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This chapter presents a review of research on somatic arousal reduction during meditation. Here the chapter takes a look at the evidence and comes to conclusions which will no doubt further fuel the flames of controversy. The analysis of the evidence leads to the conclusion that the claims made for meditation have far exceeded the evidence to date. This review focuses not just on arousal reduction during meditation, but also on the claimed stress-inhibiting function of meditation practice. This chapter offers rejoinders to the critics of an 1984 review and offers further challenges.

Although laboratory and clinical scientists gradually distanced themselves from the biological concept of stress formulated and disseminated by Selye during the 1950s and 1960s, Selye's notions of adaptation and stress were embraced and refined by researchers in other disciplines. Chapter Five suggests that psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as physiologists and endocrinologists, began to explore more fully the relationships between stressful life events and ill-health, to elaborate the distribution of work-related stress according to class, gender and personality, and to investigate the manner in which stress responses were mediated by psychological appraisal. By the 1970s, Richard Lazarus and others had extended the notions of appraisal and adjustment to include ‘coping’ mechanisms: failed coping strategies, such as denial, were seen as generating new forms of individual and social pathology. Western preoccupations with the importance of coping with stress and with improving industrial productivity and profit generated commercial opportunities for clinical and occupational psychologists to devise stress management courses or write self-help booklets, for the pharmaceutical industry to promote psychoactive drugs for the alleviation of anxiety, stress and depression, and for tobacco companies to re-brand cigarette smoking as an effective means of managing or relieving stress.

This chapter presents a review and meta-analysis of the published evaluations of group psychoeducational interventions. The common features of these approaches are explained. These include didactic informational instruction, skills training, homework, and positive group processes. The studies are grouped into three categories, and the studies in each category are reviewed and meta-analyzed. The categories are stress management training, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and coping skills instruction. Tables present the content of class meetings, key information on the studies, and meta-analysis summary data. All three approaches have been used to attain positive benefits for parents, including reduction in depressive symptoms, with small to moderate effect sizes.

This chapter discusses the treatment of patients with pruritus, using a nursing perspective. It first looks at pruritus and its effect on the quality of life, and then examines the influence of anxiety, depression, and emotional stress on pruritus. The nursing interventions that can help patients cope with pruritus are discussed next, along with awareness training and habit reversal. Other ways nurses and patients can help decrease pruritus is through stress management, relaxation exercises, and the pruritus-treatment programme. The compliance of the patients with the nursing or medical interventions is another way to quickly provide relief for pruritus.

This chapter discusses the basic biology of ageing. First, it examines the social construction of age which emphasises that what biologists or biogerontologists understand as ageing, cell senescence, is only one manifestation of a complex phenomenon. Second, it provides an overview of the biology of ageing from theories of ageing processes to the idea of normal ageing. Third, it considers what might be done to modulate cellular ageing, such as calorie restriction, inhibiting stress and supplementing the immune system. It concludes by discussing the ethics of interventions in the ageing process.

Medical students have to cope in stressful environments during training and later in their career. Emotional intelligence (EI) is useful in helping students and doctors cope, because of enhanced ability to manage stress. Yet conventional models of EI are limited in that they frame EI as an internal, static, and measurable trait. Such models assume a simplistic view of stress and fail to consider the importance of context. We have developed an alternative model that reconfigures EI as a distributed, dynamic phenomenon and an emergent property of a complex system. Our model of distributed EI may offer a valuable resource for learning how to cope in stressful settings because it takes account of the unique, global features of a group context, such as group atmosphere or shared affect. Learning how to access and respond to this shared affect, the intelligent part of collective emotional behavior, may ultimately govern how stressful encounters are managed. Helping students develop sensitivity to context is the key to distributed EI, and the work presented here will be useful for medical students, doctors, and learning facilitators. We present empirical evidence for the emergence of distributed EI in a problem-based learning group (PBL) during a stressful interaction, discuss theoretical implications of distributed EI, and offer suggestions on how small group facilitators might work within a collective framework to help students manage stressful environments.

This co-authored chapter discusses a research project initiated at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London which investigates whether the making of drawn animation can be a mindful practice. The original intention of the project was to explore the potential application of Buddhist principles and practices such as mindfulness within a secular context to benefit art and design students who experience stress in the learning environment, thereby wishing to examine learning processes more closely. The design of the project led to the use of the repetitive, haptic procedures and collaborative processes of drawn animation in combination with short-form mindfulness meditation techniques. The project rests on the wider developments in UK Higher Education that seek to enable students to engage meaningfully with the affective and extra-rational dimensions of learning. The authors conclude that there is scope for more exploration as animation-making is about the analysis of change and awareness of momentary existence.