Good news everyone. I’ll be giving a keynote at next month’s Psychology, Health, & Medicine conference in Limerick.
Here’s the abstract:
How to Not Die: What we really know about stress and heart disease
Everyone knows that stress increases blood pressure, and nearly everyone knows that such fluctuations in blood pressure constitute a risk factor for disease.
Indeed, demonstrating this empirically has been psychology’s most impactful contribution to the health sciences: it has influenced public policy, changed medical practice, and saved lives.
Such links have conventionally been discussed in terms of sustained elevation by stress of cardiovascular reactivity (CVR) such that disease onset becomes inevitable. However, the stress-CVR association is not that straightforward.
At least four anomalies exist: (a) elevated CVR is not always bad; (b) deflated CVR is not always good; (c) individual differences suggest that CVR might in fact be a secondary outcome of risk mechanisms; and (d) laboratory models tend to ignore the role of stress habituation.
This lecture will attempt to show how recent studies help resolve these anomalies by corroborating a unified, more nuanced, model of stress-related cardiovascular ill-health. Tips on not dying will be incorporated.
So there. You’ll need to register now.
Oh, by the way, anyone with any tips on how to not die, please get in touch…
Brian Hughes is an academic psychologist and university professor in Galway, Ireland, specialising in stress, health, and the application of psychology to social issues. He writes widely on the psychology of empiricism and of empirically disputable claims, especially as they pertain to science, health, medicine, and politics.