Abstract
The past two decades have witnessed an explosion in the number of studies investigating the relationships between the occurrence of a wide variety of social stressors and both physical and psychological symptomatology. These studies come from a number of different fields and a variety of perspectives. Many of these studies have examined the relationships between a variety of specific social stressors and health outcomes. Investigators have focused on reactions to a variety of disasters, both natural (Erikson, 1976) and man-made (Baum, Gatchel, & Schaeffer, 1983), as well as more common stressors such as marriage (Raush, Goodrich, & Campbell, 1966), divorce (Hetherington, Cox, & Cox, 1977), job loss (Cobb, 1974), retirement (Bell, 1975), and bereavement (Lindemann, 1944). A second line of research has focused on the joint or accumulated contributions of a variety of life events to both physical and psychological distress (Dohrenwend & Dohrenwend, 1974; 1981; Rabkin & Struening, 1976). The relatively modest relationship between measures of social stressors and measures of symtomatology and illness behavior has led many researchers to explore the ways in which a variety of biological, psychological, behavioral, and situational factors might moderate the relationship between life stressors and health outcomes (Cohen, Horowitz, Lazarus, Moos, Robins, Rose, & Rutter, 1982; Jenskins, 1979; Johnson & sarason, 1979.
The writing of this chapter was supported by grants to the first author from the National Institute of Handicapped Research and the University of Virginia Policy Council.
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Wilcox, B.L., Vernberg, E.M. (1985). Conceptual and Theoretical Dilemmas Facing Social Support Research. In: Sarason, I.G., Sarason, B.R. (eds) Social Support: Theory, Research and Applications. NATO ASI Series, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5115-0_1
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