Abstract
In terms of life events, ratings of actual experiences and of imagined ones among the first-year university students were compared. A total of 81 students were asked to complete the Life Events Checklist for College Students by checking whether they had experienced the listed life events in the previous 12 months; then they evaluated the influence of each life event as really experienced or imagined. The correlations between these mean ratings for different life events was high. When the items were divided by rating of actual events as positive (desirable) or negative (undesirable), the correlation of the two ratings for positive life events was high, while that for negative life events was relatively low. This may be influenced by the nature of positive and negative life events.