In this episode of Core Concepts, we dive into the stress response. In other words, what happens to us after we encounter a stressor.

Within Stress in Action, the stress response is a central concept of our research but also a broad and complex one. Solomiia Myroniuk, a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen, explains that while we cannot directly measure “the stress response” as a whole, we can measure its different components. She takes us through four key components of the stress response: cognitive, affective, physiological, and behavioural. Importantly, these components do not always have clear boundaries. They can overlap, both conceptually and in the way they are measured in research.

A major focus of Solomiia’s work is disentangling this overlap and improving the precision of stress-response measurement. As she explains, “When we measure (the stress response) we need to be precise to know exactly what we are measuring and to communicate this to other researchers.”

We also discuss coping, how it relates to the different dimensions of the stress response, and some of the challenges involved in studying these processes.