Psychophysical Scaling of Stressful Life Events

Abstract

Birnbaum and Sotoodeh ( PS 2(4), 1991, pp. 236–240) used psychophysical techniques to generate severity weightings for the stressful life events from Holmes and Rake's (1967) Social Readjustment Rating Scale. The techniques Birnhaum and Sotoodeh applied are designed to uncover the structure of judgments and decisions, but in the context of predicting physical symptoms, they do not improve on the original weightings published in 1967. Neither the original Holmes and Rahe weights nor Birnbaum and Sotoodeh's weights were significantly better than unit weighting (1 if event occurred, 0 if not) for predicting physical symptoms of 115 college students.