Top Highlights

• Artistic expression by itself is only a form of acting out emotions, not a way of working them through.
• Stress consists of the internal alterations—visible or not—that occur when the organism perceives a threat to its existence or well-being.
• The second element is the processing system that experiences and interprets the meaning of the stressor.
• Selye discovered that the biology of stress predominantly affected three types of tissues or organs in the body: in the hormonal system, visible changes occurred in the adrenal glands; in the immune system, stress affected the spleen, the thymus and the lymph glands; and the intestinal lining of the digestive system.
• The research literature has identified three factors that universally lead to stress: uncertainty, the lack of information and the loss of control.