Coping Skills Research Paper

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That the birds of worry and care fly above your head, this you cannot change. But that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent. —Chinese proverb

You have a test scheduled in your 9 a.m. class. Studying late, you finally set the alarm and get to sleep about 2 a.m. You awaken only to discover that the alarm either did not wake you or failed to ring and it is now 8:30. You have only 30 minutes to dress and drive 15 minutes to campus. After jumping in the shower, you discover the hot water is off and you have only cold water. Unfortunately, your last pair of clean jeans is ripped and you must wear the dirty jeans off the floor. As you head for the car, you notice that your left front tire is flat and you have no choice but to change the tire, wasting precious minutes in the process. Finally, it is 8:55, you are in the car and only a few minutes from campus. You are in line to turn into campus when the person in front of you stops when the light turns yellow. Finally, you park in student parking, half-run to your building, and see a note on the classroom door: Class canceled.

Unfortunately, events such as those described above are not uncommon. Avoiding these types of daily hassles is not possible. However, the accumulation of these annoying incidents leads us to feel stressed, irritable, and frustrated. The strategies we use to deal with such events have been labeled coping skills and will be the focus of this chapter. We will discuss the most common theories relating to coping and how coping skills are assessed. Finally, we will learn how our knowledge of stress and coping skills is being applied in two areas: cardiovascular disease/psychoneuroimmunology and resilience/positive psychology.

Although it has only been in the past several decades that psychologists have consistently documented that psychological as well as physiological factors can produce stress, the study of stress goes back much further. In 1822, French mathematician Augustin Cauchy first coined the terms “stress” and “strain.” His definition would probably not be recognized by many psychologists today. He described “stress” as the pressure per unit area and “strain” as the ratio of the increase or decrease in the length of an object to its original length.

In the twentieth century, Walter Cannon and Hans Selye advanced our understanding of the physiology of the stress response. Despite the universal nature of the body’s response to stressors, people differ markedly in how they respond behaviorally and cognitively to stressful events. In more recent decades, research has focused on the psychological dimensions of the stress response, as well as on coping strategies used to counter the effects of stress.

Coping: Research And Theory

Traditionally, coping has been viewed as a response to a negative situation. Coping strategies, therefore, are those efforts initiated by an individual to try to master, tolerate, reduce, or endure stressful events (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Such efforts may be purely behavioral (unplugging a child’s loud stereo), purely psychological (crying), or a combination of behavioral and psychological responses.

Psychologists studying coping have had a rather tall order because coping represents a complex sequence of psychological and behavioral processes that unfold over time in response to similarly complex environmental events. Naturally, people process information about their environment in different ways. Drivers, for instance, may react differently to a traffic light turning yellow as they approach the intersection. Some drivers will calmly brake and come to a stop; other drivers will be frustrated by the yellow light and accelerate in order to get through the intersection. The environmental circumstance is the same, but the two sets of hypothetical drivers respond to the situation differently. The same is true of how people manage stressful life events. How people evaluate any particular stressor will have implications for how they choose to respond to it. Is it just an annoying event, or an extremely distressing one? Is it likely to be short-lived, or a long-term problem?

Just as stressors differ across many dimensions, so, too, do the styles and capabilities of people in responding to stressors. Research on coping has identified several distinct patterns of coping. These coping styles differ in terms of who uses them, under what circumstances they use them, and how effective they are. Phenomenological theories propose that the same event can be perceived by different individuals in distinct ways, as a result of subjective perceptions of the environment. Many psychologists argue that these perceptions, or cognitive appraisals, of the individual play a critical role in the coping process.

Individuals also differ in how flexible they are in the use of coping strategies. Some individuals tend to use the same coping strategies regardless of the specific situational demands, while others vary their use of them. As might be expected, good strategy-situation fit is related to adaptive coping outcomes such as psychological well-being, physical well-being, social adaptation, and reduced strain symptoms. Research investigating the processes underlying coping flexibility reveals two distinct appraisal processes: differentiation and integration. Differentiation refers to the ability of an individual to view a situation from many perspectives before deciding on a coping strategy. Integration refers to the ability to perceive the advantages and disadvantages of pursuing one course of action—or of choosing one coping strategy—over another. Individuals high in coping flexibility are found to engage in both of these cognitive processes.

