Welcome back to the Stress Puzzle! For our second episode, I was joined by Dr. George Slavich who is an expert on the conceptualization, assessment, and management of life stress. In this conversation, we talked about the history of how stress has been thought of and measured, the limitations of many of these approaches, and the kind of research we need moving forward to really be able to translate the science to be actionable in people's lives.
Dr. George Slavich is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA where he is the Founding Director of the Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research. He is an expert with enthusiasm for bettering the conceptualization, assessment, and management of life stress and for identifying psychological and biological mechanisms that link stress to mental and physical health. He has received numerous awards for his research, mentorship, and teaching, and he brings this experience and passion for precision stress science to his role as an Associate Director of the Stress Measurement Network. Learn more about his research: https://www.uclastresslab.org/
Topics Discussed:
- History of Stress Science
- Stress Conceptualization Across Time
- Notable Figures in Stress Science
- Challenges in Measuring Stress
- Theories of Life Stress
- Stressnology
- Muti-omics
Research Mentioned:
Charles Darwin:
- Darwin CR. (1859). On the origin of species. London: John Murray
Sir Clifford Allbutt:
- Allbutt C. (1895). Nervous diseases and modern life. Contemp. Rev. 67:210–217.
Walter Bradford Cannon:
- Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage: An Account of Recent Researches into the Function of Emotional Excitement (1915)
- Cannon WB. (1929). Organization for physiological homeostasis. Physiol. Rev. 9:399–431.
- The Wisdom of the Body (1932)
Hans Selye:
- Selye, H. (1936). A Syndrome produced by Diverse Nocuous Agents. Nature, 138(3479), 32–32. https://doi.org/10.1038/138032a0
- Selye, H. (1973). The Evolution of the Stress Concept: The originator of the concept traces its development from the discovery in 1936 of the alarm reaction to modern therapeutic applications of syntoxic and catatoxic hormones. American Scientist, 61(6), 692–699.
George Slavich:
- Slavich, G. M. (2019). Stressnology: The primitive (and problematic) study of life stress exposure and pressing need for better measurement. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 75, 3-5. https://www.uclastresslab.org/pubs/Slavich_BBI_2019.pdf
- Slavich, G. M., & Shields, G. S. (2018). Assessing lifetime stress exposure using the Stress and Adversity Inventory for Adults (Adult STRAIN): An overview and initial validation. Psychosomatic Medicine, 80, 17-27. https://www.uclastresslab.org/pubs/Slavich_PsychosomaticMedicine_2018.pdf
- Slavich, G. M., Stewart, J. G., Esposito, E. C., Shields, G. S., & Auerbach, R. P. (2019). The Stress and Advers
