Third, whereas studies of specific stressors consistently generate positive findings, studies of stressful/adverse life events yield mixed results (Table 2). This inconsistency could result from the highly variable measurement of stressful life events (7, 11). The pool of studies exemplifies five difficulties in stress measurement: 1) Stress measures are sometimes noncomparable and fall prey to the fallacy that because measures have the same name they measure the same construct (12). For example, some studies count death of a spouse as a stressor, whereas others count being the child of a father in an unskilled job as a stressor. Some studies count stress events, others model event severity. Some stressors are chronic, others acute. Some studies define a “stressor” by its level of distress, others do not. Some studies examine events that happened to the proband, others examine events among the proband’s friends and relatives. 2) Some studies assess stress through currently depressed individuals’ self-reports, which are biased by mood-congruent memory revision and thus overcount events (13). Moreover, humans seek explanations, a phenomenon termed “effort after meaning,” which leads respondents who
