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‘Stress’ is one of the most intriguing phenomena that affects our life as it is today. At the same time, however, do we know what we are talking about? There is no other word in the Anglosaxen language that is so ill-defined, or has so many meanings as the word ‘stress’.
Usually, when we talk about stress, we mean that life is heavy upon us. Stress is imbalance. Scientifically, when we talk about stress, we talk about the (psychobiological) stress response and stressors (stimuli) that are able to elicit a stress response. In this way, stress is conceptualized as a positive force that enables us to learn from encounters and adapt to our environment, only being disruptive when for one reason or the other our coping skills fail and our stress response becomes inadequate: without stress there is no life; with too much stress life becomes miserable!
The present course provides insight into today’s concepts of stress, the (psycho)biological mechanisms underlying the human stress response, the autonomous nervous system, the neuro-endocrine pathways and the immune system, and its impact on health and disease. The disease context is illustrated by discussing depression as a chronic stress syndrome, the post-traumatic stress disorder as a worn out disease and the conduct disorder as a cold-hearted condition. Prudent steps towards new treatment strategies will be highlighted.
Format
The course is interactive in nature: part is lessons to learn, part is practical work. Basic lessons are alternated with lectures given by outstanding scientists in the specific research fields. They teach the latest state of the art, e.g. psychoneuroendocrinology, neuroplasticity, context learning, and the backbone of delinquent behavior.
Students design their own scientific stress experiment, following basic methodological principles for human research. To demonstrate that it is far more easy to put forward hypotheses and expectations of what stress really is, students will be challenged to ‘stress’ their peers and learn about the resilience of the human body, bias and confounding, controlled and uncontrolled designs. Psychological and behavioral measures as well as bio-measures are collected and used as read-out of the stress response. Data results are presented to the group, discussed, and written down in a scientific report.
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