APSB05029U Elective course - Psychosocial Job Stress and Chronic Disease

Psychosocial Job Stress and Chronic Disease  
Can social conditions at work cause disease? What are the mechanisms? How do we assess and quantify social conditions and their effects? How do adverse psychosocial conditions affect the employees? These and other questions are the topics for the course. The course is inter­disciplinary, and will introduce commonly used models of work-related stress, as well as broadly applicable methods for measuring the physiological effects of stress on the body. These methods are useful in understanding the effects of job stress and social stressors on health and wellbeing, with applications for cardiovascular disease (CVD), depression, metabolic illness, musculoskeletal pain, and asthma. The course includes both structured lectures that introduce and review various concepts and methods, and workshops where students are encouraged to engage with fellow students and researchers from the National Research Centre for the Working Environment (NRCWE). These workshops will cover topics such as job stress measurement, cardiovascular monitoring of stress response, and linkages between job stress biomarkers and chronic diseases.