Adaptation and Stress

The present work tries to make appropriate the classic approaches to the study of the stress with the cognitive formulations. In our opinion, the stress process has to be stated as an adaptative mechanism that is the basis for the subject s general growth. It is indispensable the stress because it allows the consolidation of adaptative answers and it allows the localization of new functional answers. Although we consider that the implication of the cognitive processes is something unavoidable in the perception of stress, not less important we find the inclusion of that basical, but so many times ignored, affective dimension: the subject s current affective state. Anyway, our conception of the stress include a stimulus suitable of beginning the process, a subject able to perceive that stimulus, and a complex preparation and answer system to confront the situation. In this last aspect, in the one that the own perception, the evaluation and the appraisal (cognitive variables per se) they become fundamental factors, it is necessary to emphasize the way by means of which the affect that subject experiences in the moment to carry out such processes influences on the own knowledge. We believe that the wisest thing would be to outline the existence of a variable filter, conformed in an interactive way for the cognitive and affective dimensions that would take charge of sifting the whole stimulation that arrives until the subject.