Process Theory (Transactional Model) Of Coping

Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman (1984) introduced the process theory, or transactional model, of coping over 20 years ago. This theory has arguably been the most influential theory of coping skills proposed in the field. In essence, these researchers defined coping skills as behavioral and cognitive strategies to manage situational demands (stressors) appraised as taxing or exceeding one’s ability to adapt. Coping strategies, therefore, have two major functions. First, the coping strategy needs to manage the problem that is causing stress. Second, the emotions relating to the stressor need to be addressed. According to Lazarus and Folkman, the coping process begins when an individual cognitively appraises that a stressful event will have an impact on him or her (primary appraisal). Once appraisal occurs, the individual then determines possible outcomes and what action can be taken to deal with the stressor (secondary appraisal). This model views the two components of cognitive appraisal (primary appraisal and secondary appraisal) as being situationally specific. That is, a person’s cognitive appraisal changes as a function of the stressful situation encountered and the perceived variety of resources available to deal with the situation.

Researchers have identified two major categories of coping skills: problem-focused coping skills, responses that directly alter or resolve the stressful situation; and emotion-focused coping skills, efforts to manage and regulate one’s emotional reactions to the stressor. Individuals engage in both problem-solving and emotion-focused coping simultaneously in an effort to deal with perceived stressors. Particular behaviors may be seen as more proactive and problem-focused (confrontational coping, problem solving, information seeking) and other behaviors may be seen as more emotion-focused (distancing and self-control). However, such predefined categorization ignores the intentions of the individual engaged in the behavior. It is certainly possible that so-called problem-focused strategies such as information seeking may, in fact, reduce emotional costs, such as heightened fear and increased experience of false alarms. This point may be important in measuring coping skills as well as in efforts to predict coping skills in particular stressful situations (Shiloh & Orgler-Shoob, 2006).

Subsequent researchers have expanded these two categories. Many researchers describe a third category of relationship-focused coping directed at managing, regulating, or preserving relationships during times of stress. These relationship-focused coping strategies may be either problem-focused or emotion-focused in nature.

In contrast, factor-analytic studies of coping have repeatedly identified three primary coping methods variously labeled as (a) problem-solving, seeking support, and avoidance; (b) task-oriented, emotion-oriented, and avoidance-oriented; or (c) cognitive self-control, solace seeking, and ineffective escapism. The task-oriented, emotion-oriented, and avoidance-oriented cluster is widely used in the literature. Task-oriented strategies are problem-focused and similar to Lazarus and Folkman’s original proposal. Task-oriented strategies involve taking direct action to alter the situation itself or to reduce the amount of stress it evokes. Such strategies may be anticipatory or occur at the moment of the stressful situation.

Emotion-oriented strategies are similar to the emotion-focused strategies proposed by Lazarus and Folkman. With these strategies, the individual attempts to alter emotional responses to stressors, usually by refraining the problem in such a way that it no longer evokes a negative emotional response. Such strategies may be most effective in reducing stress in situations in which there are no possible effective task-oriented strategies. The third category, avoidance-oriented coping strategies, may involve avoiding the situation, denying its existence, or losing hope. This category may also include indirect efforts to adjust to the stressor by distancing oneself, evading the problem, or engaging in unrelated activities for the purpose of reducing feelings of stress.

The first two categories (task-oriented and emotion-oriented) are typically perceived as proactive. Stressors perceived as controllable tend to elicit more proactive coping mechanisms, while stressors perceived as uncontrollable tend to elicit more avoidance strategies. As might be expected, better adjustment, as measured by higher self-rated coping effectiveness and less depression, tends to be associated with the two proactive strategies. Several researchers have suggested that task-oriented coping is the most efficacious strategy to deal with stress in the long run.

Although emotion-focused approaches to coping have typically been considered less effective than task-oriented or problem-focused approaches, there is some research questioning this assumption. Questionnaires measuring coping styles may be confounded with distress and self-deprecation. Longitudinal and experimental studies that assess coping through acknowledging, understanding, and expressing emotion (emotion-focused coping) using scales that do not confound coping with distress and self-deprecation have documented the adaptive value of emotion-focused coping strategies in the context of several types of stressors, including infertility, breast cancer, and chronic pain. Likewise, emotion-focused coping has been found to be more effective when dealing with a situation that involves harm or loss, whereas problem-focused coping is more effective in situations involving an anticipated stressor (Stanton, Revenson, & Tennen, 2007).

