CH. 6 Coping and Social Support Flashcards
Coping and Social Support
A warning: Do not listen to sad music because it can make you feel worse.
Two major categories of coping with stress – First, you can cope by virtue of things you do as an individual that will vary with your personality and coping style (e.g., be optimistic or make the best of the situation).
Second, you can cope by drawing on social networks for what you need to help you through the stressful situation (e.g., ask a friend to help you).
What is Coping?
COPING – “Constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person”.
- If stress is a disturbance in homeostasis, coping is whatever we do to reestablish our homeostatic balances.
- Different factors can influence the severity of a stressor (i.e., moderators and mediators of stress discussed below) and influence coping as well.
SOCIAL SUPPORT
- Finding successful ways to cope is imperative.
TWO KEY ISSUES – First, people and situations vary a lot. What may work for one person may not work for another. Similarly, what works in one situation may not work well in another, or be used in every situation.
COPING STYLE – What works for one person in one situation.
SITUATIONAL COPING – May not work for another person in the same situation.
- If you are optimistic, you will cope better and be less stressed.
- Health psychologists measure different aspects of the person or organism coping to best account for individual differences in coping.
- Coping both moderates and mediates the relationship between stress and how you feel because of it.
- Getting a good feel for what these terms mean and how they are different from each other can be a challenge PRIMARY APPRAISAL**?), but we know you have the skills to do it (nice **SECONDARY APPRAISAL.
Common Measures of Coping
COMMON MEASURES OF COPING:
People Cope in Some Clear-Cut Ways.
Two Main Styles:
- PROBLEM-FOCUSED COPING
-
EMOTION-FOCUSED COPING
- Two of the most commonly used measures are the** – **COPE** & **REVISED WAYS OF COPING CHECKLIST (RWOC)
Cope Inventory
COPE INVENTORY – Measuring the extent to which you use each type of coping. The main subscales representing different forms of problem-focused and emotion-focused coping:
- Active Coping (e.g., I do what has to be done, one step at a time)
- Planning (e.g., I make a plan of action)
- Suppression of Competing Activities (e.g., I put aside other activities to concentrate on this)
- Restraint Coping (e.g., I force myself to wait for the right time to do something)
- Seeking Social Support for Instrumental Reasons (e.g., I talk to someone to find out more about the situation)
- Seeking Social Support for Emotional Reasons (e.g., I talk to someone about how I feel)
- Positive Reinterpretation and Growth (e.g., I learn something from the experience)
- Acceptance (e.g., I learn to live with it)
- Turning to Religion (e.g., I put my trust in God)
- Focus and Venting of Emotions (e.g., I let my feelings out)
- Denial (e.g., I refuse to believe that it has happened)
- Behavioral Disengagement (e.g., I just give up trying to reach my goal)
- Mental Disengagement (e.g., I daydream about things other than this)
Later versions included additional items relating to the use of humor and alcohol as coping mechanisms.
Other Coping Questionnaires
OTHER COPING QUESTIONNAIRES:
Revised Ways of Coping (RWOC) – Checklist measure is written in a way to allow for comparisons across different types of stressful situations.
- Likert-type response format.
- Lists a number of different ways of coping and measures how much each is used.
LIFE EVENTSAND COPING INVENTORY FOR CHILDREN
ADOLESCENT COPING ORIENTATION FOR PROBLEM EXPERIENCES INVENTORY
LIFE SITUATIONS INVENTORY – Aimed at assessing coping with real-life circumstances in middle-aged and elderly men.
- Some researchers lament the overuse of coping instruments, and others report few consistent positive associations between the use of any particular coping style and positive outcomes.
- The main problem seems to be that some of the questions are too general, and researchers tend to use one standard measure across many different situations, thereby ignoring the unique aspects of different stressors.
- The coping scales allow health psychologists to study large numbers of people using limited time and money and allow for a quantification of the coping process.
- To compensate for some of the problems of scale measures, most contemporary coping researchers also include detailed interviews and observations to assess coping
New Developments in Coping Research
NEW DEVELOPMENT in COPING RESEARCH:
- First, health psychologists are paying greater attention to the role played by relationships.
