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Having established how the body responds to stress and why chronic stress damages health, the next question is: what are the sources of stress in everyday life? Psychologists have studied two very different kinds of stressor. The first are life changes — major, often infrequent events such as marriage, divorce, bereavement, or losing a job, which require significant psychological readjustment. The second are daily hassles — the minor, frequent irritations of everyday life, such as misplacing keys, traffic jams, and arguments. This lesson examines the research tools developed to measure each — the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) of Holmes and Rahe (1967) and the Hassles and Uplifts Scale of Kanner et al. (1981) — and the evidence on which type of stressor is the better predictor of ill health.
Key Definition: A life change is a major, relatively infrequent life event that requires a significant degree of psychological and social readjustment. Daily hassles are the minor, frequent, everyday irritations and demands that characterise normal life.
The debate between these two approaches is one of the most important in the Stress option, because it raises a counter-intuitive possibility: that the accumulation of small, daily stresses may actually be more damaging to health than the rare, dramatic life event — a claim with significant implications for how we understand and manage stress.
This lesson addresses the following points in AQA A-Level Psychology (7182), Paper 3, Section C (Stress):
Assessment objectives engaged: AO1 (knowledge of life changes and daily hassles as sources of stress, the SRRS and the Hassles and Uplifts Scale, and the supporting research of Rahe et al., Kanner et al., DeLongis et al., and Bouteyre et al.), AO3 (evaluation of the two approaches — methodological problems of retrospective self-report, individual differences, the correlational nature of the evidence, and the relative predictive power of hassles versus life changes), and — where a question contains a scenario — AO2 (applying the approaches to a described individual).
The pioneering work on life changes was carried out by Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe (1967). As physicians, they noticed that their patients' illnesses were often preceded by clusters of major life events, and they reasoned that the change and readjustment such events demand — whether the event is "good" (marriage) or "bad" (divorce) — is itself stressful and might therefore make people ill.
To measure this, they developed the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS). They examined the medical records of around 5,000 patients, compiled a list of 43 life events that frequently preceded illness, and then asked roughly 400 people to rate how much readjustment each event would require, using marriage as a fixed benchmark set at 500 units. The averaged ratings (divided by ten) became each event's value in life change units (LCUs).
A selection of the events and their approximate LCU values illustrates the scale:
| Life event | Approximate LCU value |
|---|---|
| Death of a spouse | 100 |
| Divorce | 73 |
| Marital separation | 65 |
| Death of a close family member | 63 |
| Marriage | 50 |
| Loss of job (being dismissed) | 47 |
| Retirement | 45 |
| Pregnancy | 40 |
| Beginning or ending school | 26 |
| Change in living conditions | 25 |
| Holidays | 13 |
| Minor violations of the law | 11 |
To use the scale, a person indicates which events they have experienced in a given period (typically the previous 6–12 months) and their LCU scores are summed. A higher total indicates greater exposure to life change, which Holmes and Rahe predicted would be associated with a greater likelihood of stress-related illness. Notice that even positive events (marriage, holidays, pregnancy) carry LCUs — the scale's central assumption is that it is change and readjustment, not negativity as such, that is stressful.
Key Definition: The Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) is a self-report questionnaire developed by Holmes and Rahe (1967) that measures the amount of life change a person has experienced by assigning each of 43 life events a value in life change units (LCUs).
The predictive value of the SRRS was tested in a well-known study by Rahe, Mahan, and Arthur (1970), who examined whether life change predicted subsequent illness in a large, healthy population.
The correlation, though statistically significant given the large sample, was modest (+0.118 means life change accounted for only a small fraction of the variation in illness) — an important point for evaluation, since it shows life change is at most one of many contributing factors.
To see how the scale works in practice, imagine a person who, in the past year, married (50 LCU), moved house and changed their living conditions (around 25 LCU), and took on a large new financial commitment (around 31 LCU). Their total of roughly 106 life change units would place them in a moderately elevated band. Holmes and Rahe suggested, on the basis of their patient data, that the higher a person's annual LCU total, the greater their statistical risk of developing a stress-related illness in the near future, with very high totals associated with a substantially raised risk. The logic is cumulative: it is not any single event but the sum of readjustment demands within a period that the scale treats as the stressor. This makes the SRRS quick and easy to administer and score, which is one reason it became enormously influential and spawned decades of research — though, as the evaluation section shows, its simplicity is also the source of its main weaknesses.
An alternative approach argues that it is not the rare, major life event but the accumulation of minor everyday stressors that best predicts ill health. Richard Lazarus and colleagues developed this view, and Kanner et al. (1981) created the Hassles and Uplifts Scale (HSUP) to measure it.
The scale presents respondents with a long list of potential hassles and uplifts and asks them to indicate which they have experienced recently and how severe or pleasant each was. The underlying accumulation hypothesis is that the daily build-up of unresolved hassles produces a chronic, low-level stress that wears the body down, while uplifts may buffer this effect. There is also an amplification hypothesis: the strain of a major life change may make a person less able to cope with daily hassles, so the two interact.
The hassles approach is rooted in Lazarus's transactional model of stress, which holds that stress arises not from the objective event but from a transaction between the person and their environment, mediated by cognitive appraisal. In primary appraisal the person judges whether a hassle is threatening; in secondary appraisal they judge whether they have the resources to cope. This is why daily hassles are theorised to be so important: they are encountered constantly, each one demanding a small appraisal and a small coping effort, and when they accumulate faster than they can be resolved the person experiences a persistent, grinding stress. The contrast with the SRRS is fundamental — Holmes and Rahe assumed an event has a fixed stress value for everyone, whereas Lazarus insists the same hassle is stressful only if it is appraised as exceeding the person's resources. This theoretical difference underlies many of the evaluation points later in the lesson.
A further reason daily hassles may predict health better than life changes is proximity in time. A major life event such as a bereavement may have occurred months ago, so its physiological impact has partly subsided by the time health is measured; daily hassles, by contrast, are current and ongoing, keeping the SAM pathway and HPA axis activated in the present. The accumulation of fresh, daily activation may therefore produce a more sustained elevation of cortisol than a single, receding life event, which helps explain DeLongis's finding that hassles out-predict life changes.
The table below contrasts the two approaches.
| Feature | Life changes (SRRS) | Daily hassles (HSUP) |
|---|---|---|
| Type of stressor | Major, infrequent events | Minor, frequent irritations |
| Key researchers | Holmes & Rahe (1967); Rahe et al. (1970) | Kanner et al. (1981); DeLongis et al. (1982) |
| Underlying mechanism | Readjustment to change is stressful | Accumulation of small stresses wears the body down |
| Predictive power for health | Modest (small correlations) | Generally a stronger predictor (DeLongis) |
A significant strength of the life-changes approach is the supporting evidence from prospective studies, which strengthens the causal interpretation. Rahe et al. (1970) measured life change before the illness occurred, so the direction of the relationship is clear — high LCU scores preceded, and predicted, later illness, rather than the illness causing people to report more life change. The implication is that life change is a genuine antecedent risk factor for illness rather than merely a correlate, which is a more powerful design than the retrospective studies that dominate this field, and it lends real weight to the claim that the readjustment demanded by major events affects physical health.
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