Coping
strategies used during the confrontation with some events to reduce unpleasant emotions
Coping refers to the application of coping mechanisms, conscious and unconscious cognitions that people use to manage unpleasant emotions, stress, and anxiety. Coping mechanisms can be adaptive, meaning that they successfully improve the well-being of the person applying them, or maladaptive, meaning they may manage a specific unpleasant emotion, but at the expense of other aspects of one's mental and/or physical health.
Theories of coping
Hundreds of coping strategies have been proposed to explain how people manage stress. However, no universal classification system has been agreed upon. Researchers have grouped coping responses through rational, empirical (factor-analytic), or hybrid approaches.
Early work by Folkman and Lazarus categorized coping into four main types:
Problem-focused coping
Emotion-focused coping
Support-seeking coping
Meaning-making coping
Weiten and Lloyd identified four related types: appraisal-focused (adaptive cognitive), problem-focused (adaptive behavioral), emotion-focused, and occupation-focused coping.
Billings and Moos later added avoidance coping as a subset of emotion-focused strategies. However, some scholars have questioned the psychometric validity of such strict categorizations, noting that coping strategies often overlap and that individuals may employ multiple strategies simultaneously.
People typically use a combination of coping functions that change over time. While all strategies can be useful, individuals who rely more on problem-focused coping tend to adjust better overall.
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This entry incorporates text from “Coping” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.