Do you know what leads you to feel stress? Odds are that at least one cause
(and probably more than one) entered your mind. But if I were to ask you about
the stress that the people in your social world feel, would it occur to you as a
factor in your own stress? Perhaps it would, depending on your circumstances.
But probably not. And yet, this is exactly what a group of researchers decided to
investigate. They cited research that stress is conveyed between two people or
among a more limited group of folks.

In this longitudinal study, they tracked the stress of a large group of
graduate students over the course of six months. The investigators measured
various aspects of people's lives, including their degree of stress along with
three different personality attributes. Specifically, they asked about people's
neuroticism (a tendency to feel more upset and have more fluctuations in how
they feel), their conscientiousness (an inclination to engage in self-control
and careful consideration, and to think ahead and come up with solutions to
problems), and their locus of control (how much someone views themselves
or events around them as determining the result of a situation).

The researchers found that the stress an individual experienced was
connected to the extent of stress in their social world, and that certain factors
appeared to play a role. First, they found that a person's stress was more apt to
fall in line with the stress of those in their social sphere when the stress among
the people in that sphere was comparable (as opposed to more diverse).
Second, they found that there was a weaker tie between a person's stress and
the magnitude of stress in their social life if that person had a less neuroticism,
more conscientiousness, and an internal locus of control.

Although the research team noted that it's not entirely clear why the stress
in a person's social world is linked to their own stress, they highlighted two
possibilities. One is that humans tend to draw from others' reactions to try to
grasp a situation better. Another is that we tend to observe how other people
are responding to help us calibrate the most suitable way of reacting so we
can socially fit in. As the researchers rightly pointed out, the study merits being
repeated to understand whether the results apply to different groups of people,
such as individuals who are older (the average age in this study was 28).

Despite the lingering questions this study couldn't address, the researchers
noted that people who feel more stress are likely to connect with others who
have the same stress level, and then they feel more stress as they socially engage
with those who are also feeling a lot of stress. Accordingly, the research team
mentioned the potential value of future programs that could help people learn
new coping strategies to reduce the odds of stress being transferred, as well as
programs that could enable people with different stress levels to connect.



(Sumber: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article)