Regulating affective responses to acute stress has the potential to improve health, performance, and well-being outcomes. Using the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat as an organizing framework, we review how appraisals inform affective responses and highlight research that demonstrates how appraisals can be used as regulatory…

Regulating affective responses to acute stress has the potential to improve health, performance, and well-being outcomes. Using the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat as an organizing framework, we review how appraisals inform affective responses and highlight research that demonstrates how appraisals can be used as regulatory…

Presence or absence of tension release significantly influenced the number of relaxation cycles necessary to produce reports of deep relaxation, frequency of practice, and successfulness of eliminating daily tension at follow-up. Subject's ability to reduce physiological activity by a procedure contributed to reductions in subjective tension.…

Subjects responded to questionnaires and rated events in the Social Readjustment Rating Scale. Some were given psychophysical training before rating events. Training did not have significant effect on ratings. Stressfulness ratings were consistently higher than those of social readjustment. Data suggest this effect interacted with the events…

The influence of personal control on reactions to shock differed as a function of the type of control and of the combination of control conditions. Behavioral control in the presence of information (cognitive control) reduced stress, whereas behavioral control in the absence of information augmented stress. (Author)

Experimental, clinical, and personal observations give some support to the notions that: (1) intensive live training with anxious subjects is required in order to demonstrate that perspective relaxation has physiological effects; (2) physiological, cognitive, and behavioral symptoms of anxiety are separable and may respond differentially to…