Abstract
<p>Conceptualizing psychological stress as a dynamic network of causally connected symptoms could provide valuable insight into its relationships with somatic health issues. This may also provide insight into the functioning and maintenance of chronic stress, along with how stress reduction methods function. Intensive longitudinal data were collected from 46 university students through a mobile app. Participants completed 5 surveys at fixed 3-hour intervals every day for 7 days. In the survey, stress symptom questions were adapted from the Perceived Stress Scale (Lee, 2012) and somatic symptom questions from the DSM-5, while stress reduction questions were newly created for this study. Multilevel vector autoregression was then used to produce temporal and contemporaneous networks. In the temporal network, feedback loops among cognitive psychological symptoms were observed, which predicted other psychological symptoms, and some somatic symptoms. In the contemporaneous network, positive psychological symptoms, negative psychological symptoms, and somatic symptoms were found to cluster together. Correlations between some psychological and somatic symptoms were also observed. Stress reduction methods did not display much effect on other variables in either network. A potential activation pathway for chronic stress was observed. Relationships between psychological and physical stress symptoms may occur rapidly. However, numerous limitations prevent the causal interpretability of results.</p>