Stressful Events: a Case Study of the Mobile Manager and his Wife

Abstract

Life is a continuing dynamic interaction of organism with environment rather than a sequence of disconnected stable states. So far we have largely failed to reflect this by taking a ‘snapshot’ approach to the understanding of stress. Here we should like to go some way in redressing this balance by considering briefly some of the facets of time as an important interacting variable and then going on to describe in ‘picturestrip’ the development of a potentially stressful event, the relocation of a manager and his family.

‘Temporal factors are crucial, and manifold, in research on human stress…. Yet very little consideration has been given to such temporal factors in theory or in research…. Time may be one of the most important and most neglected parameters of the problem’.

(McGrath, 1970c)