I think there are many committees composed of a great many experts in ASTM and other interest groups that look at many reportedly at many different terminology corrosion aspects, e.g. stress/strain corrosion/cracking, hydrogen/embrittlement effects and susceptibility, and/or various "environment-assisted" cracking/fatigue for various metallic and non-metallic materials etc. I guess you could read some resulting standards such as ASTM E1681, G129, G142 (and perhaps other letters of the alphabet!) as well as many texts and manuals that talk about these subjects, but I suspect some folks in the end could be pretty much confused by some of the explanations and/or technical jargon offered. In the real world, I’m not sure it’s very easy to separate or fingerprint all these terminologies/behaviors, as there are all sorts of materials and forms/structures of same, environments, nooks and crannies/notches, temperatures, and stress levels etc., and even combinations of all this that can interact with each other out there.
I think you will eventually find some basic corrosion references that will tell you that strained/stressed areas of structures are “anodic to” or have “more electronegative potential” for corrosion activity relative to lesser stressed/strained/worked areas of structures. This probably at least makes sense to most, at least to those with a basic understanding of galvanic corrosion (where all factors exist to result in same corrosion preferentially occurs at the anode, where electrons are stripped off/dissolution occurs by chemical reactions etc., not the cathode of a galvanic cell), and this can even be visibly demonstrated with various colored chemical reaction indicators. However, some who are very inquisitive (or perhaps some dense like me?) might ask further, “Why is the stressed area anodic, or why are the electrons easier to strip off/reactions with the material more likely to occur at the stressed/strained location?” I think it is at this deeper depth of questioning where you may find murkier and perhaps even some contradictory explanations.
All this being said, many years ago I heard an old professor (who I think got his Ph. D. in physical metallurgy at Rensselaer about a half century ago) once tell our class in referring to a tensile testing machine pulling a sample, “Spacing between atoms increases with elongation.” As I did not remember reading this anywhere in the text or study materials, I wrote (t)his comment down in my notes. Is it possible, in probably my too much sort of Simpleton's (and certainly not expert) thinking, that atoms or metal structures/grains etc. are sort of more accessible to reactants(ions), or being penetrated/wedged even further apart with stuff like hydrogen atoms etc. when they are “spaced” further apart or their motion is somehow affected by particularly tensile stress? To take this simplistic explanation further, at some point perhaps an increasing spacings could break bonds enough to become a “crack” (see interesting discussion of cracking at a quite micro level at
