Gender and Stress Generation:An Examination of Interpersonal Predictors

摘要

The goal of the current study was to examine interpersonal predictors of stress generation as well as explore gender differences. Two hundred and six (67 male and 139 female) college students completed an initial online assessment of reassurance seeking and sociotropy and maintained a 14-day diary of their mood and stress-ful life events. Logistic regression analyses examined male and female participants separately, and results indicated that reassurance seeking and sociotropy predicted stress generation in women but not men. More specifically, whereas greater reas-surance seeking predicted a greater occurrence of dependent interpersonal stress, greater sociotropy predicted lower levels of such stress. It is important to note that irrespective of gender, neither reassurance seeking nor sociotropy predicted significant fluctuations in achievement dependent or independent stress. Overall, the results indicated that there are significant gender differences when examining interpersonal predictors of stress generation and thus, underscores the need to ex-amine gender explicitly