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Topics
1.
2.
3.
4.
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7.
General Types of Coping Strategies
Measurement of Coping Strategies
Specific Types of Coping Strategies
Cognitive Restructuring
Stress Inoculation Training
Learned Optimism
Additional Coping Strategies
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GENERAL TYPES OF COPING
STRATEGIES
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General Types of Coping Strategies
 The major categories of coping strategies are:
 Problem-focused coping involves dealing with
the perceived cause of the distress.
 For example, construct a plan of
action and follow it.
 Emotion-focused coping entails
managing the distress caused by the problem.
 For example, exercise more to
reduce tension.
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General Types of Coping Strategies(cont’d.)
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General Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
 Goodness of fit hypothesis:
 Coping is most effective when there is a
good fit between the coping strategy and
the amount of control you have over
the stressor.
 In situations where you have a high level of
control over the stressor, problem-focused
strategies are the best fit.
 In situations where you have little or
no control over the stressor, emotionfocused strategies are the best fit.
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Table 10.1 An example of a coping strategy for each of the four major coping categories.
Table 10.2 Examples of cognitive and behavioral coping strategies for problem-focused
coping and emotion-focused avoidance coping. Note that Billings and Moos (1981)
lumped together cognitive and behavioral avoidance coping into one category called
simply avoidance coping but divided problem-focused coping into active cognitive and
active behavioral coping strategies.
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General Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
 Billings and Moos divided coping into three
categories:
1. Active cognitive – such as planning which uses
a mentally orientated problem-focused coping.
2. Active behavioural – such as trying harder which
employs action orientated problem focused
coping.
3. Avoidance coping which is a
form of emotion-focused coping
that may use cognitive or
behavioural strategies such as
keeping feelings to oneself.
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General Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
 Avoidance coping items include “kept my feelings
to myself,” “avoided being with people in general,”
“refused to believe that it happened.”
 In general avoidance coping is effective as a
strategy for dealing with minor or transient
irritations such as those that may soon go away
on their own.
 However, for serious or chronic problems,
avoidance coping only brings temporary relief
from distress. It is not an effective long-term
strategy.
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General Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
 Sometimes distancing as a strategy of avoidance
coping (e.g., “I went on as if nothing had
happened”) can be adaptive, but other forms of
avoidance coping such as escape-avoidance
(e.g., “I wish that the situation would go away or
somehow be over with”) are generally
maladaptive.
 Besides problem-focused coping and emotionfocused coping, factor analytic studies suggest
that support seeking is another important
independent coping strategy.
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General Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
 Support seeking is a beneficial coping strategy.
 Social support is linked to health and well-being.
 Examples of support seeking include:
 “Confided your fears and worries to a friend.”
 “Sought reassurance from those who know you
best.”
 “Went to a friend for advice on
how to handle a certain stressor.”
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General Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
 The abovementioned categories of coping are not
sufficient without meaning-making coping – how
people use cognitive strategies to derive meaning
from stressful situations.
 Meaning-making coping: coping that uses our
values and beliefs to shape meaning in stress.
 According to Park and Folkman’s (1997) meaningmaking coping model, the meaning of an event is
appraised through attributions, primary appraisals,
and secondary appraisals.
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General Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
 Situational meaning must be congruent with global
meaning.
 Global meaning is a product of our system of core
values, beliefs and goals that we use to interpret
our experiences of the world.
 Global beliefs cover broad areas “such as
fairness, justice, control,
predictability, luck and
personal vulnerability”.
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General Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
 Global goals cover “ideals, states or objects that
people work toward being or achieving/maintaining
such as relationships, work, knowledge, wealth or
achievement”.
 In order to restore shaken/lost
meaning, changes need to be
made to situational meaning,
global meaning, or both to align
them again.
 This involves cognitive restructuring: reworking
and replacing existing assumptions and beliefs.
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General Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
 Assimilation: the process of
adding new information to an
already existing schema.
 Accommodation: the process of
changing the existing larger
organizing schema to fit the
smaller one.
 For example: A bereaved mother
whose son was murdered can
do/say the following:
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General Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
 “Everything happens for a reason and his death
brought the family closer together” which would be
congruent with her global goals (i.e., assimilation)
of wanting to be emotionally close to her family.