RELATIONSHIP-FOCUSED or RELATIONSHIP COPING – Recognizes that maintaining relatedness with others is a basic human need and as fundamental to coping as eliminating or minimizing stressors.
- Relational coping includes compromising with others and being open in communication.
- Researchers are changing how they design research studies on coping.
DAILY PROCESS METHODOLOGY or DAILY DIARIES – Provides a rich set of information and addresses past concerns. This method involves many different assessments over time and automatically provides a clear picture of the process of coping.
- Even newer research is looking into the benefits of using technology to cope.
The Structure of Coping
THE STRUCTURE OF COPING – Coping includes anything people do to manage problems or emotional responses, whether successful or not.
- Coping can be separated depending on the level of analysis you use.
- You can study specific ways of coping at the item level (e.g., drug use
- Coping through roping together similar items (e.g., religious coping strategies for substance use.
- Coping as a higher-order level, mode, or style (e.g., approach coping in African Americans.
COPING STYLES – Are general predispositions to dealing with stress.
- They are tools a person tends to use repeatedly.
In general, ADAPTIVE COPING styles are associated with better health.
- African Americans using more religious coping styles showed better well-being.
Coping styles are also common MODERATORS.
- For example, women high in social support coping showed lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
APPROACH COPING** and **AVOIDANT COPING – Two most basic styles an individual can approach a stressor and make active efforts to resolve it or can try to avoid the problem.
- Avoidant coping moderates the relationship between stress and depression-related eating in adolescents (Young & Limbers, 2017) and in general is associated with more-negative health outcomes (e.g., more diabetes-related distress in adolescents.
APPROACH:
- Monitoring
- Vigilance
- Problem-focused
AVOIDANCE:
- Blinting
- Cognitive Avoidance
- Emotion-focused + Appraisal-focused
COPING STRATEGIES – Refer to the specific behavioral and psychological efforts that people use to master, tolerate, reduce, or minimize stressful events.
- Some main types of coping. Either you can do something about the problem or you can ignore it.
PROBLEM-FOCUSED COPING – Involves directly facing the stressful situation and working hard to resolve it.
- Problem-focused coping can be a useful strategy.
EMOTION-FOCUSED COPING – The person may deny the test results or not want to talk about them for some time. This strategy of coping is referred to as emotion-focused coping because you use either mental or behavioral methods to deal with the feelings resulting from the stress.
- African Americans tend to use more emotion-focused coping strategies than European Americans.
- Further divided emotional coping.
EMOTIONAL COPING STYLES – E.g., “I get support from someone”
AVOIDANT EMOTIONAL STYLES – E.g., “I tell myself it’s not real”
- Although conceptually distinct, both strategies are interdependent and work together, with one supplementing the other in the overall coping process.
- Both styles can be useful.
Skinner and colleagues conducted a major review of the coping literature and identified five core categories of coping – Support seeking, problem-solving, avoidance, distraction, and positive cognitive restructuring.
Best Way to Cope?
BEST WAY TO COPE?:
- Problem-solving coping adapt better to life stressors and experience less-negative affect than those who make use of avoidant coping.
- A large body of work demonstrates the deleterious emotional impact of avoidant coping in a variety of populations.
- Avoidance has only accentuated your stress.
- Avoidance may increase emotional distress.
- Ironically, people often become preoccupied with the thoughts that they attempt to suppress, and the inhibition of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can cause have negative implications for your health.
- Also, the use of avoidant coping requires sustained effort to screen out stressor-relevant thoughts.
- The best coping style to use depends on the severity, duration, controllability, and emotionality of the situation.
- Essentially best to match the type of coping you use with the situation and with your comfort level.
- Emotion-focused coping may be beneficial in the short term.
- At some point, however, you must face the problem, get more information about it, and learn what you should do to deal with it.
Who Copes Well?
WHO COPES WELL?:
- You may have some friends or coworkers who are not fazed even when everything seems to be going wrong. Other individuals fall apart and get freaked out by the most minor negative events.
- How a person appraises an event can determine the extent to which that person thinks it is stressful.
Cognitive appraisals and coping are two critical mediators of responses to stressful events.
- Your feeling of stress depends both on how many things you really have due and on how serious or demanding you think the assignments or deadlines are.
- Even if you do not really have too much to do, just believing that you have too much to do or that what you have to do is very difficult can be stressful.
