ABSTRACT
For social psychologists, the pioneer work on stressful life events and illness onset was provocative yet frustrating. Holmes and Rahe (e.g., Rahe, 1968) found environmental correlates of illness that identified disease as proper subject matter for social science. By demonstrating that the occurrence of life events that cause change and readjustment (e.g., job transfer, death of parent, marriage) increases the likelihood of one's falling sick, Holmes, Rahe, and their colleagues forced our conceptualization of disease beyond physiological and biochemical processes to psychological and sociological processes. But, given their epidemiological orientation, these early investigations never specified the nature of the psychosocial dimensions. Countless studies were done that simply counted the number of stressful life events that subjects checked off on a standardized list, while weighing each event in terms of its objective or consensually defined stressfulness weight. The total stress score was then significantly correlated with some indicator of illness like self-report of symptoms, time of hospitalization, or amount of medication requested. Nothing was said about those psychosocial variables that served either to strengthen or weaken the positive correlation. Individual differences in response to stress were ignored.
