14.1 Sources of Stress: What Gets to You

First of all, what are the sources of stress? A natural catastrophe, such as a hurricane, earthquake, or volcanic eruption, is an obvious source. But, for most of us, stressors are personal events that affect the comfortable pattern of our lives and little annoyances that bug us day after day. Let’s look at the life events that can cause stress, chronic sources of stress, and the relationship between lack of perceived control and the impact of stressors.

Stressful Events

Weddings are positive events, but they also can be stressful due to the often overwhelming amount of planning and decision making involved (and occasionally because of the difficulties managing the interactions of friends and family).
UNIVERSAL PICTURES/THE KOBAL COLLECTION/HANOVER, SUZANNE

People often seem to get sick after major life events. In pioneering work, Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe (1967) followed up on this observation, proposing that major life changes cause stress and that increased stress causes illness. To test their idea, they asked people to rate the magnitude of readjustment required by each of many events found to be associated with the onset of illness (Rahe et al., 1964). The resulting list of life events is remarkably predictive: Simply adding up the stress ratings of each life change experienced is a significant indicator of a person’s likelihood of future illness (Miller, 1996). Someone who becomes divorced, loses a job, and has a friend die all in the same year, for example, is more likely to get sick than someone who escapes the year with only a divorce.

A version of this list adapted for the life events of college students (and sporting the snappy acronym CUSS, for College Undergraduate Stress Scale) is shown in TABLE 14.1. To assess your stressful events, check off any events that have happened to you in the past year and sum your point total. In a large sample of students in an introductory psychology class, the average was 1,247 points, ranging from 182 to 2,571 (Renner & Mackin, 1998).

Event Stress Rating
Being raped 100
Finding out that you are HIV positive 100
Being accused of rape 98
Death of a close friend 97
Death of a close family member 96
Contracting a sexually transmitted disease (other than AIDS) 94
Concerns about being pregnant 91
Finals week 90
Concerns about your partner being pregnant 90
Oversleeping for an exam 89
Flunking a class 89
Having a boyfriend or girlfriend cheat on you 85
Ending a steady dating relationship 85
Serious illness in a close friend or family member 85
Financial difficulties 84
Writing a major term paper 83
Being caught cheating on a test 83
Drunk driving 82
Sense of overload in school or work 82
Two exams in one day 80
Cheating on your boyfriend or girlfriend 77
Getting married 76
Negative consequences of drinking or drug use 75
Depression or crisis in your best friend 73
Difficulties with parents 73
Talking in front of class 72
Lack of sleep 69
Change in housing situation (hassles, moves) 69
Competing or performing in public 69
Getting in a physical fight 66
Difficulties with a roommate 66
Job changes (applying, new job, work hassles) 65
Declaring a major or concerns about future plans 65
A class you hate 62
Drinking or use of drugs 61
Confrontations with professors 60
Starting a new semester 58
Going on a first date 57
Registration 55
Maintaining a steady dating relationship 55
Commuting to campus or work or both 54
Peer pressures 53
Being away from home for the first time 53
Getting sick 52
Concerns about your appearance 52
Getting straight A’s 51
A difficult class that you love 48
Making new friends; getting along with friends 47
Fraternity or sorority rush 47
Falling asleep in class 40
Attending an athletic event 20
Note: To compute your personal life change score, sum the stress ratings for all events that have happened to you in the last year.
Source: Renner & Mackin (1998).
Table 14.1: College Undergraduate Stress Scale

Where are you on the stress scale?

Looking at the list, you may wonder why positive events are included. Stressful life events are unpleasant, right? Why would getting married be stressful? Isn’t a wedding supposed to be fun? Research has shown that compared with negative events, positive events produce less psychological distress and fewer physical symptoms (McFarlane et al., 1980), and that happiness can sometimes even counteract the effects of negative events (Fredrickson, 2000). However, positive events often require readjustment and preparedness that many people find extremely stressful (e.g., Brown & McGill, 1989), so these events are included in computing life-change scores.

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Chronic Stressors

Life would be simpler if an occasional stressful event such as a wedding or a lost job were the only pressures we faced. At least each event would be limited in scope, with a beginning, a middle, and, ideally, an end. But unfortunately, life brings with it continued exposure to chronic stressors, sources of stress that occur continuously or repeatedly. Strained relationships, discrimination, bullying, overwork, money troubles—small stressors that may be easy to ignore if they happen only occasionally—can accumulate to produce distress and illness. People who report being affected by daily hassles also report more psychological symptoms (LaPierre et al., 2012) and physical symptoms (Piazza et al., 2013), and these effects often have a greater and longer-lasting impact than major life events.

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What are some examples of environmental factors that cause chronic stress?