Theoretical Issues Subsequent To Lazarus And Folkman

Personality by Context Interactions

Although characteristics of the stressful situation are critical in determining coping skills, personality variables have also been found to be important. The idea that personality characteristics could buffer against physical illness grew out of the wave of research linking sickness to emotional stress during the 1970s. Study after study has shown that people experiencing stressful life events fell victim to colds, flu, and other maladies more frequently than did people who reported less stress. Personality variables have consistently been linked to a greater likelihood of experiencing stressful situations, the appraisal of an event as stressful, certain coping strategies, and the effectiveness of these coping strategies.

For example, Suzanne Ouellete Kobasa and her colleagues (Kobasa Maddi, & Courington, 1981) introduced the concept of hardiness as an initial attempt in accounting for individuals who were able to adapt well in the face of seemingly insurmountable stressors. Hardiness is a set of beliefs about oneself, the world, and how they interact. Three interrelated attitudes have been identified: commitment, challenge, and control. Commitment refers to an individual’s readiness to become involved in all areas of their life including work, family, relationships, and social institutions. Challenge refers to the tendency to believe and act as though one has the power to affect the stressful situation. Challenge refers to how the person perceives the stressful situation. A person may view a novel or potentially stressful situation as challenging and stimulating rather than as threatening. In contrast to the concept of cognitive appraisal proposed by Lazarus and Folkman that is situation-specific, Kobasa proposed hardiness as a set of personality characteristics that would be consistent across situations. Hardy attitudes allow individuals to face stressors accurately and lead to problem-focused coping strategies.

Maddi and Kobasa (1991) reported that hardy people are unusually resistant to many kinds of illness. Hoping to bring some of these differences to light, they began a seven-year-long study of illness patterns and stress among middle-aged managers, both men and women, at the Illinois Bell Telephone Company. They tested the managers every year, with questionnaires, interviews, and medical examinations. The researchers found that some of these people were much more likely to become sick after a stressful event. In contrast to the sicklier group, those in the healthier group showed higher levels of commitment, challenge, and control.

Recently, research has utilized the five-factor model of personality (McCrae & Costa, 1996) in examining how personality impacts coping. This model describes personality in terms of five dimensions: neuroticism or negative affectivity (N), extraversion (E), openness (O), agreeableness (A), and conscientiousness (C). Individuals high in N are more likely to select coping strategies that exacerbate stressful situations. That is, people who score higher on measures of N tend to report lower levels of problem solving, and higher levels of confrontation, escape avoidance, and self-blame. In contrast, people who score high on measures of E appear to select more effective and active coping strategies, including cognitive reframing and active problem solving. Less research has investigated O, A, and C, but findings suggest that those higher on measures of O are adaptive and flexible in coping with stressors, those higher in A select less confrontational approaches to coping, and those higher on C report less escape avoidance and self-blame. Findings also seem consistent in that these dimensions of personality interact with stressor type to elicit coping responses, with some people (e.g., those higher on O) varying their coping strategies more adaptively than others (e.g., those higher on N).

Given that genetic influences have been shown to have an impact on personality and that personality dispositions play an important role in predicting variance in coping, it isn’t surprising that several researchers have sought to identify both gender and genetic differences in coping. Several studies have reported that women are more likely than men to utilize emotion-focused and avoidance coping strategies. Kenji Kato and Nancy Pedersen (2005), reporting on results from the ongoing Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging, a substudy of the Swedish Twin Registry, demonstrated that genes, via their influence on personality, may affect an individual’s coping style. When frustrated, those high in E are more likely to utilize task-oriented coping, while individuals who score high in N are more likely to use emotion-focused coping. In addition, gender differences reported suggest that women’s coping styles are less strongly correlated with specific personality traits than are men’s coping styles.

Self-Efficacy

Lazarus and Folkman described the second part of the appraisal process, secondary appraisal, as an individual’s judgment about possible outcomes in a stressful situation and what action can be taken to deal with the stressor. In essence, the person must ask, “What can I do?” A key aspect of asking this question is for people to judge the extent to which they can control the situation. Self-efficacy may be seen as contributing to this decision-making process. Albert Bandura (1977) defined self-efficacy as the perception one has about one’s ability to perform a specific behavior. Self-efficacy is highly situation-specific—a high level of self-efficacy in one domain does not necessarily correlate with high levels of self-efficacy in other domains. For example, believing that you will score highly on a psychology test does not mean that you believe you will score highly on a calculus test. Beliefs about coping self-efficacy would, thus, be integral in determining selection of coping strategies. Self-efficacy beliefs have been found to predict diabetic self-care behaviors as well as adherence to habits that lower cardiovascular risk and prevent myocardial infarctions in persons with coronary heart disease.

