Psychological androgyny and stressful life events

Seventy-one college students completed the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, a stressful life-events questionnaire, and some general questions on adjustment. Subjects were also asked to rate the stressful life events they had experienced in the prior 12 months along the dimensions of desirability, amount of change, anticipation, control, and meaningfulness. As hypothesized, androgynous subjects rated their stressful life events as less undesirable than other subjects, but this result only held for females (p less than .01). Undifferentiated subjects rated their stressful life events as less meaningful than other subjects (p less than .01) and androgynous subjects rated themselves as happier than other subjects (p less than .05). No differences were found among androgynous, masculine, feminine, and undifferentiated persons for the dimensions of change, anticipation, or control. Of the five dimensions examined, only meaningfulness was significantly related to happiness (r = .34, p less than .01). One possible reason for the results of this study may be differential access to and/or use of social support systems by persons of different sex-types. Some findings of the present study are presented that support this contention.