Clinical instrument

Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10)

A 10-item self-report of the degree to which situations in one's life over the past month are appraised as stressful. Items 4, 5, 7, and 8 are positively stated and reverse-scored. Higher totals indicate greater perceived stress. Administer under clinician oversight.

You learn how stressful your life has felt over the past month.

For anyone curious about how they handle stress.

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Report and PDF $6, paid after you finish.

Your answers stay private.

It comes from health psychology research on how unpredictable and overloaded life feels.

Sample result, example data. Illustrative chart with invented scores; it does not describe any real respondent.

What this test is

Welcome. A 10-item self-report of the degree to which situations in one's life over the past month are appraised as stressful. Items 4, 5, 7, and 8 are positively stated and reverse-scored. Higher totals indicate greater perceived stress. Administer under clinician oversight.

The measure

The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) was developed by Cohen and colleagues (1983). It has 10 items, each answered on a 5-point (Never … Very often) scale.

Cohen, S., Kamarck, T., & Mermelstein, R. (1983). A global measure of perceived stress. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 24(4), 385–396.

At a glance

Items

Response scale

5-point (Never … Very often)

Est. time

~1 min

Access

Free to take · Full report and PDF for $6, or $3 to repeat

Time frame

Past month

What it measures

The scale asks how often, over the past month, a person has been upset by something unexpected, felt unable to control important things, felt nervous and stressed, felt confident about handling personal problems, felt that things were going their way, found that they could not cope with everything they had to do, been able to control irritations, felt on top of things, been angered by things outside their control, and felt difficulties piling up too high to overcome. The items concern appraisal rather than events: not what happened, but how unmanageable life has felt.

Cohen, Kamarck and Mermelstein (1983) developed the scale from the transactional view of stress, in which stress arises when people judge that demands exceed their resources for coping (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). Counting stressful events had proved a weak predictor of health, partly because the same event is experienced very differently by different people, and the scale was designed to measure the appraisal directly. The ten-item version is the standard short form (Cohen and Williamson, 1988).

Positively worded items are reversed and all ten ratings are summed. Lower totals indicate that life has felt predictable and manageable over the past month; higher totals indicate that it has felt uncontrollable and overloaded. The score reflects a recent period and can change quickly with circumstances, so it is best read as a description of the past month rather than of a stable trait. It is not a diagnosis.

The scale is among the most widely used measures in health psychology, where perceived stress has been studied in relation to illness, health behavior and recovery, and it is used in counseling and stress-management programs to track change. On this site, the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10) measures the distress that can follow from sustained stress, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) describes how emotions are managed, and the Brief Self-Control Scale (BSCS) describes everyday self-regulation.

Validity evidence

A two-factor structure (perceived helplessness and self-efficacy) has been replicated widely, and scores correlate with depression, anxiety, and health outcomes (Lee, 2012).

Example item

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

NeverAlmost neverSometimesFairly oftenVery often

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Scoring & interpretation

Your report explains each of your scale scores in plain language.

References

Cohen, S., Kamarck, T., & Mermelstein, R. (1983). A global measure of perceived stress. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 24(4), 385-396.
Cohen, S., & Williamson, G. (1988). Perceived stress in a probability sample of the United States. In S. Spacapan & S. Oskamp (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Health (pp. 31-67). Sage.
Lee, E.-H. (2012). Review of the psychometric evidence of the Perceived Stress Scale. Asian Nursing Research, 6(4), 121-127.

Sample report preview

The report shows your total score and where it falls across the range of possible scores, followed by a plain-language explanation of what scores in that region describe. Where the instrument has published interpretive bands, the report names the band and what it means. It closes with notes on how to read the result and on when a conversation with a qualified professional may be useful.

Report contents
Section	What it shows
Score	Your scale score, computed with the published scoring key.
Comparisons	How your scores compare with a published comparison group.

It is free to take, and the full report with a downloadable copy is $6.

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