Synonyms
Definition
Distress is an aversive emotional, cognitive, or physical state. It is contextual; a specific person, situation, or environment can be distressing at one point in time but not another; distress is variable within the individual and across time.
Introduction
Distress is an aversive emotional, cognitive, or physical state. It is subjective in nature; each individual has a different threshold for distress, and within each person the level of distress varies depending upon situational factors. Thus, two people may experience differing levels of distress in the same situation, and the amount of distress experienced by any individual may vary from day to day or from one situation to another. For example, the level of distress when faced with a stressful task could be very different between two different people, and the same individual may have a very different response to the task on different days. Distress and psychopathology are transactional in nature; higher...
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Vijay, A., Paquette, C., Douglas, J. (2020). Distress. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_504
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