 Or she can change her global beliefs that “people
are inherently good” to “some people are violent,
and the world is more dangerous than I believed”
(i.e., accommodation), thus changing her
worldview to fit the situation.
 The assimilation process is more common than the
accommodation process.
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MEASUREMENT OF COPING
STRATEGIES
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Measurement of Coping Strategies
 Often use retrospective self-reports in the form of
checklists.
 50-item Ways of Coping Scale: one of the first
inventories; measures eight types of coping.
 Issues include that people suffer from bias and
remembering difficulties.
 An alternative is momentary accounts of coping.
 Narrative approaches allow the person to write
about the stress and describe how he/she coped
with it.
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SPECIFIC TYPES OF COPING
STRATEGIES
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Specific Types of Coping Strategies
 There are at least four general types of coping
strategies and a number of different coping
interventions.
 The COPE Scale measures 14 coping styles:
 Active coping – taking measures to remove or
lessen the problem.
 Planning – deciding on future actions
of dealing with the problem.
 Suppression of competing activities –
intentionally setting aside other projects to focus on
the problem.
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Specific Types of Coping Strategies (cont’d.)
 Restraint coping – waiting until
the time is right to act.
 Seeking social support for
instrumental reasons – seeking
advice, information or assistance from others.
 Seeking social support for
emotional reasons – seeking
sympathy and understanding.
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Specific Types of Coping Strategies (cont’d.)
 Positive reinterpretation and growth – reframing
and reappraising the stressor in a more positive
light.
 Acceptance – acknowledging the reality of the
stressor.
 Turning to religion – finding comfort in religion.
 Focus on and venting emotions –
expressing feelings.
 Denial – refusing to believe the
stressor is real.
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Specific Types of Coping Strategies (cont’d.)
 Behavioural disengagement – reducing efforts to
act on the stressor.
 Mental disengagement – using
distractions to take one’s mind off
the stressor.
 Alcohol-drug disengagement – using
substances to avoid thinking about the stressor.
 Factor analysis shows that these categories fit the
four broad coping styles.
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Specific Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
 Another way to conceptualize different coping
strategies is through two intersecting dimensions:
 Problem focused vs emotion focused, and
approach focused vs avoidance focused.
 Approach coping involves using strategies to
reduce or eliminate the stressor or it’s effects.
 Avoidance coping refers to disengaging from the
stressors or it’s effects.
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Specific Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
 For example, problem-focused approach coping
involves planning, whereas problem-focused
avoidance coping involves behavioural disengagement.
 Emotion-focused approach coping involves
cognitive restructuring, whereas emotion-focused
avoidance coping involves denial.
 Although approach coping seems to be the most
successful and avoidance coping the least
successful, there appears to be no best strategy
for every situation.
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Specific Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
 The key is flexibility and the ability to use a wide
range of coping strategies to fit the specific
context or situation.
Table 10.3 Examples of coping strategies that intersect along the two dimensions of approach
coping versus avoidance coping and problem-focused coping versus emotion-focused coping
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Specific Types of Coping Strategies
(cont’d.)
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COGNITIVE
RESTRUCTURING
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Cognitive Restructuring
 How we appraise and interpret
an event determines our reaction
to it.
 Our cognitive filters play an
important role in determining our stress reactions.
 Cognitive primacy: idea that cognitions influence
how we respond to stress.
 Cognitive restructuring: technique used in CBT
that refers to the process of challenging
dysfunctional automatic thoughts and replacing
them with healthier realistic thinking patterns.
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 Modern cognitive therapy was developed
primarily by two theorists, Albert Ellis and Aaron
Beck.
 Ellis developed rational-emotive behaviour
therapy (REBT) in the mid-1950s as an
alternative to traditional psychoanalysis.
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 Rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT): uses
an ABC model, where (A) an activating event is
interpreted through one’s beliefs (B), leading to
emotional and behavioural consequences (C).
 If beliefs (B) are irrational, a person is likely to
catastrophize – see the event as having a
catastrophic meaning.
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 An example:
Receiving a poor
test mark
“I am stupid and a
failure”
Shame, guilt,
anxiety and giving
up.
