Name______

Stress: Portrait of a Killer

Please answer the following questions as you view the video.

1.  To where does Robert Sapolsky shift his lab for a few weeks every year?

2.  Why did Sapolsky choose to observe baboons?

3.  The stress response and stress hormones are critical to our ______.

4.  List some things mentioned in the video that happen in your body when it’s under stress.

5.  In terms of stress, how are human beings different from animals like zebras?

6.  Ironically, after a while, the ______is more damaging than the stressor itself.

7.  What is the “right type” of stress?

8.  What two remarkable discoveries did Sapolsky make when studying baboons?

a.

b.

9.  The lower you are in the hierarchy, the higher your risk of ______.

10.  How does stress cause stomach ulcers?

11.  Dr. Karen Shively studied Macaque monkeys. How did the subordinate monkey’s arteries differ from the dominant monkey’s arteries?

12.  What did Sapolsky discover when he studied stress in rats?

13.  Dominant monkeys had more dopamine and subordinate monkeys had less dopamine. How does having less dopamine affect a human?

14.  Emmanuel Johnson is a guidance counselor in one of America’s most dangerous neighborhoods. What price does Emmanuel pay for enduring this chronic stress?

15.  What is the most dangerous kind of fat and what tends to create this type of fat?

16.  How do we as a society need to change our values?

17.  What did Dr. Roseboom find when analyzing children who were conceived during the Dutch famine?

18.  Telemers protect the ends of our chromosomes. As we age, telemers shorten. What does stress do to our telemers?

19.  What are important ingredients to reducing stress and promoting longetivity according to Dr. Elissa Eppil?

20.  When the baboon troop was infected with tuberculosis, who survived and who didn’t? What can we learn from this?

21.  What is the health of this new troop of baboons like? What can we learn from this?

22.  What can be done to help the majority of us who aren’t “at the top” decrease our stress levels?

23.  Overall, what do baboons teach us?

25.What is the question we must ask ourselves?