Coping with Stress: Effective People and Processes (Snyder, 2001)

Coping with Stress: Effective People and Processes (Snyder, 2001)

This is a companion volume to Coping: The Psychology of What Works, which is also edited by Snyder. This second book includes chapters by some of the most well known clinical and health psychologists and covers some of the newest and most provocative topics currently under study in the area of coping. The contributors address the key questions in this literature: Why do some of us learn from hardship and life's stressors? And why do others fail and succumb to depression, anxiety, and even suicide? What are the adaptive patterns and behaviors of those who do well in spite of the obstacles that are thrown their way? The chapters will look at exercise as a way of coping with stress, body imaging, the use of humor, forgiveness, control of hostile thoughts, ethnicity and coping, sexism and coping aging and relationships, constructing a coherent life story, personal spirituality, and personal growth.

p.3-4 Our goal in this chapter is to present a model of coping that has broad applications... that is as succinct as possible and yet attends to the complexities that must be considered in this evolving field. [JLJ - perhaps for use in game theory? This section is a gold mine - note to self, return here and re-read...]

p.4 coping... is seen as the effortful attempt to deal with stressors that are beyond the "normal" range of functioning, with the purpose of reducing the negative impacts of those stressors.

p.4 For our purposes, coping reflects thinking, feeling, or acting so as to preserve a satisfied psychological state when it is threatened.

p.5 In point of fact, there is some evidence that we engage in cognitive coping without awareness (7); moreover, we fairly often purposefully engage in coping activities that are below our level of awareness (8,9,10).

p.5 Each person has built a particular "coping machine." Dr. Seuss, no doubt, would produce a whimsical rendering of this machine... we also present it as an image to vivify the point that each person brings his or her set of characteristics to form a "vehicle" for dealing with whatever stressors may be encountered.

p.6 As a general principle, the positive moderators should yield their beneficial influences through approach coping, whereas the negative moderators should lead to their detrimental influences by avoidance coping

p.8 A stressor needs only to be of sufficient severity so that the person responds to it

p.15 The approach coper will act on the stressor. As such, our approach coper must select one or more coping strategies to implement.

p.16 The "using of environment-directed strategies" is a common active approach... these approaches attempt, through the efforts of the person and any other supporting persons or institutions, to act directly on the stressor so as to weaken it and diminish its dissonance-producing properties. This has been called primary control (102).

p.18 With some stressors (e.g., chronic pain), it may be unrealistic to expect the stressor to totally go away, but a more reachable goal is to reduce the stressor to a manageable level.

p.18 we hold that the most useful means of understanding coping is to view it as a process... it is the perception of the stressor and the related construal phase that are the elicitors of coping in our model.

p.18 flexibility has been touted as one of the hallmark beneficial properties of effective coping

p.20 Because of page constraints, we will not provide any description of the types of stressors, other than to note that there are three: (1) blocked goal pursuits; (2) unlearned aversive stimuli; and (3) learned aversive stimuli (see [Houston, B.K. (1987). Stress and Coping. In C.R. Snyder & C.E. Ford (Eds.), Coping with negative life events: Clinical and social psychological perspectives], pp.380-384, for a more detailed discussion).

p.54 Upon reviewing our life story we can begin to see the various forms of resilience that shaped our behavior, allowing us to construct an identity for ourselves as "copers."

p.64 In our view resilience arises - with or without professional prompting - from the double effort first to describe our coping responses in the micronarratives of our life story, and then to inscribe these as personal resources in the more or less coherent macronarratives that consolidate our sense of identity over time. "Coping" then becomes a storied construction, created and sustained within a distinctively human meaning-making process.