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 In order to engage in cognitive restructuring, the
person needs to dispute
(D) the irrational beliefs
that lead to C and replace
them with effective new
beliefs (E).
 We can ask ourselves
questions to challenge irrational beliefs (e.g., Is it
rational/logical?; What is a more rational belief that
I can substitute this one with?)
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 Beliefs that need to be disputed are:
 Absolutistic. Signaled by use
of words such as must, should,
have to, need to.
 E.g., “I have to be perfect and
do great in this”.
 Unrealistic overgeneralization
 E.g., “I will never amount to anything”.
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 Self-talk: changing absolutistic
internal dialogue (“I have to”) to
more flexible language (“I would
like to”).
 We can ask ourselves questions to challenge
irrational beliefs:
 “Is it rational?”
 “Is it logical?”
 “What is a more rational belief that I can
substitute this one with?”
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 Beck’s cognitive therapy focuses on challenging
maladaptive attitudes.
 E.g., “If I don’t perform as well as others, it means I
am an inferior human being.”
 These attitudes serve as well-springs for automatic
negative thoughts.
 E.g., “I am no good”, “people don’t
like me”, “things will never change”.
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 These automatic negative thoughts
produces particular errors of thinking
or cognitive processing styles that are
distorted, biased or illogical.
 Arbitrary inference – drawing conclusions without
supporting evidence.
 Selective abstraction – focusing on specific detail
that ignores the big picture.
 Overgeneralization – drawing conclusions based
on limited information.
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 Dichotomous thinking – thinking
in black or white terms.
 Magnification – exaggerating
small events.
 Minimization – trivializing big events.
 Personalization – taking responsibility
for events that are not under one’s control.
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 By using Beck’s restructuring, we
can ask basic questions such as:
 “What evidence supports this
thought?”
 “What’s another way of thinking about it?”
 “If the negative thought were true, what would be its
implications?”
 By using the triple column method as a daily
exercise, we can challenge and replace automatic
negative thoughts.
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 Triple column method: First column is a list of
negative thoughts.
 Second column is any distortions for the thoughts.
 Third column is positive thoughts, the substitutions
for the negative thoughts and distortions.
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 Burns (1993) developed a list of distorted thinking
categories:
 All or nothing thinking – Dichotomous,
black and white thinking (e.g., “I am
either a winner or a loser”).
 Overgeneralization – taking a specific
example and seeing it as global (e.g., “I got bad
news today, but then again, my life is nothing but
bad news. It never ends”).
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 Mental filter – Focusing only on bad qualities or
events (e.g., “I don’t fly on planes because they
crash too often”).
 Discounting the positives – overlooking one’s
positive qualities (e.g., “I have done well in school,
but I’m really not that smart”).
 Magnification or minimization – exaggerating or
downplaying the importance of something (e.g., “My
stomach aches, it must be appendicitis”. “Yes, I
smoke, but it’s no big deal, I”ll outlive all nonsmokers”).
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 Jumping to conclusions – mind reading:
assuming others are thinking badly
of you or fortune telling - predicting
negative outcomes (e.g., “I know
she thinks I’m not in her league and
will laugh at me when I ask her out
on a date”).
 Emotional reasoning – confusing feeling for facts
(e.g., “How do I know that I am incompetent?
Because I feel incompetent, that’s how”).
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Cognitive Restructuring (cont’d.)
 “Should” statements – absolutistic statements
(e.g., “I should be more outgoing. I’m too shy”).
 Labeling – using negative labels about oneself or
others rather than describing the event (e.g., “If I
wasn’t such a weak person, I would have stood up
to her”).
 Blame – Internalizing or
externalizing responsibility
inappropriately (e.g., “If I scored
more runs, we would have won the game. If you
scored more runs, we would have won the game”).
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STRESS INOCULATION
TRAINING
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Stress Inoculation Training
 Stress Inoculation Training (SIT): a cognitive-
behaviour modification training program to prepare
individuals for stressful future encounters or treat
current excess stress.
 Based on the principle of fortifying individuals with
coping skills (inoculate them).
 Uses approaches such as educating,
raising self-awareness, cognitive
restructuring, problem solving, relaxation training,
and rehearsing.
