ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that some guidelines for interpreting the instrumental significance of physiological arousal under "stress" conditions. Subsequent work in the Pavlovian mold demonstrated such conflict-produced aberrations in animals as hyperactivity, convulsions, sexual anomalies, and visceral dysfunction. With human subjects it is also found that conflict situations entail the sort of behavioral reactions of interest to stress researchers: autonomic nervous system arousal, feelings of distress, distortions of thinking and perceiving, and impaired performance. Conflict models have explicitly or implicitly been employed in much of this research, which can be treated under the three headings of conformity, status ambiguity, and attitude conflict. A series of elegant studies of real-life stress by S. Epstein and W. Fenz have treated sport parachuting as essentially a temporal approach-avoidance conflict. The intention has been to outline behavioral models of conflict, indicate their relationship to a variety of social-psychological studies of stress, and to describe the rather consistent psychophysiological effects observed.
