Stress and Illness

Daily Hassles and Uplifts

Whilst Holmes and Rahe focused on major life changes as sources of stress, Lazarus and colleagues proposed that the accumulation of minor, everyday irritations — daily hassles — may be a better predictor of stress-related outcomes than infrequent major life events. They also proposed that minor positive experiences — uplifts — may buffer against the negative effects of hassles.

Kanner et al. (1981) — Hassles and Uplifts Scale

Kanner et al. (1981) developed the Hassles Scale (117 items) and the Uplifts Scale (135 items). Hassles are irritating, frustrating, or distressing demands that occur in everyday life: concerns about weight, household responsibilities, misplacing or losing things, rising prices, home maintenance, too many things to do, neighbours, traffic, crime. Uplifts are events that make you feel good: relating well to your partner, feeling healthy, getting on well at work, completing a task, finding money, spending time with friends.

Kanner et al. (1981) assessed 100 middle-aged Californian adults monthly for nine months, measuring their hassles and uplifts frequency and their psychological symptoms. Daily hassles were more strongly correlated with concurrent and subsequent psychological symptoms than life events measured on the SRRS. The frequency and intensity of hassles predicted psychological wellbeing better than major life events alone.

DeLongis et al. (1982) — Hassles Better Than Life Events

DeLongis et al. (1982) compared the predictive power of daily hassles vs major life events for health outcomes in a sample of 100 adults. They found that daily hassles scores were a significantly better predictor of somatic health symptoms and psychological wellbeing than SRRS life event scores, even after controlling for life events. The chronic cumulative effect of daily irritations — traffic jams, queues, minor conflicts, work pressures, household chores — may have a more sustained physiological impact than occasional major events, because hassles activate the SAM and HPA systems repeatedly and chronically, without allowing full recovery between activations.

Lazarus's Transactional Model and Appraisal

The daily hassles approach is grounded in Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) transactional model of stress, which proposes that stress is not a property of the environment or the person but arises from the transaction between a person and their environment, mediated by appraisal. Two stages of appraisal determine whether a potential stressor becomes a stress experience:

Primary appraisal: the person evaluates the stimulus — is it irrelevant, benign, or stressful (threatening, harmful, or challenging)? Primary appraisal determines whether a situation is perceived as a stressor at all.

Secondary appraisal: if the situation is appraised as stressful, the person evaluates their coping resources — can they deal with this? Secondary appraisal determines the degree of stress experienced. A situation appraised as threatening but controllable produces less stress than one appraised as threatening and uncontrollable.

The transactional model explains individual differences in stress responses: the same objective event (a job interview) can be appraised as a challenge by one person and as a devastating threat by another, producing different psychological and physiological stress responses.

The Role of Uplifts

Kanner et al. proposed that uplifts buffer against the negative effects of hassles — minor positive experiences (receiving a compliment, enjoying a meal, completing a task) may reduce the accumulation of physiological stress. Evidence for uplifts as a buffer is less consistent than evidence for hassles as stressors — some studies find buffering effects; others do not. Nevertheless, the conceptual insight that daily positive experiences matter for wellbeing has been influential in positive psychology.