Richard Lazarus, 80; Studied the Effects of Stress
Psychologist Richard S. Lazarus, who died on Nov. 24 at the age of 80 following a fall, sometimes quoted Shakespeare in trying to explain his research into the effects of stress: “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
What was so for Hamlet, Lazarus came to believe, was so for the rest of us.
As Lazarus, the author of 13 books and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, put it more academically, stress is “neither an environmental stimulus, a characteristic of the person, nor a response but a relationship between demands and the power to deal with them without unreasonable or destructive costs.”
Much of our stress is, in other words, not a matter of the magnitude of the problems we face, but of our ability -- and our assessment of that ability -- to handle them. If our coping mechanisms are adequate, we experience minimum stress. If they’re not, we stress out.
And he was not just talking about the big problems.
In the 1970s, Lazarus used the phrase “daily hassles” to describe life’s quotidian stresses, which he came to believe were a better predictor of stress reactions and health problems than major life events.
He said that such worries -- about weight, a loved one’s illness, tension with a work colleague, traffic jams or even relentless house chores -- could affect a person’s blood pressure or cause other physical symptoms, such as chest pain or asthma attacks.
Other researchers took it further, saying that the more upset we feel about day-to-day hassles, the more vulnerable we are to infections and perhaps even more serious illnesses.
“You can argue about the findings with cancer, but with infection the evidence is very strong,” Lazarus told the Toronto Star in 1996. “If you are an inept coper or a person who overreacts, then your stress level will be higher and so will your risk of infectious illness.”
Lazarus also discovered that a little denial could go a long way. In one study, he demonstrated that patients who engage in forms of denial -- refusing to believe that a serious medical problem exists or refusing to accept that it is as bad as it seems -- recover better and more quickly from surgery than other patients.
He thus came to believe that false beliefs can sometimes have very beneficial consequences for one’s health and well-being, and also that a person’s illness or other situation is only part of the story -- that medical professionals needed to take the emotional and physiological reactions into account.
Lazarus wrote 13 books, including “Emotion and Adaptation,” which explained that a single response, such as a smile, can be used for different emotions and that different responses, such as retaliation and passive aggressiveness, can be used in service of the same emotion.
Lazarus won a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1989 was awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution to Psychology Award from the American Psychological Assn. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1957 after graduating from City College of New York and receiving his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh. Before moving to Berkeley, he taught at Johns Hopkins University and Clark University.
Lazarus died in Walnut Creek, Calif., where he resided with his wife of 57 years, Bernice. She survives him, as do two children and four grandchildren.
