Glasgow Centre For Population Health Podcast

Seminar Series 7 concluded on Tuesday 10 May 2011 at St Andrew's in the Square, Glasgow. Everyone faces stressful experiences. They are facts of life. Not everyone handles stressful experiences in quite the same way, however. And not all stressful experiences are the same. Some are brief. Others are chronic. Some are psychological. Others are physical. Some make us grow and give us an opportunity to flourish. Others make us flounder and undermine our wellbeing. The different ways in which stress can affect people either positively or negatively ultimately depends on the brain. This is because the brain is the central organ that filters our experiences as being positive or negative — and it ultimately determines how we handle these experiences throughout life. The purpose of this lecture was to provide a general overview of what we know and what we don’t know about how the human brain processes and responds to stressful experiences, both in the short-term and over the long-term. A particular emphasis was pla