- A person experiences distress when primary appraisals of threat exceed secondary appraisals of coping ability
- One’s secondary appraisal will depend in large part on the personal resources a person brings to the situation, such as personality factors (e.g., optimism) and perceived resources for coping with the situation.
Personality and Diverse Coping Styles
PERSONALITY and DIVERSE COPING STYLES – A person’s personality characteristics provide some of the best clues as to how he or she will cope with a stressor.
- Being easy-going could help you cope.
PERSONALITY – Is defined as an individual’s unique set of consistent behavioral traits.
TRAITS – Are durable dispositions to behave in a particular way in a variety of situations.
- One of the earliest personality psychologists, Gordon Allport (1961), scoured an unabridged dictionary and collected more than 4,500 descriptors used to describe personality. Later personality theorists such as Cattell (1966) used statistical analyses to measure correlations between these different descriptors. Cattell found that all 4,500 descriptors could be encompassed by just 16 terms. It gets better. McCrae and Costa (1987) further narrowed these 16 terms down to a core of only five as part of their five-factor model of personality.
BIG FIVE or FIVE FACTOR MODEL – Suggesting that personality can be sufficiently measured by assessing how conscientious, agreeable, neurotic, open to experience, and extroverted a person is.
TRAITCHARACTERISTICS
Conscientiousness Ethical, dependable, productive, purposeful
Agreeableness Sympathetic, warm, trusting, cooperative
Neuroticism Anxious, Insecure, guilt-prone, self-conscious
Openness to Experience Daring, nonconforming, imaginative
Extroversion Talkative, Sociable, Fun-loving, Affectionate
Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern – Based on their observations of heart patients who showed a sense of time urgency (always doing more than one thing at the same time), competitiveness, and hostility in their interactions with other people.
- There were problems replicating Friedman and Rosenman’s hypothesized link between cardiovascular disease and Type A personality, and it later became clear that the critical personality risk factors were anger and hostility.
- Hostility reliably predicts heart attacks and early death.
- Having a sense of time urgency and being competitive is all right, but being hostile is most dangerous to your health.
- Hostility also provides us with another good example of how personality characteristics can be moderators of the relationship between psychological factors and stressful outcomes.
- Low-hostile participants experiencing supportive interactions showed reductions in ABP.
- This was not the case for high-hostile participants.
- The researchers concluded that hostile individuals may find offers of support stressful and may fail to benefit from intimacy during everyday life.
- Some personality types use different coping styles than others, and empirical tests mostly confirm this assumption.
- Conscientiousness was positively associated with problem-focused coping and negatively with avoidance coping.
- Whereas neuroticism was most positively associated with avoidance coping.
- Extroversion was positively related to both seeking social support and avoidance coping.
- In another study, patients with less-adaptive coping strategies (i.e., emotion-focused coping) had less-adaptive personality traits (i.e., neuroticism) and were more depressed.
- Clearly, personality styles can predict what coping style a person is likely to use.
- Coping styles are not merely reflections of personality but mediate the relationship between personality and well-being.
- Yes, having a high level of optimism or a low level of neuroticism is associated with feeling less stressed in general, but people with these personality characteristics are more likely to use more-adaptive coping styles and have different physical reactivity and decrease their stress.
- A study of adults with diabetes illustrates this process. Researchers exposed 140 people with type 2 diabetes to a stressor in a lab (Puig-Perez, Hackett, Salvador & Steptoe, 2017). Researchers then measured some classic health psychology variables, heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and cortisol (see Chapter 2). People high in optimism showed heightened stress reactivity and lower daily cortisol output. People low in optimism showed poorer self-reported physical and mental health, illustrating a protective stress modulating role.
- Therefore, the personality style led to certain physiological reactions, which then influenced well-being. The personality style did not directly influence the outcome.
Characteristics that can influence their coping – Health psychologists suggest that we pay close attention to the concepts of optimism, mastery, hardiness, and resilience.
OPTIMISM – Generalized outcome expectancies that good things, rather than bad things, will happen.
- This personality trait is associated with a number of health-related factors and predicts longevity in general.
- Cope better with stress and practice better health behaviors.
- Correlated with problem-focused coping strategies.
