Stress Research: Varied Paradigms

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The term ‘stress’ is used to denote varied type of concepts in different disciplines. The concept of stress and has gained augmented attention of researchers during the past century, and it still continues to remain a popular research domain. Researchers and scientists of different behavioral and health sciences have attempted to look into the concept of stress from varied perspectives. Literature witnesses that numerous paradigms exist to delineate the conceptual understanding and stress research; however, there is hardly any meta-analytic synthesis that presents different perspectives and paradigms together to the reader. Present article reviews different existing perspectives for the thorough understanding of the concept of stress from multiple viewpoints. Different research paradigms, running through which the topic of stress has gained a huge momentum, have been discussed concisely. The authors present a meta-analytical review of different conceptual models and research approaches to stress. Beginning with the early physiological notions of 1920s, the genetic, epigenetic, biophysiological, psychological, sociological, developmental, environmental stress, and occupational stress paradigms have been reviewed and more future researches with combined methodological approaches tested with multivariate analytic methods have been called for to further simplify the understanding of the concept of stress from a multidisciplinary perspective.