The stress process.

Abstract

This study uses longitudinal data to observe how life events, chronic life strains, self concepts, coping, and social supports come together to form a process of stress. It takes involuntary job disruptions as illustrating life events and shows how they adversely affect enduring role strains, economic strains in particular. These exacerbated strains, in turn, erode positive concepts of self, such as self-esteem and mastery. The diminished self-concepts then leave one especially vulnerable to experiencing symptoms of stress, of which depression is of special interest to this analysis. The interventions of coping and social supports are mainly indirect; that is, they do not act directly to buffer depression. Instead, they minimize the elevation of depression by dampening the antecedent process.

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