Personal Orientations and Their Relation to Psychological and Physiological Symptoms of Strain

Abstract

Psychological and physiological symptoms of strain are investigated with consideration of five personal orientations hypothesized to be causally related to health and illness: self-image, locus of control, interpersonal orientation, goal orientation, and time orientation. The Stress Processing Report, an instrument designed to measure dysfunctional thinking styles, was administered to 816 individuals who also provided self-report data on psychological and physiological symptoms of strain. Clusters of symptoms were identified empirically and regressed on the personal orientations, controlling for the age and income of respondents. The five personal orientations were directly and, to some extent, differentially related to the clusters of symptoms. These findings, along with those of other recent studies, underscore the importance of considering the direct effects of individual characteristics in research on stress.