ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the nature of stress, its sources, health consequences, and how stressors combine to affect human performance. The contributing research emanated from numerous sources including industrial production, athletics, and laboratory experimentation. The experience of fatigue is often a result from stress exposure, but it is also a dynamic in its own right. A substantial portion of the relevant thinking for some of these areas dates back to the early 20th century. Cognitive load and fatigue effects are often difficult to separate, but recent developments with nonlinear dynamics and enhanced experimental designs have made the separation possible. Thus, the chapter elaborates four cusp catastrophe models for four types of stress-behavior mechanisms: the ability-stress model, the buckling model, the diathesis-stress model, and fatigue. The first contributions from a series of studies are described in the final section of the chapter.
