The biodynamic stress hypothesis Towards an evolutionary psychology paradigm

In recent decades, stress has played a prominent role in terms of how the individual views the world and in the sphere of public health policies. Expressions such as “being stressed”, “reducing stress” and so on abound in individual communication. Recently, the World Health Organization, with the ICD 11, formally recognized stress as a central contributor to the “burn out syndrome”. Despite these advances, scientific discussion on stress has made little progress due to a significant number of issues related to its definition, the nature of normal or pathological responses and its neurobiological basis, each of which must be kept quite separate from those related to psychiatric and medical disorders related to stress. In this article we shall try to a) define stress in a scientifically adequate and rigorous manner; b) describe stress (and stress response) in its normal individual phenomenology, including behavioral and biological changes during a response to a stressful event; c) formulate some hypotheses on the psychobiological basis of stress in the light of the biodynamic stress hypothesis; d) analyze the consequences of stress at an early age; e) detect implications for the development of new IC technologies.