Negative stress affects our physical and psychological health. How we perceive our general stress affects our experience of work and situations therein. The things that are perceived as stressful vary among individuals and how we deal with our perceived stress also varies. The purpose of this study was to clarify to what extent our general perceived stress-level inter-acted with the sense of coherence in our experience of work and situations at work. Another purpose was to examine how the interaction were affected by age. Lastly, the purpose was to see if there is any differences between genders. Men and women (N=171) working 100 % in the last month participated in my study.

To collect the data, I used Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), Sense of Coherence Scale (SOC) and Work Experience Measurement Scale (WEMS) in conjunction with question each participant´s background. The multiple regression analysis showed that PSS was the strongest predictor variable on experience of work and situations at work (B = -1.22, p< .001). SOC had a smaller relationship (B = 0.35, p< .01). Gender (B = -1.70, p = .717) and age (B = -0.22, p = .430) was not found to be significant. With the predictor variable SOC, the explained variance was 24.2% and when PSS was added to the model, the explained variance increased significantly to 28.4%.