Influence of Psychological Closeness on Emotional Contagion: a focus on stress

As already stated, the stress response has a lot of negative consequences when prolonged or dysregulated. It has been demonstrated that stress is implicated in many physical and psychological disorders, like mood disorders, heart disease, stroke, obesity and suicide (Sapolsky, 1996; Chrousos, 1998); namely:
- Dysregulation of the negative feedback causes excessive levels of glucocorticoids in the blood resulting in mood disorders like melancholic depression (Chrousos, 1998b; 2000).
- Pathological sensitization of the HPA axes is related to depression and post-traumatic stress disorders (Heim & Nemeroff, 2001; Yehuda, 2012; Anisman & Merali, 2002).
- High levels of glucocorticoids play a role in obesity and abdominal fat deposition. Obese people’s weight and fat distribution are often normalized after adrenal removal and glucocorticoid receptors blockage (Björntorp, 1991; Björntorp & Rosmond, 1999, 2000; Raber, 1998).
- Workers that suffer from burnout and have high levels of cortisol show increased cardiovascular diseases risk factors, such as elevated cholesterol and triglycerides (Melamed et al., 1999).
- Hyperactivation of the HPA axis is associated with many psychological disorders, among which, anorexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, alcoholism, excessive exercising and child sexual abuse.
- Finally, hypoactivation of the stress system is associated with seasonal depression, chronic fatigue and withdrawal from smoking (Chrousos & Gold, 1992; Gilbey and Spyer, 1993; Tsigos et al., 1993; Gold and Chrousos, 1999).

Fortunately, some elements moderate our response to stress, acting as protective factors:
- Social support seems to have a protective function against stress’ negative consequences on health; it preserves people in stressful conditions from a lot of pathological states, accelerates recovery, reduces necessary medicament and facilitates compliance with the prescribed medicament (Cobb 1976).
- Abouserie (2006), while investigating university students’ stress levels, discovered a positive correlation between external locus of control and stress and a negative correlation between self-esteem and stress: students with an internal locus of control registered lower levels of stress when compared to students with external locus of control and students with high self-esteem were less stressed than students with low.
- People with a high sense of humour register lower stress levels, maybe because sense of humour helps in restructuring a situation so that it is perceived as less stressful (Overholser,1992; Abel, 2008)
- Religiosity has been demonstrated to prevent the negative outcomes associated with stress and to promote the positive ones. Specifically, religiosity is associated with lower feelings of anger when bad situations happen outside one’s control and to promote feelings of self-confidence (Merrill et al., 2009).
- Finally, masculinity seems also to be a protective factor: women usually score higher levels of chronic stress than men, they judge bad events as more negative and less controllable than men, register more somatic symptoms and psychological distress and use more emotional and avoidance coping style, while men use more rational and detachment coping (Matud, 2004).