Excerpts:
p. 64: Some stressors are unhealthier than other stressors, and some individuals are more prone to the effects
of stressors than other individuals.
p. 65: Individuals appraise stressors in terms of their perceived severity and in terms of how much they
are perceived as disrupting daily goals and commitments.
p. 65: Resilience and vulnerability factors affect individuals’ exposure and reactivity to daily stressors
and, thereby, their daily well-being. Exposure is the likelihood that an individual will experience a daily stressor, given
his or her resilience or vulnerability factors. Although daily stressors may be unpredictable, more often they arise out of
the routine circumstances of everyday life. The stressor-exposure path illustrates that an individual’s sociodemographic,
psychosocial, and health characteristics are likely to play a role in determining what kinds of stressors that individual
experiences and how he or she appraises them (right side of Fig. 1). Reactivity is the likelihood that an individual will
react emotionally or physically to daily stressors and depends on the individual’s resilience or vulnerability (Bolger
& Zuckerman, 1995). The stressor-reactivity path illustrates that sociodemographic, psychosocial, and health factors modify
how daily stressors affect daily well-being. Individuals’ personal resources (e.g., their education, income, feelings
of mastery and control over their environment, and physical health) and environmental resources (e.g., social support) affect
how they can cope with daily experiences (Lazarus, 1999). Finally, the feedback-loop path (dotted arrow from the right to
the left of the figure) shows how aspects of stressors and wellbeing will have subsequent effects on the resilience and vulnerability
factors.
p. 66: Stress is a process that occurs within the individual, and research designs need to reflect this
fact.
p. 67-68: One promising avenue for future research concerns allostatic load, the biological cost of adapting
to stresssors. Allostatic load is commonly measured by indicators of the body’s response to physiological dysregulation—responses
such as high cholesterol levels or lowered blood-clotting ability— and has been found to be predictive of decline in
physical health (McEwen, 1998). Ironically, researchers have conceptualized allostatic load as physical vulnerability caused
by the body having to adjust repeatedly to stressors, yet few studies have examined allostatic load in conjunction with individuals’
daily accounts of stressors.
