Chapter 20 

 PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY OF STRESS 



CHESTER W. DARROW and CHARLES E. HENRY* 



Institute for Juvenile Research, Chicago 



Introduction 



The pride of the service is that its men are 

 tough, that only men who can "take it" are 

 encouraged to remain, that the morale is 

 of the best, that a man would be a submariner 

 in preference to belonging to any other serv- 

 ice. Yet, with the pride of officers and 

 men in their dangerous and demanding serv- 

 ice and with the well-schooled contempt 

 for an easy berth or soft detail, there must 

 be no needless disregard of human comfort 

 or incidental wastage of highly trained and 

 expensive human capacity. There must be 

 no toughening at the sacrifice of efficiency. 

 The unavoidable rigors of fife on a sub- 

 marine patrol subject men to conditions of 

 severe psychological and physiological stress 

 and demonstrate an endurance which bears 

 testimony to the remarkable capacity of 

 the human organism for adaptation, for com- 

 pensation, and for acclimatization to con- 

 ditions. 



I. Analysis of Physiological Factors in 



Stress 



Stress is defined in the Standard Dic- 

 tionary as "That of which a force and its 

 reaction are opposite aspects; a force to- 

 gether with its reaction, as in tension, com- 

 pression, or torsion." The definition is 

 particularly applicable to physiological and 

 psychophysiological stress because of the em- 

 phasis upon reaction as an aspect of stress. 

 Reactions to be considered here will be, first, 

 physiologically determined adjustments to 

 environmental conditions, often referred to 

 as "homeostasis" (13), and second, psycho- 



* Now at Institute of Living, Hartford, Conn. 



logically determined and excessive or disor- 

 ganized physiological changes which go be- 

 yond the requirements for homeostasis and 

 which will here be referred to as ''emotion." 

 Physiological activity of both types may 

 be sensed to varying degrees and may con- 

 tribute to the background of awareness or 

 consciousness, and, in relation to the back- 

 ground of experience, may be termed "affect" 

 (15). Stresses prominent in fife aboard a 

 submarine may be classified conveniently 

 under four general heads according to the 

 characteristics of the initiating reaction. 



A. Stresses Involving Severe Physiological 

 Response to Environmental Conditions. 

 These include stresses due to conditions of 

 habitability, O2 deficiency, CO2 excess, tem- 

 perature, humidity, vibration, pressure and 

 even odors — conditions to which the organ- 

 ism responds automatically, physiologically, 

 and reflexly. In this type of stress the 

 psychological and emotional reaction of the 

 subject occurs secondarily as a consequence 

 of one's observation of his own changed 

 physiological state. For example, a man's 

 first awareness of depleted oxygen or ex- 

 cessive CO2 may be the observation of his 

 own increased breathing. He may refer to 

 "difficulty in getting his breath," and he 

 may become emotionally perturbed by the 

 observation. Temperature and humidity in 

 the same manner may be reacted to physio- 

 logically by cutaneous dilatation and sweat- 

 ing, and subsequently the increase may be 

 observed and sensed as discomfort. Such 

 stresses may thus involve two types of physi- 

 ological reaction, (a) homeostatic, automatic, 

 unconscious adjustment of the organism to 

 the environment, and (b) the emotional (in- 



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