Approaches To Modeling Of Psychological Stress With Applications

In the psychological and medical science community, psychological stress is identified as a relevance to emotional, cognitive and behavioral reactions, representing human individuals’complicated psychological responses to external stimuli. Psychological stress can stimulate an individual to adapt to a variety of challenging environments, while, in the presence of a long period of psychological stress, individual’s psychosomatic health could suffer a certain degree of damage, even more serious mental health problems.In order to quantitatively investigate psychological stress, this thesis takes advantage of first-principle and data driven modeling approaches to calculate and recognize the parameters of personality characteristics, cognitive appraisal and mood features, leading to a dynamic hierarchical psychological stress model characterized by stress source inputs and emotional response outputs. Subsequently, simulations on the dynamic characteristics of the model are carried out, showing that personality plays a key role on when and how psychological stress appears while the cognitive appraisal mainly affects the recovery time of psychological stress. It is suggested that, therein, the former is identified from the questionnaire data based on a clustering approach and the latter is calculated by means of Bayesian classification methods corresponding to specific stressors.College students are considered in an application study concerning the psychological stress model based analysis. In the context of the specific stressors associated with college students, the psychological stress response are analyzed and evaluated, leading to conclusions that can help to effectively respond to the students’psychological stress to a certain extent.