Stressful Life Events

Stressful life events are discrete social experiences or life changes that require individual adjustment or manifest themselves in emotional arousal or physical reactions. The defining characteristic of life events as stressors is that they are observable life changes that have relatively clear onsets and endings. This quality of discreteness distinguishes stressful life events from chronic stressors that typically have more insidious onsets and whose conclusions are less easily demarcated. Chronic stressors tend also to have longer time courses than life events.