Stress : Source Of Stress ( LC and Daily Hassles) Flashcards
What are life changes?
Life changes are life events that might cause stress and illness – can be positive/negative - require adjustment
What is Social Readjustment Rating scale?
Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) devised by Holmes and Rahe (1967) included 43 such life changes e.g
- date of a spouse
- financial difficulties
- minor violation of law
- Christmas holidays
How is life change recorded ?
Each life change can be accorded a value known as a life change unit (LCU) and an overall LCU score can be calculated by adding the LCUs for all the life changes experienced in the last year
Examples of LCU?
• Examples include marriage (50 LCUs) and changing job (36 LCUs) • Holmes and Rahe suggest a high LCU score can predict illness
What happens if you get a high score on the SRRS scale?
• A score of under 150 increases the chance of stress-related illness by 30%
• A score of over 300 is a major crisis and increases the risk to 80%
Evaluation of Life changes and stress?
• Life changes can be experienced very differently, e.g. divorce may be a negative experience for some but positive for others
• Individual differences (personality, gender etc) can mediate the effects of life events
• The relationship between LCU score and stress-related illness is correlational so cannot say life changes cause illness
• Controllability may affect the extent to which a life change causes stress – changes we can have control over are less stress-inducing
• Need to distinguish between positive changes (getting a better job) and negative changes (losing a good job) as they can have vastly different effects, however the LCU gives the same points regardless of whether the person feels the event is positive or negative.
What was the Life changes as a source of stress study by Rahe? ( Aim and procedure )
Aim : investigate whether scores on the Homes and Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) were correlated with the subsequent onset of illness.
Procedure:
- 2,500 male American sailors were given the SRRS to asses how many life events they had experienced in the previous 6 months. The total score on the SRRS was recorded for each participant.
- over the following six month tour of duty detailed records were kept of each sailer’s health status. The recorded number of Life Change Units were correlated with the sailors’ illness scores.
Evaluation of Measuring stress : SRRS evaluation
- Validity of measures as certain LE on SRRS may be stressful for some e.g. divorce but not others.
- SRRS does not distinguish between positive and negative events
- Causality-illness may lead to divorce/losing a job rather than the
other way around - SRRS may be age specific-not suitable for young people?
- Reliability-test-retest varies
- Illness outcomes are not clearly specified
- Correlations between the SRRS scores and illness outcomes are small
- Use of retrospective questionnaire has problems of self-presentation, demand characteristics, accuracy of recall.
- Self-report-socially desirable responses?
What was the Life changes as a source of stress study by Rahe? ( findings)
Findings :
- There was a positive correlation of +0.118 between Life change scores and illness scores. Although the positive correlation was small ( a perfect positive correlation would be +1.00) , it indicated a meaningful relationship between Life change units and health ( statistically significant correlation) as LCU increased so did frequency of illness.
Conclusion:
- experiencing life events increased the chances of stress-related health breakdown. As the correlation was not perfect it means life events cannot be the only factor contributing to illness.
What was the Life changes as a source of stress study by Rahe? ( evaluation)
- the study does not take into account individual differences in reactions to stress
- a correlation does not imply causality nor the direction of any effect; depression or anxiety may not be caused by life events , since depressed or anxious people may bring life events such as separation or divorce
- the sample was restricted to male US Navy personnel; therefore it was ethnocentric ( Americans only ) and androcentric ( males only ). This reduces population validity of the study and makes it difficult to generalise to other populations.
• The study is retrospective, which means they survey people already undergoing treatment for heart disease who are asked to remember prior life events
• The study was carried out in the US so the events and how they were rated may have been culturally specific
Evaluation of SRRS?
• The ratings for the individual life events on the SRRS ignores individual differences:
• For example, some people hate Christmas and find it stressful and therefore would view it as having a high LCU score (a large amount of readjust would need to take place), whereas others do not view Christmas as being stressful and therefore would view it has having a low LCU score.
• SRRS scale is used in many current studies and, if not those scales, adaptations of these scales are used.
• Evaluation: This is a strength because the continued use of these scales highlights that psychologists view these questionnaires to have a great deal of validity and reliability.
Who were Holmes and Rahe?
Heart doctors who believe that the degree of stress was related to both physical and psychological illness.
SRRS study by Holmes and Rahes? ( aim and procedure )
Aim : to construct an instrument for measuring stress , defined as the amount of change an individual has had to deal,with during a particular period of time.
Procedure:
- Examined the records of 5000 patients, and made a list of 43 life events of varying Seriousness , which seemed to cluster in the months preceding the onset of their illness.
- they told 400 people that ‘marriage’ had been assigned an arbitrary value of 500 and these ‘judges’ were then asked to assign a number to each of the other life events in terms of intensity and length of time compared to marriage.
- over a period of 12 months
SRRS study by Holmes and Rahes? ( results and conclusions)
Results :
- most life events were judged to be less stressful than getting married , six ( death spouse , divorce and personal injury etc. ) were rated as more stressful.
- High LCU scores were associated with likelihood of experiencing some sort of physical illness within the following year.
- the range of health problems included sudden cardiac death , heart attacks ( non-fatal ) , tuberculosis (TB) , diabetes , leukaemia, accidents and sports injuries
Conclusions :
- stress could be measured objectively as an LCU score that is a number corresponding to the amount of change a person has had to face and adjust to during a 12month period.
Evaluation of studies using the SRRS?
- The studies that claim to show that life change is responsible for illness are correlational. It is possible, therefore , that instead of life events causing illness, some life events ( e.g being fired from work and change in sleep habits ) are early manifestations of illness.
- many of these studies are retrospective. People are asked to recall both the illness and the stressful event which is likely to produce unreliable data.