Religion and Spirituality

Although reports vary, in the United States, somewhere between 80 and 95 percent of adults express a belief in God and 60 to 70 percent identify religion as the most important influence in their lives. Despite the prominence of religion, psychologists and other social scientists have neglected the role of religion and spirituality in the empirical literature until fairly recently. Over the past 20 years, an increased number of studies have focused on religion, spirituality, and coping, which seems understandable when one considers how many people turn to prayer when confronted with serious stressors such as a health dilemma. In fact, one study found that family (79 percent) and religion (44 percent) were the two most frequently used support systems reported by patients diagnosed with cancer.

Researchers have linked religious coping with a variety of social, personal, and situational factors as well as psychological and physical health. Spiritual attachment to God appears as a key factor in the religious coping process. Spirituality has been found to operate at several levels of the stress and coping process at any point in time. For example, spiritual beliefs operate as a contextual framework orienting an individual’s interpretation of, comprehension of, and reaction to life experiences. Spiritual beliefs help people to construct meaning out of suffering and provide for an optimistic and hopeful attitude. Spiritual beliefs may also facilitate an active attitude toward coping and the strengthening of social support in times of stress. Social support related to religion has been associated with numerous health factors such as lower morbidity for hypertension.

Assessment of Coping Skills

The measurement of coping skills has been fraught with difficulty. Traditionally, coping skills are assessed by inventories that can be broadly grouped into one of two categories. In the first category are questionnaires that conceive of coping as a habitual trait, coping style, or disposition describing an individual’s response independently of any particular stressful situation. This category reflects a perspective that may be referred to as stylistic or dispositional and assumes that relatively stable, person-based factors underlie habitual coping strategies. The second category includes questionnaires that assess how an individual might cope in a particular stressful situation. This category reflects a perspective that has been called contextual and assumes that more transitory, situation-based factors shape individuals’ cognitive appraisals of their choice of specific coping strategies.

Stylistic or Dispositional Approaches to Assessment

Four major assessment methods have been suggested by proponents of the stylistic or dispositional approaches. First, the assessment of what is called defensive styles is accomplished through the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ). The underlying assumption of the DSQ is that people use defensive mechanisms to distort and reduce stress. The DSQ measures four characteristic styles of dealing with conflict: maladaptive action styles, such as acting out and withdrawal; image distortion styles, such as omnipotence and primitive idealization (the exaggeration of perceived positive qualities in a person or object to the exclusion of everyday, or expected, defects); self-sacrificing styles, such as reaction formation and pseudo-altruism; and adaptive or mature styles, such as suppression and humor.

The second measurement method is exemplified by the Coping Orientation to Problem Experience (COPE) inventory. The COPE inventory asks respondents to choose how they would typically manage stressful situations. Fifteen strategies are grouped into problem-focused coping (active coping, planning, suppression of competing activities, restraint, and seeking social support for instrumental reasons), adaptive emotion-focused coping (seeking social support for emotional reasons, positive reinterpretation, acceptance, religion, and humor), and potentially maladaptive emotion-focused coping (denial, mental disengagement, behavioral disengagement, focus on and venting of emotions, and the use of alcohol and drugs). A second inventory, the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS), is quite similar but organizes coping strategies into task-oriented, emotion-oriented, and avoidance-oriented coping styles (divided into distraction and social diversion).

Assessing problem-solving styles is the third method for measuring coping strategies under the stylistic/ dispositional perspective. The Problem-Solving Inventory, for example, assesses self-confidence in problem-solving abilities, an approach-versus-avoidance problem-solving style, and the perception of personal control in handling problems. Once again, perception of overall problemsolving strategy is obtained rather than looking at specific problems. Another measure falling into this category is the Personal Style Inventory that assesses the extent to which an individual, when confronting a threat, seeks out information (monitoring) or avoids information (blunting).

