UNDESIRABLE LIFE EVENTS AND PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL DISTRESS: A PROBLEM OF OPERATIONAL CONFOUNDING.

I examine the extent to which health-related events account for the well-established relationship between undesirable life events and psychophysiological distress. Employed in the analysis is a distress scale similar to others often used in previous research. This scale, the Macmillan Health Opinion Survey index, relies heavily on psychosomatic symptoms as indicators of distress. The analysis clearly indicates that when health-related events are controlled, other undesirable events have small and nonsignificant effects upon psychophysiological distress. Further, the analysis also shows that health-problem events are more strongly related to physiological than to psychological items on the distress scale. The results clearly suggest that previously well-established correlations between undesirable events and distress may have been inflated due to the operational confounding of health-related items on the independent and dependent variable scales. The implications of these findings for research in the Holmes-Rahe tradition-and for life-events research in general-are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]