Sources of Stress and Measuring Stress

Life changes are major life events that require significant psychological readjustment. Getting married, divorcing, losing a job, being bereaved or moving house all force a person to reorganise large parts of their life, and that adjustment is itself stressful, even when the event is a positive one.

The classic way of studying life changes is Holmes and Rahe's Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS). They asked hundreds of people to rate how much readjustment each of 43 life events demanded, and turned those ratings into Life Change Units (LCUs).

Life event (rank)	Life Change Units
Death of a spouse	100
Divorce	73
Marriage	50
Change in job	36
Moving house	20

To use the scale, a person totals the LCUs for the events they have experienced over a set period (for example, the past year).

A higher total LCU score over a period is associated with a greater risk of stress-related illness. It signals how much readjustment a person has had to make.

Not all stress comes from big events. Daily hassles are the minor, everyday irritations and demands of life: sitting in a traffic jam, missing a deadline, misplacing your keys, an awkward conversation. Individually they are trivial, but they happen constantly.

Kanner et al. developed the Hassles and Uplifts Scale to measure them. Alongside hassles, it records uplifts — the small positive events (a compliment, a good meal) that can offset daily stress.

Research suggests that the accumulation of daily hassles predicts stress and illness better than major life changes do. Two ideas explain why:

• Accumulation hypothesis — enough small stressors piling up creates a persistent state of stress and depletes the body's resources.
• Amplification hypothesis — when someone is already dealing with a major life change, everyday hassles feel worse, amplifying the overall strain.

Because hassles are frequent and ongoing, their cumulative effect can outweigh a one-off major life change, even though each individual hassle is minor.

The workplace is a major source of stress, and AQA names two drivers of it: workload and control.

• Workload — the amount and difficulty of work, and the demands placed on the worker. High demand means more pressure.
• Control — how much say a worker has over how, when and at what pace they do their job. Low control removes the ability to relieve that pressure.

The key study is Marmot et al.'s Whitehall study of British civil servants. Marmot tracked thousands of employees across different job grades and found that those in lower-grade jobs with less control had higher rates of cardiovascular disease than higher-grade staff, even though the higher grades often carried heavier workloads.

This supports the job-strain model: the most damaging combination is high demand plus low control, which produces "strain".

The Whitehall finding is important because it shows low control, not simply a heavy workload, is a key workplace stressor. The people with the most demanding jobs were not the most ill; the people with the least control were.

Once you can identify sources of stress, you need a way to measure it. The first approach is self-report: asking people to report their own recent experiences on a standardised scale. Two are named on the spec.

Scale	Developed by	What it measures
Social Readjustment Rating Scale	Holmes & Rahe	Major life changes over a period, scored in LCUs
Hassles and Uplifts Scale	Kanner et al.	Everyday daily hassles (and offsetting uplifts)

The logic is that a person's score on the scale should correlate with their level of stress and their risk of stress-related illness.

Self-report is quick, cheap and easy to administer to large samples, which is why these scales are so widely used. Its weakness is that it depends on people accurately and honestly recalling and reporting their own experience.

Keep the two scales matched to the right source: the SRRS measures major life changes, while the Hassles and Uplifts Scale measures daily hassles. Swapping them is a common exam error.

The second approach measures the body's stress response directly, rather than relying on what a person says. When a person is stressed, the sympathetic branch of the nervous system produces physical arousal, and that arousal can be measured.

The named physiological measure is the skin conductance response (SCR), also called the galvanic skin response. Sympathetic arousal increases sweating slightly, and sweat carries electrical charge, so the skin conducts electricity a little more easily. A device passes a tiny current across the skin and detects these small rises in conductance.

Other physiological measures include cortisol level (a stress hormone measured in blood or saliva) and heart rate.

Approach	Example	Main strength
Self-report	SRRS, Hassles and Uplifts Scale	Easy to use with large samples
Physiological	Skin conductance response	More objective; not self-reported

Physiological measures are more objective than self-report because they record real bodily changes rather than a person's own account. Their limitation is that arousal alone does not always mean stress.