The fourth and final category of tests assessing coping strategies under the stylistic/dispositional perspective includes tests that examine personality dimensions. Measures such as the NEO five-factor inventories (extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, orderliness, and conscientiousness), the Millon Multiaxial Clinical Inventory, the Millon Behavioral Health Inventory, and the Personality Assessment Inventory assess personal resources and deficits that provide a personal context for coping. The Life Orientation Scale assesses dispositional optimism (general expectancy for positive outcomes), which has also been linked to coping style. Finally, the Sense of Coherence Scale measures three components of coherence: comprehensibility (seeing the world as structured and predictable), manageability (adequate personal and social resources to meet environmental demands), and meaningfulness (is it worthwhile to attempt to cope with the stressor?). Coherence has also been shown to be related to coping styles.

Contextual Approaches to Assessment

In contrast to the stylistic/dispositional perspective, the contextual approaches focus on identifying the coping responses employed in specific stressful encounters. Four basic types of coping strategies are hypothesized under this perspective: cognitive approach, behavioral approach, cognitive avoidance, and behavioral avoidance. Cognitive approach strategies rely on logical analysis and positive reappraisal, focusing on one aspect of the stressful situation at a time, reviewing past experiences, mentally rehearsing alternative actions and their probable consequences, and accepting the reality of a situation while restructuring it to find something favorable. Behavioral approach strategies focus on strategies such as seeking guidance or support and taking direct action to deal with a situation or the consequences of a situation. Cognitive avoidance strategies focus on denying or minimizing the seriousness of a situation while deciding that the basic situation cannot be altered. Finally, behavioral avoidance strategies focus on seeking alternative rewards by becoming involved in new activities.

Two of the most common measures that assess coping skills from this perspective are the Ways of Coping Questionnaire (WOC) and the Coping Responses Inventory (CRI). The WOC asks respondents to identify specific stressful situations and then to report their reliance on 66 coping responses. Six of the eight subscales assess problem-or approach-focused coping (positive reappraisal, accepting responsibility, self-control, seeking support, problem solving, and confrontation) and two assess emotion-focused coping (distancing and escape avoidance). The CRI is composed of eight subscales assessing cognitive approaches, behavioral approaches, cognitive avoidance, and behavioral avoidance strategies as already outlined

Other researchers have developed specific measures for particular types of stressors. For example, addiction-specific coping skills are assessed by the Process of Change Scale. Coping skills focused on pain management have been assessed by the Coping Strategies Questionnaire and the Cognitive Coping Strategy Inventory.

Deciding Which Approach to Use

The decision to use a more stylistic/dispositional measure or a contextual measure will most likely reflect the underlying assumptions of the psychologist doing the assessment. Using a general coping style inventory without specifying a particular situation may lead individuals to answer with “preferred” responses rather than with their actual coping strategies. Researchers disagree about how well general coping styles correlate with the ways in which an individual copes with a particular stressful situation. Some investigators report fairly low correlations between these variables, while other researchers report fairly high correlations. Likewise, the use of particular coping strategies varies from situation to situation, raising the importance of an appropriate match between chosen coping strategies and the situation-specific demands of a stressor. It is probably most useful to conceptualize the coping process as encompassing both enduring personal factors andmore transitory situational factors. Both personal coping styles and contextual factors have been shown to influence coping skills and to act together to influence psychosocial functioning and well-being.

Psychologists have also debated the frequency of assessment of coping skills. Using a cross-sectional approach is the most convenient and efficient method, but it fails to capture the dynamic interplay of coping and the experience of stress. Repeated-measures methodology decreases this problem yet often still fails to identify antecedents and consequences of behaviors. Day-to-day monitoring, also called the daily process method, has been suggested as the most advantageous way to gain a fuller understanding of contextual factors in coping. As might be expected, however, this approach is more time-consuming and expensive.

Applications

Health and Psydioneuroimmunology

Adaptive coping can ameliorate the consequences of stress, but maladaptive coping strategies have been found to lead to an increased risk for chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. The field of psychoneuroimmunology is a specialized field of research that studies the interactions among psychology, behavior, the brain, and the endocrine and immune systems of the body. In the interests of space, I will address only cardiovascular disease as an example of how our knowledge of coping skills is influencing future research in this area.

Considerable research evidence has accumulated documenting the negative impact of anger and hostility on health. Typically, anger is defined as the affect experienced by an individual when irritated or frustrated. Hostility refers to a system of negative beliefs about others. Both anger and hostility may be defined as negative affect, or the negative tendencies in the expression of feelings that may be seen across situations and time. Both anger and hostility have been identified as significant risk factors for coronary heart disease. Individuals high in anger and hostility experience greater stress in their environments and cope more poorly, thus creating more stress for themselves. In addition, individuals who are high in anger and hostility tend to provoke angry and hostile responses from others, increasing interpersonal stress. Most likely, this maladaptive coping pattern leads to decreased social support networks, higher conflicts in family relationships, and decreased marital satisfaction.

