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.
