The relationship between occupational stress, dysfunctional attitudes and the cognitive phenomenological theory of stress and coping (CPS theory) was examined in this paper, Specifically, two tests, with a total of 244 subjects, were conducted on; 1) The relevance of dysfunctional attitudes to the aetiology of occupational stress, and 2) The validity of CPS theory on occupational stress. The different magnitudes of stress were also taken into consideration, this led to the collection of 2 sets of data. They were data from perceived high and perceived low occupational stress events. results from structural equation modeling indicated that the CPS theory could not adequately represent data from both high and low occupational stresses. However, other statistical results indicated significant relationships between variables in the CPS theory. This suggested that the aetiological process of occupational stress was more complex than that depicted in the CPS theory. Dysfunctional attitude was found to be relevant to the aetiology of high occupational stress but not in low occupational stress. It appeared that dysfunctional attitude was triggered only when the occupational stress level reached a certain threshold. Hence, two structurally different aetiological models were developed for high and low occupational stresses. Implications of the above findings were also discussed in this paper.

Key words; dysfunctional attitude, deep level cognition, occupational stress, cognitive phenomenological theory of stress and coping, aetiological process