The second scale focuses on feelings pertaining to historical losses. Its purpose is to identify emotional responses that are triggered when reminders of historical losses or thoughts pertaining to historical loss come to mind. Most of the items associated with historical loss were emotionally charged. We wanted to tap those emotions and tie them directly to the sense of loss. Simply correlating indicators of historical loss with standard stress measures (e.g., measures of depression, anxiety, trauma) creates “noise” in that the symptoms may be the result of proximal rather than historical causes. Our intent was to determine the extent to which the respondent would associate emotional distress directly to historical losses. All of the distress items were mentioned by the people we spoke with and approved by the elder focus groups as appropriate. (author abstract)