Population- and Individual-Level Changes in Life Satisfaction Surrounding Major Life Stressors

How do stressful life events impact well-being, and how does their impact differ from person to person? In contrast to work focusing on discrete classes of responding, the current study examines the adequacy of a model where responses to stressors are characterized by a population average and continuous variability around that average. Using decades of yearly data from a large German longitudinal study examining effects of divorce, spousal loss, and unemployment, we found that (1) in the overall population, life satisfaction was diminished for years preceding stressors and only incompletely recovered with the passage of time, and (2) there were large between-person differences around the average response, following normal and heavier-tailed continuous distributions rather than discrete classes. These findings provide a multilevel model of responses to stressors and suggest that individual differences can be understood in terms of continuous variation around what is typical for a given event and population.