axis and SAM pathway and how they contribute to the stress response.
- Describe the role of cognitive appraisal in determining whether an event is experienced as stressful.
- Explain how chronic stress affects immune function, cardiovascular health, and psychological well-being.
- Evaluate research evidence for the relationship between stress and health using supporting and opposing studies in ACAS format.
- Apply stress and health concepts to a real-world case study from biological, cognitive, and sociocultural perspectives.
- Discuss the extent to which stress is a biological, cognitive, or sociocultural phenomenon.
- Analyse research on stress and health using relevant concept areas: Causality, Bias, Perspective, and Responsibility.
Introduction & Context
Think about the last time you had an important exam, a difficult conversation, or a moment where everything seemed to go wrong at once. Your heart may have quickened, your palms may have become damp, and your thoughts may have raced. These sensations are not random — they are the product of a finely tuned biological system that evolved to help humans survive danger. The question that psychologists and health scientists have spent decades investigating is this: what happens when that system is activated not for a few minutes, but for weeks, months, or years?
The relationship between stress and health is one of the most important and well-documented areas in health psychology. Stress is not simply a feeling of being overwhelmed — it is a complex interaction between the brain, the body, and the environment. Understanding how stress affects physical and psychological health requires us to examine the biological pathways involved, the cognitive processes that shape our perception of threat, and the social conditions that make some people far more vulnerable to stress than others.
🔧 Analogy — The Car Engine Imagine your body's stress response as a car engine running at high speed. In short bursts — overtaking on a motorway, for instance — the engine performs brilliantly. But if you drive at maximum revs for hours every day, the engine begins to wear down: parts overheat, oil depletes, and components fail. Chronic stress does something similar to the human body. The same systems that protect us in acute danger begin to damage us when they are never allowed to rest.
Core Concepts
Before we can understand how stress damages health, we need to understand what stress actually is. The word is used loosely in everyday language — people say they are "stressed" about a traffic jam or a missed deadline — but in psychology, stress refers to something more specific and more consequential. It is not simply an emotion; it is a physiological and psychological state that arises when the demands placed on an individual are perceived to exceed their available resources.
📖 Key Definition — Stress Stress is a state of physiological and psychological arousal produced when an individual perceives that the demands of a situation exceed their capacity to cope. A stressor is any event, condition, or stimulus — real or perceived — that triggers this response. Stressors can be acute (short-term, such as a near-accident) or chronic (long-term, such as financial hardship or relationship conflict).
This definition highlights something crucial: stress is not purely about the objective severity of a situation. Two people can face