College undergraduates were administered the Life Experiences Survey, the Discomfort scale of the Psychological Screening Inventory, and the most recent version of the Sensation Seeking Scale. The findings did not replicate Smith et al.'s results concerning the role that sensation seeking plays in the relationship between negative life change and psychological distress. However, the data suggest that the sensation seeking motive is a causal variable that is predictive of recent life events that college students have experienced, and that future life-stress research should examine the occurence of controllable life events as a function of subjects' personality traits.