United States Forces Japan

Originally from Cornell, Holmes is now at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and it was there, with the help of a young psychiatrist named Richard Rahe, that he created an ingenious research tool named the Life-Change Units Scale. This was a device for measuring how much change an individual has experienced in a given span of time. Its development was an important methodological breakthrough, making it possible, for the first time, to qualify, at least crudely, the rate of change in individual life. Reasoning that different kinds of life-changes strike us with different force, Holmes and Rahe began by listing as many such changes as they could. A divorce, a marriage, a move to a new home – such events affect each of us differently. Moreover, some carry greater impact than others. A vacation trip, for example, may represent a pleasant break in the routine. Yet it can hardly compare in impact with, say, the death of a parent. Holmes and Rahe next took their list of life-changes to thousands of men and women in many walks of life in the United States and Japan ...»