Cited by 531Stress Responses and CortisolResilience and Mental HealthHealth disparities and outcomes

Ten Surprising Facts About Stressful Life Events and Disease Risk

Open access
Cohen, Sheldon, Murphy, Michael L.M., Prather, Aric A.·2019·Annual Review of Psychology

Abstract

After over 70 years of research on the association between stressful life events and health, it is generally accepted that we have a good understanding of the role of stressors in disease risk. In this review, we highlight that knowledge but also emphasize misunderstandings and weaknesses in this literature with the hope of triggering further theoretical and empirical development. We organize this review in a somewhat provocative manner, with each section focusing on an important issue in the literature where we feel that there has been some misunderstanding of the evidence and its implications. Issues that we address include the definition of a stressful event, characteristics of diseases that are impacted by events, differences in the effects of chronic and acute events, the cumulative effects of events, differences in events across the life course, differences in events for men and women, resilience to events, and methodological challenges in the literature.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-102857

Cites

126 of 126 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 7

  1. Brown GW, Harris TO. 1989 Life Events and Illness. New York: Guilford Press
  2. Carver CS, Scheier MF. 1999 Stress, coping, and self-regulatory processes In Handbook of Personality, ed. Pervin LA, John OP, pp. 553– 75. New York: Guilford Press
  3. Cohen F, Horowitz MJ, Lazarus RS, Moos RH, Robins LN, 1982 Panel report on psychosocial assets and modifiers of stress In Stress and Human Health: Analysis and Implication of Research, ed. Elliott GR, Eisdorfer C, pp. 147– 88. Berlin: Springer
  4. Cohen S. 2016 Psychological stress, immunity, and physical disease In Scientists Making a Difference: The Greatest Living Behavioral and Brain Scientists Talk About Their Most Important Contributions, ed. Sternberg R, Fiske F, Foss D, pp. 419– 23. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press
  5. Cyranowski JM, Frank E, Young E, Shear K. 2000 Adolescent onset of the gender difference in lifetime rates of major depression. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 57: 21– 27 10632229
  6. Glass DC, Singer JE. 1972 Urban Stress. Cambridge, MA: Academic
  7. Monroe SM, Slavich GM, Georgiades K. 2009 The social environment and life stress in depression In Handbook of Depression, ed. Gotlib IH, Hammen CL, pp. 340– 60. New York: Guilford Press

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Cohen, S., Murphy, M. L. M., & Prather, A. A.
Affiliations
  • Carnegie Mellon University (US)
  • University of California, San Francisco (US)
Venue
Annual Review of Psychology
Published
2019-01-04
Volume
70
Issue
1
Pages
577-597
ISSN
  • 0066-4308 (ISSN-L)
  • 1545-2085
OpenAlex
W2811485232
Cited by
531
References
124
Citations by year
2026: 58 · 2025: 82 · 2024: 82 · 2023: 92 · 2022: 88 · 2021: 74 · 2020: 32 · 2019: 18 · 2018: 3
FWCI
3.57
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Annual Review of Psychology (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
  • eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
Funders
  • National Institute on Aging (R24AG048024)
  • National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (R01AT006694)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Behavioral Neuroscience › Stress Responses and Cortisol
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Resilience and Mental Health
  • Social Sciences › Health › Health disparities and outcomes
Keywords
life events, disease risk, chronic stress, acute stress, cumulative stress, life course, sex differences, resilience, methodological issues, health effects of stress
MeSH terms
Cardiovascular Diseases, Communicable Diseases, Depressive Disorder, Humans, Life Change Events, Neoplasms, Stress, Psychological

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review