Editor: Kate L. Harkness
Guest Co-Editors: Elizabeth P. Hayden and Nestor L. Lopez-Duran
Stress is one of the strongest causal predictors of a wide range of psychopathology, and the role of stress is given prominence in most theoretical accounts of the cause and maintenance of psychopathological disorders. Nevertheless, it is increasingly understood that there are wide differences in individuals' sensitivity, or reactivity, to stress. Further, there is now a large amount of evidence suggesting that some individuals may become increasingly sensitized to stress over time. These joint processes of stress sensitivity and stress sensitization have enormous implications for understanding individual differences in risk for the onset and maintenance of psychopathology.
The February issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology contains a special section featuring twelve articles that focus on some of the most crucial questions regarding the underlying mechanisms and consequences of stress sensitivity and stress sensitization in psychopathology.
The articles address a wide variety of disorders, from those long known to involve heightened stress sensitivity and sensitization, such as major depressive disorder (Farb et al., 2015), bipolar disorder (Muhtadie & Johnson, 2015; Weiss et al., 2015), anxiety disorders (Morris & Rottenberg, 2015; Farmer & Kashdan, 2015), and psychosis (Hernaus et al., 2015), to disorders for which an emphasis on stress mechanisms is more unique, such as tobacco addiction (Bradford, Curtin, & Piper, 2015).
Further, they use state-of-the-art, and often novel, methodologies. Stressful life events are assessed with rigorous contextual interviews that permit examination of stress unconfounded by recall biases. Ecological momentary assessments that permit the fine-grained examination of minor, daily stressors are also featured (Ruscio, Gentes, Jones, Hallion, & Coleman, 2015), as are well-validated laboratory stress paradigms that permit a controlled examination of neuroendocrinological and physiological responses to stress (Hinnant, Erath, & El-Sheikh, 2015; Morris & Rottenberg, 2015; Laurent, Gilliam, Wright, & Fisher, 2015). Most novel in this area is the paper by Hernaus and colleagues (2015) that integrates positron emission tomography (PET) and intensive daily life event sampling to examine a dopaminergic mechanism of stress sensitivity in psychosis.
The papers focus on several mechanistic accounts of stress sensitivity and sensitization, including hyper-reactivity of the limbic-hypothalamic-pituitary-arenal axis (Hankin et al., 2015), negative attentional bias and rumination, as well as striatal dopamine release and dopamine-mediated reward learning.
The theoretical paper by Farb et al. (2015) provides a particularly sophisticated model of stress sensitization as a mechanism of recurrence in major depression that integrates several of the constructs examined in this section. Specifically, it proposes that sensitization over time in the depressed individual is driven by dysphoric attention and dysphoric elaboration/rumination. As such, increasingly minor life events activate an underlying neural network that triggers recurrences of depression.
Finally, there are papers that focus on stress resilience, which is key to prevention. For example, a theoretical paper by Liu (2015) articulates the hypothesis that exposure to moderate levels of stress may inoculate, or "steel," the individual against future threats, whereas exposure to both low and high levels of stress may heighten reactivity to future threats. This paper raises the intriguing question of what are the optimal environments that foster stress resilience, and challenges the assumption that stress and negative outcomes show a simple, linear relationship.
All of these papers open the door to more cross-disciplinary and multi-method work that seeks to integrate these diverse mechanisms into a unified theoretical account.
In summary, the twelve papers featured in this section represent the forefront of research on stress and psychopathology produced by the leaders of this important field. Undoubtedly, these papers will stimulate further cutting-edge research that will continue to expand knowledge of the role of stress in psychopathology, and ultimately inform the prevention of stress-related disorders.
Citation:
Harkness, K. L., Hayden, E. P., & Lopez-Duran, N. L. (2015). Stress sensitivity and stress sensitization in psychopathology: An introduction to the special section. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 124(1), 1–3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/abn0000041
Note: This article is in the Clinical Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Clinical Psychology topic area.