People differ in how they respond to the same stressor, and personality is one reason. Friedman and Rosenman identified contrasting personality types linked to different health risks.

Type	Key behaviours	Associated health risk
Type A	Competitive, impatient, time-pressured, hostile	Higher rate of coronary heart disease
Type B	Relaxed, patient, easy-going	Lower risk (used as the comparison)
Type C	Suppresses emotions, people-pleasing, avoids conflict	Linked to a higher incidence of cancer

Friedman and Rosenman's longitudinal research linked the Type A pattern to roughly double the rate of coronary heart disease compared with Type B men. The proposed reason is that the constant time-pressure and hostility keep the body in a near-permanent state of stress arousal.

Type C individuals tend to bottle up emotions, especially negative ones, and this suppression has been associated with a higher incidence of cancer.

Do not muddle the three types. Type A → heart disease (via hostility and time-pressure); Type B → the low-risk comparison; Type C → cancer (via emotional suppression).

Kobasa's concept of hardiness explains why some people stay healthy even under heavy stress. Hardiness is a personality style that buffers the effects of stress, and it is built from the three Cs.

• Commitment — being actively involved and engaged in life, work and relationships, rather than feeling detached.
• Challenge — seeing change and difficulty as an opportunity to grow, not as a threat to be feared.
• Control — feeling in charge of your own life and able to influence what happens to you.

People high in all three cope better with stress: they appraise stressors as less threatening and take more constructive action to deal with them. Notice that control appears both here and in workplace stress — feeling in control is protective in both contexts.

Hardiness is a buffer, not the absence of stress. Hardy people still face stressors, but their commitment, challenge and control help them stay healthier under the same pressure that harms others.

Sources and measures of stress must be weighed against their limitations.

The SRRS is useful but limited. It does not distinguish desirable events (marriage) from undesirable ones (divorce), even though these are experienced very differently. It ignores individual differences in how people appraise events, and it relies on retrospective self-report, so recall may be inaccurate or biased.

Daily hassles may be the better predictor. Because hassles are frequent and cumulative, research suggests they predict illness better than life changes. However, hassles research is also based on self-report and is largely correlational, so it cannot show that hassles cause illness rather than simply co-occurring with it.

Physiological measures are more objective, avoiding the honesty and memory problems of self-report. But the skin conductance response cannot distinguish stress from other forms of arousal such as excitement or physical exertion, so a raised reading does not prove a person is stressed.

Type A and hardiness have supporting evidence (Friedman and Rosenman's longitudinal study; Kobasa's research). However, later research suggests hostility, rather than the whole Type A pattern, is the key cardiac risk factor, which questions the original construct. Personality measures also rely on self-report, so scores may not reflect true behaviour.

A strong evaluation answer pairs each source or measure with a specific limitation: self-report scales with recall and appraisal problems, physiological measures with the arousal-versus-stress confound.

1. Using the SRRS to measure daily hassles

The Social Readjustment Rating Scale measures major life changes in Life Change Units. Daily hassles are measured by the Hassles and Uplifts Scale (Kanner et al.). Attaching the wrong scale to the wrong source loses easy marks.

2. Confusing the three personality types

Keep them straight: Type A is hostile and time-pressured and links to coronary heart disease; Type B is the relaxed low-risk comparison; Type C suppresses emotion and is linked to cancer.

3. Forgetting hardiness is the "three Cs"

Hardiness is commitment, challenge and control. Answers that describe hardiness vaguely as "being tough" without naming the three Cs miss the specific content the question is testing.

4. Assuming physiological measures are always more valid

Physiological measures like the skin conductance response are more objective, but they cannot tell stress apart from other arousal such as excitement. Objectivity is a strength; it does not make the measure automatically more valid.

5. Muddling workload with control

Workload is the amount and demand of the work; control is how much say the worker has. The Whitehall study's key finding is about low control, not heavy workload, so treating the two as the same misreads the evidence.