Daily Hassles and Stress

Outline what research has shown about the relationship between daily hassles and stress. (12marks)

Daily hassles are minor events that can occur during the course of a normal day, they are usually sort-lived however they may continue for a longer period of time if left unresolved. Lazarus argues that uplifts such as getting a hug from someone can make the daily hassles bearable and these will counteract the negative effect that daily hassles put onto people.

Boutyre et al (2007) conducted a study which investigated the relationship between daily hassles and the mental health of students during transition from school to university. They found that 4% of the students suffered from depressive symptoms and there was a positive correlation between hassle scores and the incidence of depressive symptoms. The weaknesses of this study is that by showing the transition to university, people frequently deal with daily hassles which are a risk for depression. The study was practical as it is an easy task to get students to record hassle scores and it didn’t cost anything to conduct the study. The study may not have been ethical something major could have occurred during the day and this could produce stress which isn’t protecting the participants from harm. The study isn’t reliable as people will experience different hassles every day so it cannot be repeated again due to the different tasks that happen on a different day, this would affect the validity of the study if it was to be conducted on a different day. Lastly, the study isn’t representative as it was only conducted on first year psychology students at a French university; this isn’t generalisable as it was only a small sample size in a specific area as well as it being culturally biased as it was only investigated in France.

In addition to this, Gervais (2005) conducted a study where he asked nurses to keep diaries for a month where they recorded all of their daily hassles and uplifts at work. The nurses were...