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Stress Inoculation Training (cont’d.)
 Consist of three phases:
 Conceptual educational phase –
help clients understand their stressrelated problems by presenting
information in such a manner that it produces hope.
 Skills acquisition and skills consolidation
phase – develop coping skills by dealing with target
stressors.
 Application and follow-through phase – practice
applying these skills during increasing levels of
stress.
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Stress Inoculation Training (cont’d.)
 Has a history of use with medical patients,
psychological or emotional
difficulties, performance
anxiety, professional groups,
and people going through
stressful life transitions.
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LEARNED OPTIMISM
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Learned Optimism
 Seligman (1991) suggests that people
can learn to be optimistic just as they
can learn to be helpless.
 Learned optimism: cultivating positive
expectations when seeing connections
between one’s efforts and outcomes.
 In order to do this, it is necessary to challenge
pessimistic causal attributional explanatory styles.
 We use three dimensions of attributions:
stable/unstable, global/specific and internal/external
to answer why things happened.
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Learned Optimism (cont’d.)
 For example, after a man asked a woman out on a
date and she said no, he could think: (a) “I am
defective and will never find love” or (b) “I am just
not her type, I’ll find someone else”.
 If he thought “a” he is making a stable (his
condition is permanent, he will never
find someone), global (it will affect
him with anyone he ever asks out on
a date) and internal (he is the cause
of her rejection) attribution.
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Learned Optimism (cont’d.)
 On the other hand, if he thought “b” he is making a
unstable (his condition is temporary, he will find
someone), specific (it only applies to this women he
asked out) and external (the outcome was due to
her taste in men) attribution.
 An optimistic explanatory style is unstable,
specific, and external.
 Attributional retraining (AR):
encourages students to use
attributions of control (as opposed
to poor control) after poor academic performances.
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ADDITIONAL COPING
STRATEGIES
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Expressive Writing
 People write down their thoughts
and feelings about their most
upsetting or traumatic experiences.
 Most studies find positive effects
for mental and physical health.
 Writing positive feelings down seems to be
beneficial as well.
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Self-Forgiveness
 Refers to the constructive process
of letting go of a desire to punish
oneself due to one’s perceived
transgressions.
 It does not absolve a person from taking
responsibility for objective acts of wrongdoing.
 Self-forgiveness is more likely to occur when:
 Person feels less guilt about the transgression.
 Engages in more conciliatory behaviour towards
the victim.
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Self-Forgiveness (cont’d.)
 Perceives the victim as more forgiving.
 Self-blame in cancer patients usually
results in mood disturbance.
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Humor
 Humor reframes problems in ways that create
positive affect, emotional distance and a new
perspective.
 Research on humor as a strategy to combat illness
is currently weak and inconclusive.
 Methodological issues such as poor controls and
sample sizes.
 More positive results is found for
coping humor – a strategy to use
humor to cope with stress.
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Humor (cont’d.)
 Linked to high levels of self-esteem, perceived
competency, and positive affect.
 Some types linked with negative
psychological well-being, such
as self-defeating humor.
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Pets
 Interaction through pet ownership can result in
lower blood pressure and heart
rate.
 Pets offer non-evaluative social
support.
 Studies show that oxytocin may
play a role in women bonding
with their pet dogs.
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Music
 Music has been used throughout the ages for
enjoyment and mood regulation.
 Listening to smooth jazz music caused increased
immune response in participants in one study.
 Stress reductions seen in critically ill patients
listening to Mozart.
 Limited research; only some types
of music seem to produce health
effects.
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Summary
 Problem-focused coping deals with the perceived
cause of stress; emotion-focused coping deals
with stress itself.
 Avoidance coping only effective with small
problems.
 Support-seeking coping deals with seeking
emotional support from others.
 Meaning-making coping uses our beliefs to shape
meaning in stressful situations.
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Summary (cont’d.)
 Approach coping more successful than
avoidance in general.
 Cognitive restructuring challenges dysfunctional
thoughts and replaces them with more realistic
thinking patterns.
 SIT is a cognitive behaviour modification training
program.
 Expressive writing, self-forgiveness, humor, pets,
and music may help with coping.
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