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Perceived Stress Scale (PSS)

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Handbook of Assessment in Mindfulness Research

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Abstract

The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) was developed as a self-report, subjective measure to evaluate the extent to which situations are assessed as stressful in an individual’s life. The PSS determines the extent to which respondents found their lives overloaded, uncontrollable, and unpredictable. Since its inception, the PSS has been widely adopted within both general and clinical settings receiving over 20,000 citations on Google Scholar, and the scale has been translated into 28 different languages. This chapter presents a theoretical overview of stress, the PSS scale’s development and initial validation, further examination of the psychometric properties from more recent studies, and a brief outline of the three versions of the PSS, with the main focus of the chapter on the most commonly used scale, PSS-10. The PSS has shown to be a reliable measure of perceived stress with robust psychometric properties that are suitable for mindfulness research.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Scott Townsend & Oleg N. Medvedev

Authors
  1. Scott Townsend
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  2. Oleg N. Medvedev
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Oleg N. Medvedev .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Oleg N. Medvedev

  2. North Shore Campus, Auckland Univ of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

    Christian U. Krägeloh

  3. Dept of Psychology and Neuroscience, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

    Richard J. Siegert

  4. Augusta University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Nirbhay N. Singh

Appendix

Appendix

PSS-10 (Cohen & Williamson, 1988)

Instructions: The questions in this scale ask you about your feelings and thoughts during the last month. In each case, please indicate your response with a number in the field representing how often you felt or thought a certain way.

For each question choose from the following alternatives:

0 – never, 1 – almost never, 2 – sometimes, 3 – fairly often, and 4 – very often

  1. 1.

    In the last month, how often have you been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly?

  2. 2.

    In the last month, how often have you felt that you were unable to control the important things in your life?

  3. 3.

    In the last month, how often have you felt nervous and “stressed”?

  4. 4.

    In the last month, how often have you felt confident about your ability to handle your personal problems?

  5. 5.

    In the last month, how often have you felt that things were going your way?

  6. 6.

    In the last month, how often have you found that you could not cope with all the things that you had to do?

  7. 7.

    In the last month, how often have you been able to control irritations in your life?

  8. 8.

    In the last month, how often have you felt that you were on top of things?

  9. 9.

    In the last month, how often have you been angered because of things that were outside your control?

  10. 10.

    In the last month, how often have you felt difficulties were piling up so high that you could not overcome them?

PSS Scoring

PSS-10 scores are obtained by reversing the scores on the four positively worded items 4, 5, 7, and 8 (e.g., 0 = 4, 1 = 3, 2 = 2, 3 = 1, 4 = 0), and then summing scores across all 10 items together to get the total score (Table 1).

Table 1 Converting from a raw PSS-10 score (10–50) to an interval scale in logit units and using the original English-language scale metrics, based on the study of Medvedev et al. (2019)
Full size table

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Townsend, S., Medvedev, O.N. (2022). Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). In: Medvedev, O.N., Krägeloh, C.U., Siegert, R.J., Singh, N.N. (eds) Handbook of Assessment in Mindfulness Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77644-2_91-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77644-2_91-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-77644-2

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