Victoria Branson

_{“Stress is a scientific concept which has suffered from the mixed blessing of being too well known and too little understood”                                                                                                                                                                                               ~ Hans Selye, 1980}       

Overall, my research has focussed on challenging assumptions about stress and its' effect on healthy adolescent development. Specifically, I aim to shine a light on the profoundly positive effect stress can have on young people. 

^{_{PhD Research}}

Psychological literature describes stress as an unavoidable occurrence that can be delineated into both negative and positive aspects, known as distress and eustress. However, despite this prominent theoretical conceptualisation, there are only three adult measures that incorporate both distress and eustress and no adolescent measures.

The first major aim of my PhD project was to rectify this oversight, by designing and evaluating a holistic measure of adolescent stress that encompasses both the positive and negative aspects of the construct. The resulting Adolescent Distress-Eustress Scale (ADES) was developed collaboratively with adolescent participants and demonstrated promising psychometric properties in a large-scale evaluation study.

The second aim of the project was to use the ADES to investigate the effect of distress and eustress on young people's psychological functioning. Results demonstrated eustress a profoundly positive effect adolescent wellbeing, challenging common assumptions. This finding suggests stress may be positively leveraged for clinical psychological intervention.

If you would like to use the Adolescent Distress-Eustress Scale in your research, organisation, or school, please see  https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019865802 for a copy of the scale.