Stress, social status, and psychological distress

II has long been known that persons in socially disadvantaged statuses are particularly likely to exhibit symptoms of psychological distress. Why this is so remains the subject of controversy. This paper sheds some light on the controversy by analyzing survey data on stress, social status, and psychological distress. Two components of the status-distress relationship are isolated empirically: (I) a differential exposure to stress component, interpretable as one sort of social causation influence; and (2) a component due to the differential impact of comparable stresses on people in different categories of various status dimensions. The analysis shows that differential impact is the more important determinant in relationships between social class, sex, and marital status and self-reported distress. Only in the comparison of whites to nonwhites is differential exposure the key determinant. The implications of these findings for our under-standing of the social status-psychological distress relationship are discussed. A central problem to emerge from the study of sociodemographic correlates of mental dis-order has been to explain why persons in cer-tain disadvantaged social statuses have the high rates of emotional distress they do. The earliest work on this problem concemed itself with social class (Faris and Dunham, 1939; Hollingshead and Redlich, 1958; Langner and Michael, 1963). But over the last two decades a great deal of research has also been directed toward the overrepresentation of certain emo-tional problems among the unmarried (Bach