Week 8: Coping and social Support
4 Parts:
1. Recap of stress and intro to coping
2. Coping flexibility, adjustment and social support
3. Coping with health problems and illness, including the self-regulatory model
4. Role of intervention in stress and coping
Part 1: Recap of stress and intro to coping
Think about psychosocial factors and how these link to health, symptoms, disease and acute events. These are
linked through health related behaviour, which are caused by social cognitive determinants. There is a more
direct pathway, which are through stress pathways (physiological pathways).
There is also a link between health and illness can have psychosocial impacts and affect psychosocial factors.
To reduce the impacts that illness can have, we can think about coping.
What is stress?
- Can be thought of in terms of a stressor and a response.
- Psychologists think about it as an interaction between the stressor and the response, where someone
makes appraisal about threat of stressor and then a reappraisal about ability to cope with it.
Health effects of stress
Stress can impact on bodily systems, and through this it influences disease development, duration, severity and
exacerbation.
But most people exposed to stress don’t get ill (Cohen et al., 2019) 35-65% of people exposed to trauma don’t
get mental health problems. So there are individual differences, and this may be in coping perhaps?
How can we manage stress?
There are many influences on our response to stress, and we can draw upon those. There are multiple
dimensions:
- Biological
- Social
- Psychological
- Plus, interactions between these
, Biological:
- Age
- Gender
- Genetic susceptibility
- Individual reactivity (e.g: cardiovascular reactivity)
- Weakness due to pre-existing pathology
- Medication
- Resistance resulting from sleep, diet, exercise, previous stress exposure etc.
Psychosocial factors:
- Health-related behaviours
- Personality
- Control beliefs: self-efficacy, helplessness
- Appraisal, perception, interpretation
- Altered response
- Coping strategies: this is a range of thoughts and actions.
Coping Definitions
- Process in which person is active agent in managing stressors, reducing perceived discrepancy
between demands and resources, especially to regulate negative emotions
- “constantly changing cognitive and behavioural efforts to manage specific external and or internal
demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding resources” Lazarus
- “Specific coping responses are the behaviours, cognitions and perceptions in which people engage
when actually contending with their life problems.” Pearlin and Schooler
Research on coping includes…
- Life events / changes: bereavement, grief, pregnancy, infertility, miscarriage, childbirth, neonatal loss,
ageing, menopause, retirement
- Traumatic events: terrorism, kidnapping, hostage
- Social issues: racism social change, loneliness
- Work: work stress
And much more
Assessing coping
Generic questionnaires where people response to indicate the way they would normally deal with a chosen
stressor, to assess their coping style. Or generic questionnaires where people respond in related to a specific
stressor, to assess their coping strategies. There are some specific questionnaires that tap into people’s coping
with particular stressors. All assessment strategies classify coping into different dimensions.
Understanding Coping
The issue is that coping is complex. It covers a range of different things that people may do. There has been a
tendency to try to group similar types of coping actions into ways of coping or strategies. The research is
difficult to grasp, as over years, strategies have been labelled in different ways and categorised differently.
4 Parts:
1. Recap of stress and intro to coping
2. Coping flexibility, adjustment and social support
3. Coping with health problems and illness, including the self-regulatory model
4. Role of intervention in stress and coping
Part 1: Recap of stress and intro to coping
Think about psychosocial factors and how these link to health, symptoms, disease and acute events. These are
linked through health related behaviour, which are caused by social cognitive determinants. There is a more
direct pathway, which are through stress pathways (physiological pathways).
There is also a link between health and illness can have psychosocial impacts and affect psychosocial factors.
To reduce the impacts that illness can have, we can think about coping.
What is stress?
- Can be thought of in terms of a stressor and a response.
- Psychologists think about it as an interaction between the stressor and the response, where someone
makes appraisal about threat of stressor and then a reappraisal about ability to cope with it.
Health effects of stress
Stress can impact on bodily systems, and through this it influences disease development, duration, severity and
exacerbation.
But most people exposed to stress don’t get ill (Cohen et al., 2019) 35-65% of people exposed to trauma don’t
get mental health problems. So there are individual differences, and this may be in coping perhaps?
How can we manage stress?
There are many influences on our response to stress, and we can draw upon those. There are multiple
dimensions:
- Biological
- Social
- Psychological
- Plus, interactions between these
, Biological:
- Age
- Gender
- Genetic susceptibility
- Individual reactivity (e.g: cardiovascular reactivity)
- Weakness due to pre-existing pathology
- Medication
- Resistance resulting from sleep, diet, exercise, previous stress exposure etc.
Psychosocial factors:
- Health-related behaviours
- Personality
- Control beliefs: self-efficacy, helplessness
- Appraisal, perception, interpretation
- Altered response
- Coping strategies: this is a range of thoughts and actions.
Coping Definitions
- Process in which person is active agent in managing stressors, reducing perceived discrepancy
between demands and resources, especially to regulate negative emotions
- “constantly changing cognitive and behavioural efforts to manage specific external and or internal
demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding resources” Lazarus
- “Specific coping responses are the behaviours, cognitions and perceptions in which people engage
when actually contending with their life problems.” Pearlin and Schooler
Research on coping includes…
- Life events / changes: bereavement, grief, pregnancy, infertility, miscarriage, childbirth, neonatal loss,
ageing, menopause, retirement
- Traumatic events: terrorism, kidnapping, hostage
- Social issues: racism social change, loneliness
- Work: work stress
And much more
Assessing coping
Generic questionnaires where people response to indicate the way they would normally deal with a chosen
stressor, to assess their coping style. Or generic questionnaires where people respond in related to a specific
stressor, to assess their coping strategies. There are some specific questionnaires that tap into people’s coping
with particular stressors. All assessment strategies classify coping into different dimensions.
Understanding Coping
The issue is that coping is complex. It covers a range of different things that people may do. There has been a
tendency to try to group similar types of coping actions into ways of coping or strategies. The research is
difficult to grasp, as over years, strategies have been labelled in different ways and categorised differently.
