Abstract
Life stress is central to models of psychopathology, and traditions have focused on either assessing stress exposure—what occurs in the environment—or stress responding—the person’s multimodal reaction to the exposure, including stress perception. The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) is the most widely used measure of stress perception in psychopathology and health research; although it was intended to measure appraisals of transient stressors, it is often used as a stand-in for stress exposure. However, the PSS may inadvertently measure a general neuroticism factor (i.e. a stable tendency to experience negative emotion) rather than capture environmental conditions or situational appraisals. Therefore, we investigated the structural relationships between perceived stress and neuroticism in two samples. In secondary analyses of samples randomly split into two equal halves, we conducted exploratory factor analyses of perceived stress and neuroticism, followed by confirmatory factor analyses. The results suggest a substantially common structure characterized by a shared overwhelmed factor plus smaller specific factors for low self-efficacy (entirely derived from perceived stress) and self-dislike (derived from neuroticism). The PSS was also correlated more with neuroticism than with stress exposure in a subsample. Researchers using the PSS should consider that the measure may largely capture trait neuroticism and poor self-efficacy.