Life, Change, and Stress - Essay Example

Many studies by health psychologists have established that such external changes may trigger internal psychological adjustments that may cause illnesses.
Holmes and Rahe developed a scale that can measure a person’s stress by taking on its size and magnitude in various stressful life experiences so that it can be related to the status of one’s health.

Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS).
This scale was used by many researchers to link life stress with the probability of the existence of illness in a person. However, such psychosomatic illnesses were argued to also be caused by other factors such as one’s experience with a stressful event, coping skills, the strength of one’s physiological system, how one deals with an illness when it occurs,
Sudden, negative events that an individual has no control of were found out to be more predictive of illness than positive controllable life changes. The SRRS has helped in many types of research to determine this finding. However, this common-sensical result has put the SRRS in question as to its reliability and validity in predicting illness from stress. One criticism is that it does not take into account a person’s interpretation of a particular event. An example may be one’s interpretation of retirement. Person A may view it as a loss of a career, or being put ‘on the shelf, while Person B may view it as the ultimate highlight of a fulfilling career because it spells the end of a lifetime of hard work. To rectify this, some researchers suggest that the SRRS would be more accurate if it would allow an individual to rate the event on some measure of severity in accordance with his own interpretation. Cohen, Kamarck, and Mermelstein developed such a scale and called it the Perceived Stress Scale.

Nevertheless, many studies still rely on the SRRS in studies with stress. The authors claim that the balance of negative and positive changes may cancel off one’s tendency to develop hopelessness in a person. It is quite reassuring to know that Psychology and medicine are joining hands in understanding the psychological component of illness and the eventual successful treatment of it. The SRRS is hailed as one tool that helps achieve that.

Two questions are raised by this reader while pondering on the points of the article:
1. Since the scale was developed in the sixties, would it still be useful today when there is a substantial change in lifestyle and the perception of life events?
2. Would particular life changes commonly predict specific illnesses?

Further investigation on the usefulness of SRRS in the present time may be beneficial in the interest of researchers on psychosomatic illnesses. Since the only constant thing in life is change, then even the scale should adapt to it, if it is to be an effective tool of research.