Chapter 2: Being Stressed About Stress: Do People’s Beliefs About Stress Matter?

Despite the wide use of the word stress in research, policy, and daily life, it was not until recently that researchers tried to understand what people’s beliefs about stress were and how these beliefs affected their physical and mental health. This is somewhat surprising, as the power of people’s beliefs and expectations has been studied and demonstrated in different research fields such as psychology, sociology, education, and medicine. The objective of this chapter is to review recent development in the research field of stress beliefs, with specific attention given to the possible positive or negative effects these beliefs have on physical and mental health. We begin the chapter with a review of the different definitions of stress and the scientific evidence linking stress to positive and negative outcomes. We then turn to people’s beliefs about stress, and finally we discuss the limitations of these studies and introduce several research directions.