Research consistently finds that people who are most prone to anger are almost three times more likely to have a heart attack than those reporting low anger. Likewise, research conducted by Patricia Chang and her colleagues (Chang, Ford, Meoni, Wang, & Klag, 2002) found that medical students who became angry quickly when under stress were three times more likely to develop premature heart disease and five times more likely to have an early heart attack than their calmer colleagues. Hot tempers, in these studies, accounted for more variance in predicting heart disease than did traditional risk factors such as diabetes and hypertension.

Social situations and support appear to be crucial in mediating the impact of stress. The case is no different when considering the impact of anger on cardiovascular health. For example, highly hostile men who were harassed by a laboratory technician while attempting to unscramble words had greater physiological reactions than participants with low hostility. The harassed hostile men had higher blood pressures, heart rate, norepinephrine, testosterone, and cortisol responses. Similar results have been reported for women.

Isolation, low perceived social support, and social conflict have consistently been found to put people at higher risk for coronary heart disease. As might be expected, people who are angry tend to report low social support and high levels of conflict in close relationships. Researchers have found that husbands who received higher hostile and suspicious attitudes scores showed greater increases in blood pressure during discussions of a stressful marital issue than did those who had lower scores. Interestingly, the wives of those husbands who scored higher on these measures also showed greater increases in blood pressure. Similar results have been reported for wives identified as angry, including the changes in measures such as heart rate and blood pressure for the husbands of the angry wives. Being angry and hostile (or being the spouse of someone who is) raises physiological reactivity, thereby increasing cardiovascular risk. In addition, the marital stress associated with such a volatile relationship is likely to increase cardiovascular risk even more due to the decreased social support.

Other research supports these findings. In contrast to less hostile people, hostile people frequently do not appear to derive the same benefits from the social support of friends. In laboratory tests, less hostile individuals have a smaller rise in blood pressure when provided with the support of friends in comparison with those whose friends acted in a more neutral manner. Hostile participants, undergoing the same laboratory procedures, didn’t show the same benefit when provided with their friends’ support.

Coping skills that impact cardiovascular health have also been a focus of study. For example, researchers have found that those who cope with anger in constructive ways (what Lazarus & Folkman, 1984, might call problem-focused coping) have lower blood pressure than do people with fewer coping skills.

Studies also have focused on whether individuals express their anger or keep their anger to themselves. Results have been mixed: Some researchers have found that it is expressing anger that is most damaging; other researchers have found that suppressing anger is more dangerous to cardiovascular health. Chang et al. (2002) hypothesized that the relationship between anger and cardiovascular health may be much more complex. They found that if the expression of anger is viewed as a continuum, with people who consistently express their anger at one end and people who consistently suppress their anger at the other end, people in the middle of the continuum may be viewed as having flexible coping skills. People who cope more flexibly will adjust their coping as a function of the situation, so they might be more likely to express their anger about the decisions of their boss to their spouse than to their boss. Compared with those who cope more flexibly, people who fall at one end of the continuum or the other (people who consistently express or suppress their anger) exhibit significantly greater changes in cardiovascular symptoms, such as increased blood pressure and higher cholesterol and homocystine levels (amino acid that has been linked to heart disease).

Building Resilience and the Emergence of Positive Psychology

Resilience has been defined by psychologists as the ability to adapt in the face of tragedy, trauma, adversity, hardship, and ongoing stressors. Research examining children exposed to such trauma in their early lives consistently finds that some children are still able to thrive as adults. Obviously, determining factors that distinguish between people who emerge from traumatic situations relatively unscarred, or even experiencing self-growth, and people who do not would be of great benefit. Psychologists have identified four possible outcomes for those exposed to a traumatic event: submitting to the trauma, surviving with a decreased ability to function, recovery to a former level of functioning, or recovery to a higher level of functioning. This latter possibility may be referred to as self-growth, thriving, or resilience. Individuals with negative affect (anger, hostility, shame, fear, depression) are more likely to experience stress, whereas those with positive affect (enthusiasm, activity, control, commitment) are more likely to thrive when presented with stressful situations. For example, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the American Psychological Association conducted focus groups across the United States and found that people were interested in becoming more resilient in the face of such adversity. Building such resilience, however, is a fairly complicated process due to the multidimensional nature of resilience and the fact that one individual’s strategy for building resilience will most likely differ from that of another individual. Certain behaviors are fairly typical: maintaining good relationships, having an optimistic view of the world, keeping things in perspective, setting goals and taking steps to reach those goals, and being self-confident. Building resilience leads to more than just feeling better. Being more resilient helps reduce stress and is associated with improved health. In particular, good relationships, optimism, and the ability to find meaning in difficult life experiences have been linked to living longer.

