Psychological stress occurs when an individual perceives that environmental demands tax
or exceed his or her adaptive capacity. 1 Operationally, studies of psychological stress focus
either on the occurrence of environmental events that are consensually judged as taxing
one's ability to cope or on individual responses to events that are indicative of this overload,
such as perceived stress and event-elicited negative affect. In this article, the definition of
stress excludes psychiatric disorders that may arise as downstream consequences of …