- Optimists show good psychological well-being, suggesting that optimism may moderate depression.
- Optimism is associated with a range of physiological factors.
- Slower progression of artery clogs and hence heart attack and better cardiovascular health.
- Relates to the presence of active potent natural killer cells during stress.
- Measures of AIDS-related optimism have been related to a slower disease course.
- Optimists differ significantly from pessimists in secondary (but not primary) appraisal, coping, and adjustment.
- Predictions of his or her likelihood to take risks—optimistic take more risks.
MASTERY – The extent to which one regards one’s life chances as being under one’s own control.
- Someone with a high level of mastery believes that he or she has the capability to succeed at whatever task is at hand.
- Been found to be a moderator in many studies of stress and appraisal.
- For example, For people high in mastery, negative life events were not related to increases in plasma PAI-1 antigen levels (an antigen related to cardiovascular disease).
- Mastery is also a mediator.
- For men with increasing stress, a greater sense of personal mastery reduced negative feelings.
- The effects of mastery also vary by age.
- Older people with elevated feelings of mastery used more-efficient coping strategies.
HARDINESS – People who are strongly committed to their lives, enjoy challenges, and have a high level of control over their lives are high on the trait of hardiness.
- In general, being hardy is related to better adjustment to a range of health issues.
- Particularly useful for competitive situations.
RESILIANT – Resilience a person who has encountered a tremendous number of stressful events but always seems to bounce back into action and still do fine, he or she is said to be resilient.
- Like hardiness, resiliency accompanies adaptive coping strategies that lead to better mental and physical health.
- Linked to resiliency, such as finding/having a purpose in life and depression.
- Prominent factors of resilient families include positive outlook, spirituality, family member accord, flexibility, family communication, financial management, family time, shared recreation, routines and rituals, and support networks
Cultural factors were related to measures of five aspects of resilience: – Childhood stressors, global coping, adaptive coping, maladaptive coping, and sociocultural support.
Coping and Culture
COPING AND CULTURE – Culture can be a factor that mediates specific coping styles and strategies through its influence on vulnerability to stress and the availability of support.
- Culture can also influence which coping responses are appropriate, limiting coping options.
- Terms such as “individualistic” and “collectivistic” are often used to describe the general orientation of other cultures and can be extended to describe individuals’ coping styles in these cultures.
Coping methods within the collectivistic orientation – Individualistic coping; seeking social support; forbearance (emotion-based coping); religiosity; traditional healing practices.
Coping strategies typically associated with individualistic cultures – approach based.
- While avoidance-based coping strategies are often associated with collectivistic cultures
Ethnic Identity
ETHNIC IDENTITY – One of the major mediators of the stress-mental health relationship.
- Those with stronger ethnic identities had better coping skills, allowing them to better navigate discrimination.
- Report fewer stressful life events and fewer adverse health behaviors.
- The rates of psychiatric disorders may increase with duration of time living in the United States.
- Generational status variables moderated the risk of 12-month prevalence of psychiatric disorders.
- The prevalence of psychiatric disorders varied by generational status, such that third-generation immigrants had the highest rates of psychiatric disorders, while first-generation immigrants had the highest rates of psychiatric disorders in the past 12 months.
Acculturation
ACCULTURATION – Ethnic identity formation is more of an issue for non–European Americans, because they are often made very aware of their not being White.
- Immigrants often enter a culture different from their own, leaving their families behind in their home cultures.
- They differ in the extent to which they acculturate, and while some remain steadfast in retaining the values and norms with which they were raised, some subtly adapt to the different world around them.
- Often these stressors and changes have health consequences.
Acculturated may mean different things
- Roland (1991), sees the acculturation process as primarily entailing the adoption of one culture at the expense of the other. Berry, Trimble, and Olmedo (1986) define four models of acculturation that directly pertain to the issues we have raised here.
INTEGRATION** or **BICULTRALISM – A strong identification with both groups.
ASSIMILATION– A strong identification with only the dominant culture.
SEPARATION – With only the ethnic group.
MARGINALIZATION – With neither group.
Acculturation and ethnic identity formation:
- Are of much more significance to non-European Americans and can influence health and health behaviors.
- Acculturation is also a mediator between perceptions of discrimination and levels of distress, influencing coping.
