Customization of psychosocial stress effects on human health: An intrapersonal conflict perspective

From etiologic, clinical or public health perspectives, differences in psychosocial stress responses remain a huge scientific and medical challenge. We address the customization of psychosocial stress responses in humans by considering our dual character of independent organisms and interdependent social group members as a source of intrapersonal conflicts.

By challenging our subjective representations on our social identity, psychosocial stress triggers or exhibits intrapersonal conflicts and may enhance divergence between physiologically-driven and psycho-sociologically-driven internal forces. In this perspective, our individual-specific brain development constitutes a major cause of interindividual variability since it impacts the overall stress-to-disease links.

We propose a two-step stress-to-disease etiological chain: i) stress perception and appraisal and ii) response to actually perceived stress. We argue that the first step of stress perception and appraisal is more affected by interindividual variability than the second step of response to actually perceived stress. A psychocognitive approach correlating symptoms with actually perceived stress is proposed to address the epidemiology of psychosocial stress effects. The ability of this approach to reduce interindividual variability biases is discussed.

From this perspective, pathological effects of psychosocial stress might be questioned as possible conflict responses internally emerging as the lesser evil, thus corresponding to adaptation attempts.