4.3.7 - Sources of stress

Life changes, hassles and work

A major move, a delayed bus and an impossible workload can all create pressure, but they differ in scale, frequency and setting. The word source is important. It means we are studying the situations and conditions that can place demands on a person, not the whole biology of the stress response or every possible way of coping with stress.

The first family is made up of major events.

The second family is much smaller in scale but often much more frequent.

The third family puts the same stress logic into the job setting.

For this AQA topic, organise your AO1 like this:

AO2 questions usually give a short scenario. Your job is to classify the source and then explain the mechanism. For example, "Nina has just divorced" points to a life change because it is a major event requiring adjustment. "Nina keeps missing buses and arguing over childcare arrangements" points to daily hassles because these are repeated everyday pressures. "Nina's manager has doubled her targets but lets her make no decisions" points to workplace stress because it combines workload with low control.

AO3 starts with a simple caution: a stressor is not automatically stressful in the same way for everyone. Appraisal, control, support, personality, culture and health can all change how a source of stress is experienced. That is why the strongest answers avoid "X causes stress in everyone" and write in terms of increased risk, prediction, vulnerability or likely strain.

Life changes

Life changes are sometimes called major life events or critical life events. The life-changes approach argues that change itself can be stressful because the person has to adapt. This applies to negative events, such as bereavement or redundancy, and to positive events, such as marriage or a promotion. The common factor is the need for readjustment.

Those numerical values are the scale's main measurement device.

Holmes and Rahe (1967) created the SRRS by asking people to rate the amount of readjustment needed for 43 life events. Marriage was set at 50 LCUs, then other events were rated relative to it. Death of a spouse is usually scored at 100 LCUs and divorce at 73. A person's total score is calculated by adding the LCUs for events experienced in a period such as the previous year.

The AO1 chain is:

1. Major life events disrupt normal routines.
2. The person must spend psychological energy adapting.
3. Several changes close together create a cumulative effect.
4. Higher LCU totals are associated with a higher risk of stress-related illness.

Rahe et al. (1970) developed this into a prospective study with US Navy personnel. Before a tour of duty, participants completed a recent-life-events measure covering the previous months. Illness reports were then recorded during the later deployment period. The key finding was a positive relationship between prior life change and later illness: people with more life-change stress tended to have more illness during deployment.

That prospective design is useful AO3. Measuring life changes before the later illness period reduces the problem of participants only remembering stressful events after they have become ill. The use of medical records also improves measurement compared with simply asking people whether they felt unwell.

The limitation is that life-change evidence is still correlational. A positive relationship between LCU score and illness does not prove that life changes directly caused illness. A third variable, such as anxiety, sleep loss, poor social support or existing health problems, might increase both reported stress and illness.

There is also a validity problem in the SRRS itself. The same event does not mean the same thing to everyone. Divorce may be devastating for one person but a relief for another. Moving house may be exciting if it means more security, but threatening if it means financial strain. This matters because the SRRS gives each event a fixed score. Later stress-measurement work has also criticised checklist approaches for treating positive and negative changes too similarly, even though undesirable, uncontrollable events often have stronger effects.

AO2 example: Erika moves in with her partner, then her grandad dies soon afterwards. The move and bereavement are life changes. The life-changes approach would say Erika is not stressed only because one bad thing happened, but because two major adjustments happened close together, creating a cumulative demand on her coping resources.

Daily hassles

Daily hassles shift the focus away from dramatic events and towards ordinary repeated pressures. Lazarus argued that the small irritations of everyday life may be especially important because they happen often and are interpreted through the person's own appraisal of threat and coping.

Primary appraisal is followed by a judgement about coping resources.

The same hassle can therefore affect two people differently. Being stuck in traffic may feel mildly annoying if a person has spare time, but threatening if they are late for an exam or a childcare pickup. The stress is not only in the event. It is in the transaction between the event and the person's appraisal of it.

The contrast term is distal.

Daily hassles are often described as proximal because their effects are immediate. Life changes can act as distal sources when they disrupt routines and generate later hassles. This is a possible pathway, not a rule that major events never cause immediate distress. For example, divorce may produce financial worries, changed childcare arrangements, awkward messages and repeated practical problems. The major event matters, but much of its stress may arrive through everyday hassles.

Kanner et al. (1981) compared life-event measures with hassles and uplifts. A community sample of middle-aged adults completed Hassles and Uplifts scales monthly for 10 consecutive months, and psychological symptoms were measured. The Hassles Scale was a better predictor of concurrent and later psychological symptoms than life-event scores. Even when life events were statistically controlled, hassles still predicted symptoms.