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 understanding of the social status-psychological distress relationship are discussed.