City life can be fun, but the higher levels of noise, crowding, and violence can also be sources of chronic stress.
SHUTTERSTOCK

Many chronic stressors are linked to social relationships. For instance, as described in the Social Psychology chapter, people often form different social groups based on race, culture, interests, popularity, and so on. Being outside the in-group can be stressful. Being actively targeted by members of the in-group can be even more stressful, especially if this happens repeatedly over time (see Hot Science Box). Chronic stressors also can be linked to particular environments. For example, features of city life—noise, traffic, crowding, pollution, and even the threat of violence—provide particularly insistent sources of chronic stress (Evans, 2006). Rural areas have their own chronic stressors, of course, especially isolation and lack of access to amenities such as health care. The realization that chronic stressors are linked to environments has spawned the subfield of environmental psychology, the scientific study of environmental effects on behavior and health.

In one study of the influence of noise on children, environmental psychologists looked at the impact of attending schools under the flight path to Heathrow Airport in London, England. Did the noise of more than 1,250 jets flying overhead each day have an influence beyond making kids yell to be heard? Compared with children from matched control schools in low-noise areas, children going to school in the flight path reported higher levels of noise annoyance and showed poorer reading comprehension (Haines et al., 2001). Next time you fly into an airport, please try to do so more quietly for the children.

HOT SCIENCE: Can Discrimination Cause Stress and Illness?

Have you ever been discriminated against because of your race, gender, sexual orientation, or some other characteristic? If so, then you know that this can be a pretty stressful experience. Discrimination that occurs repeatedly over time can be an especially powerful stressor for anyone. But what exactly does it do to people?

Recent research has shown that there are a number of ways that discrimination can lead to elevated stress and negative health outcomes. People from socially disadvantaged groups who experience higher levels of stress as a result of discrimination engage more frequently in maladaptive behaviors (e.g., drinking, smoking and overeating) in efforts to cope with stress. They also can experience difficulties in their interactions with healthcare professionals (e.g., clinician biases, patient suspiciousness about treatment; Major, Mendes & Dovidio, 2013). Taken together, these factors may help to explain why members of socially disadvantaged groups have significantly higher rates of health problems than do members of socially advantaged groups (Penner et al., 2010).

New studies are revealing how discrimination can literally “get under the skin” to cause negative health outcomes. One recent study by Wendy Mendes and colleagues (Jamieson, Koslov, et al., 2013) exposed Black and White participants to social rejection by either a person of the same race or a different race to test whether there is something particularly harmful about discrimination, versus social rejection in general. To test this, they had research participants deliver a speech to two confederates in different rooms via a video chat program, after which the confederates provided negative feedback about the participant’s speech. The confederates were not seen by the participant, but were represented by computer avatars that either matched the participant’s race or did not. Interestingly, although the nature of the rejection was the same in all cases, participants responded very differently if the people rejecting them were from a different race than the same race. Specifically, whereas being rejected by people from your own race was associated with greater displays of shame and physiological changes associated with an avoidance state (increased cortisol), being rejected by members of a different race was associated with displays of anger, greater vigilance for danger, physiological changes associated with an approach state (i.e., higher cardiac output and lower vascular resistance), and higher risk taking.

Studies like this one help to explain some of the health disparities that currently exist across different social groups. The results suggest that discrimination can lead to physiological, cognitive, and behavioral changes that in the short term prepare a person for action, but in the long-term could lead to negative health outcomes.

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Perceived Control over Stressful Events

Some stressful life events, like those associated with drunk driving, are within our power to control. We gain control when we give away the car keys to a designated driver.
© PURESTOCK/ALAMY

What do catastrophes, stressful life changes, and daily hassles have in common? Right off the bat, of course, their threat to the person or the status quo is easy to see. Stressors challenge you to do something—to take some action to eliminate or overcome the stressor.

What makes events most stressful?

Paradoxically, events are most stressful when there is nothing to do—no way to deal with the challenge. Expecting that you will have control over what happens to you is associated with effectiveness in dealing with stress. Researchers David Glass and Jerome Singer (1972), in classic studies of perceived control, looked at the aftereffects of loud noise on people who could or could not control it. Participants were asked to solve puzzles and proofread in a quiet room or in a room filled with loud noise. Glass and Singer found that bursts of such noise hurt people’s performance on the tasks after the noise was over. However, this dramatic decline in performance was prevented among participants who were told during the noise period that they could stop the noise just by pushing a button. They didn’t actually take this option, but access to the “panic button” shielded them from the detrimental effects of the noise.

Subsequent studies have found that a lack of perceived control underlies other stressors too. The stressful effects of crowding, for example, appear to stem from the feeling that you can’t control getting away from the crowded conditions (Evans & Stecker, 2004). Being jammed into a crowded dormitory room may be easier to handle, after all, the moment you realize you could take a walk and get away from it all.

  • Stressors are events and threats that place specific demands on a person or threaten well-being.
  • Sources of stress include major life events (even happy ones), catastrophic events, and chronic hassles, some of which can be traced to a particular environment.
  • Events are most stressful when we perceive that there is no way to control or deal with the challenge.