Over the past 100 years, psychology has developed a significant level of understanding of how individuals cope with adversity, leading to an emphasis on treating psychological disorders. This emphasis has, unfortunately, led to psychologists spending little effort uncovering the factors underlying how people flourish under normal conditions. Instead, psychology, especially clinical psychology, has focused on psychopathology, in some ways neglecting people at the other end of the spectrum who live fulfilled and psychologically healthy lives. Over the past several decades, the field of positive psychology has begun to focus attention on how we might build positive qualities in people.

Martin Seligman (1991) has been a leading proponent of positive psychology, a movement that attempts to explore healthy psychological function, positive emotions, and resilient coping. The positive emotion of happiness can be used an example of how researchers in this field work. The word “happiness” lacks scientific rigor. Seligman has taken this common, positive emotion and broken it down into three measurable components: positive emotion and pleasure (the pleasant life), engagement (the engaged life), and meaning (the meaningful life). Not only do people differ in regard to the type of life they lead (pleasant, engaged, or meaningful), but also the most satisfaction is reported by people who attempt to achieve all three, with the greatest weight carried by engagement and meaning.

Seligman and his colleague, Christopher Peterson, have also proposed a classification manual, similar in nature to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). This proposed classification manual, Character Strength and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (CSV), describes and classifies positive traits as individual differences that exist in degrees instead of all-or-nothing categories. Six general categories, or virtues, are proposed by the CSV: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Under each virtue are listed character strengths for a total of 24 character strengths. For example, under courage four character strengths are listed: authenticity (genuineness), bravery (facing threats), persistence (completing tasks), and zest (approaching life with excitement). Research has already illustrated the usefulness of the CSV. Researchers have found similar rankings of the character strengths across the United States and around the world. Differences in rankings have been reported between adolescents and adults in the United States. Finally, certain character strengths such as zest, gratitude (transcendence), hope (transcendence), and love (humanity) have been found to correlate with life satisfaction.

Another example of work in the area of positive psychology is provided in the research of Shelley Taylor and her colleagues (e.g., Taylor, Kemeny, Bower, Gruenwald, & Reed, 2000). By reviewing the results of patients diagnosed with HIV, Taylor and her colleagues found that patients who were optimistic, had a belief in personal control, and who derived meaning from their experiences were more likely to develop symptoms later and to survive longer than were patients without these traits. Meaning, personal control, and optimistic beliefs, then, may serve a protective function in illness, perhaps through impacting habits that enhance health, increasing social support, or even by currently undetermined direct physiological effects.

Summary

The study of coping skills is quite broad. Despite the multiplicity of studies and the seeming complexities, there are certain points that have been repeatedly confirmed through research. As Lazarus and Folkman pointed out in their original model, an individual’s perception of events as being stressful is more important to psychological adjustment than the objective stress of the event. Likewise, cognitive appraisal has also been found to predict psychological adjustment to stress. Specifically, individuals who perceive a stressful event as less threatening, view the event as challenging, and have higher self-efficacy report better psychological adjustment. Coping has also been found to be influenced by personality dispositions such as optimism, neuroticism, and extraversion. Social support and marital satisfaction have likewise been consistently positively related to ability to cope with stressors.

The measurement of stressors and associated coping strategies has been more problematic. Should coping strategies be assessed as a function of specific stressful events, or is coping a more general dispositional characteristic? The question of the frequency of assessment has also become an issue, with some researchers using a cross-sectional approach, others a repeated-measures approach, and others relying on day-to-day monitoring of coping strategies.

Coping research is impacting future research in the field of psychoneuroimmunology, particularly in terms of how stress and coping impact cardiovascular health. Coping research is also helping to shape the relatively new field of positive psychology, especially in the ways that people cope successfully with stress, even to the point of thriving in the face of adversity.

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