- In many cases, greater acculturation is associated with better mental health.
- This is not the case for all ethnic groups or with physical health.
ACCULTURATION-PHYSICAL HEALTH – Recent immigrants are healthier than better-acculturated nonimmigrants.
Social Support
SOCIAL SUPPORT – Just the perception that support would be available if we need it can greatly enhance our coping strategies and health.
- Social support is one of the most important factors in the study of stress and coping.
- Lack of social relationships increased the probability of a person committing suicide.
- Women who were socially integrated lived longer.
- Age-adjusted relative risk for mortality for the men and women with weak social connections was almost twice as high as the risk for the participants with strong social connections.
SOCIAL SUPPORT – Generally defined as emotional, informational, or instrumental assistance from others.
- Has been tied to better health, more-rapid recovery from illness, and a lower risk for mortality, also reduces psychological distress, promotes better coping, and puts one at less risk for depression.
- In periods of crisis, family support may become an especially important determinant of emotional well-being.
Types of Social Support
TYPES OF SOCIAL SUPPORT – here are many different types of social support
NETWORK MEASURES AND FUCKING FUNCTIONAL MEASURES – A person’s networks (e.g., Berkman, 1985), asking if the person was married, or asking how many people the person saw on a weekly basis. The measurement of networks also varied. Some researchers just asked for the number of people in a network whereas others also assessed the relationship of the support provider to the support recipient.
FUNCTIONAL MEASURE OF SUPPORT – Assessed in two main ways.
- RECEIVED SUPPORT – Measure the social support the person reports was provided to him or her.
- PERCEIVED SUPPORT – Social support the person believes to be available to him or her.
- The type of support that you get and that will be helpful will depend largely on the type of stress you are experiencing.
- If you are stressed because you have a big assignment due at school, but you do not even know how to begin, any information that you obtain about how to do it will be helpful. If you are stressed because your car broke down and you do not know how you will go to work, then someone giving you a ride will best help you cope.
Three main types of received support, and each has its counterpart form of perceived support:
- Received or perceived support can be:
- Instrumental (also called TANGIBLE OR MATERIAL SUPPORT. (e.g., the loan of the car),
- Informational ADVICE, (e.g., how to do your assignment)
- Emotional (e.g., being told that people care for you).
GLOBAL SUPPORT – Person’s sense of support from people in general.
SPECIFIC SUPPORT – Support from a specific person or relationship.
- The most effective and theoretically compelling model combines received and perceived support measures but separates them by source.
- Different sources of support were associated with different outcomes.
- Support is most effective when the type of support a person needs matches the type of support provided.
Theories of Social Support Change
THEORIES OF SOCIAL SUPPORT CHANGE:
- Theories of how our networks change.
SOCIAL CONVOY MODEL – This model suggests that people are motivated to maintain their social network sizes as they themselves age, despite changes in the composition of the networks. We work to make sure we get the most out of our networks and that our networks contain those who will give us what we need.
- Individuals construct and maintain social relationships while becoming increasingly aware of specific strengths and weaknesses of particular members.
- This knowledge allows them to select different network members for different functions (e.g., certain people are relied on for emotional support and others for instrumental support) and possibly avoid members who are not supportive.
- Although specific nonsupportive network members may drop out over time, the social convoy model suggests that general levels of support will be constant or even increase, given that social support is coordinated to optimize support receipt. We work to make sure we get the most out of our networks and that our networks contain those who will give us what we need.
SOCIOEMOTIONAL SELECTIVITY THEORY – Proposes that people prune their social networks to maintain a desired emotional state depending on the extent to which time is perceived as limited.
- When we get older, we believe that we have less time and want to maximize the time we have. We do not want to waste time on people or things that are not worth it to us.
- Emphasis in old age is placed on achieving short-term emotional goals.
- Whereas older adults’ social networks may be smaller than those of younger adults, the numbers of close relationships are comparable.
- The evidence indicates that it is not necessarily the size, membership, or particular structure of the network, but the quality of transactions (i.e., perceived and received social support) that is critical to mental and physical health.
- We are active managers of our social networks and play a role in determining how much support we get.
EVOCATIVE QUALITIES – Personal characteristics may be critical determinants of whether support transactions increase or decrease over time.
