Affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses to economic stress

The purposes of the study were to test the hypotheses of stress and management theories concerning responses to an economic stressor and to identify differences between farm men and women in responses to the same event. The study verified by path analysis that the behavioral economic adjustment strategies activated by 298 women and 294 men were influenced by the affective responses of perceiving emotional stress and the cognitive deciding processes. The analysisfailed to support the hypotheses that perceiving emotional stress would motivate respondents to initiate cognitive deciding processes. There were gender differences in the importance of age and education in explaining the variance of cognitive deciding processes and behavioral economic adjustment strategies in the household.