**4. Conclusion**

While the stress response is beneficial from an evolutionary standpoint, chronic activation associated with occupational duties results in an excessive CAR profile, placing the worker at higher risk for negative health outcomes. High-risk occupations provide a framework for analyzing the effect of different stress exposure on physiology. While previous research has found that different risk- subspecialties of policing display increased cortisol patterns in line with increasing risk, followup analyses of subjective stress measures of the same groups found an opposite relationship, with lower-risk subtypes reporting higher levels of operational stress despite lower CAR profiles. Differentiating relationships provided an opportunity to explore the nuances of occupational stress profiles, and explanations of several other factors that also have impact (e.g., exercise and public image concerns). Results may inform tailored interventions to reduce both objective, physiological stress profiles (i.e., CAR response) and subjective self-reported stress profiles among high-risk occupational subspecialties.

#### **Acknowledgements**

The authors would like to acknowledge and thank the Health Adaptation Research on Trauma (HART) Lab research assistants and volunteers in who assisted in the data collection, coding, and cleaning. Thank you to the agency who collaborated with us to make the data collection possible, and to all the police officers who participated in the study.

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**Author details**

Jennifer F. Chan and Judith P. Andersen\*

provided the original work is properly cited.

University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada

\*Address all correspondence to: judith.andersen@utoronto.ca

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

*Physiological Stress Responses Associated with High-Risk Occupational Duties*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93943*

#### **Conflict of interest**

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

*Physiological Stress Responses Associated with High-Risk Occupational Duties DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93943*
