Stressful Life Events,General Mental Health,and Temperament among Late Adolescent Females

Abstract

Interrelationships among stressful life events, general mental health, and temperament were investigated with a sample of 133 late adolescent females. Three different stressful life event schemes were used to explore these interrelationships, including a categorization based on contextual or social domain, a categorization-based source of control for event occurrence, and a unit-weighted summation of life events. Differential relations between the disaggregated social domain and source of control dimensions and general mental health were found. Contrary to previous findings on stress-mental health relationships in adolescence, a socially-interactional stress dimension, and not a family stress dimension, was most highly correlated with general mental health. Alternative explanations were proposed to account for these discrepant findings, one of which suggested the need to consider differences in contextual "press" factors which may differentially influence early and late adolescents. Moderate to strong support was found for the relationships of temperament to general mental health and to stress. Eight of ten temperament-mental health correlations were statistically significant. Similar to the mental health-stress relation findings, differential relations were found between temperament attributes and the disaggregated social domain and source of control dimensions. Temperament attributes were generally more highly associated with the occurrence of socially-interactive, peer, and controllable stressful life events. Multiple regression analysis indicated that temperament and stress made statistically reliable contributions to general mental health.

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