Dealing With Stress Essay Sample

Both traditional and community psychology have had concerns on how humans deal with stress. In the traditional psychology approaches of stress, psychologists tended to study the effects the stress had on an individual without necessarily tying it to the social cultural context. In this case, some suggested that stress had some genetic inclinations that affected how humans and other organism used in research responded to stress. In addition, the traditional approaches focused on the obvious cause of stress of such as the teenage life where teenagers experience bodily changes that may lead to depression. Other included stress due to death, war as well as post-traumatic stress.
On the other hand, community psychologist focuses on stress in more diverse ways. These approaches utilize the social-cultural and environmental factors in the study of stress. Although the aspects in the traditional approaches are studied under community psychology, the details are not tied to an individual but rather are put in the context of the whole community. For example, in a community, stressors such as wars, famine affect people in different ways. For examples, children would respond to the stressors in a different manner as well as women, and men. The stressors affect the people differently in terms of their economic abilities, cultural and religious affiliations among others. Such differentiation leads to completely different coping mechanisms among different groups in the community. It is worth noting that the social intercalations can be causes of stress as the members of the community interact. Others include unemployment; economic hardship as the cost of living increases, social malfunctioning like corruption, terrorism actives, lifestyles issues, diseases (Neil Schneiderman, Gail Ironson, and Scott D. Siegel, 2008), among others, most of which were not part of the traditional psychologist.

Reference

Neil Schneiderman, Gail Ironson, and Scott D. Siegel (2008). STRESS AND HEALTH: Psychological, Behavioral, and Biological Determinants. Retrieved on January 15, 2015 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2568977/