Stress and Coping Theory Across the Adult Lifespan

Author(s):  
Agus Surachman ◽  
David M. Almeida

Stress is a broad and complex phenomenon characterized by environmental demands, internal psychological processes, and physical outcomes. The study of stress is multifaceted and commonly divided into three theoretical perspectives: social, psychological, and biological. The social stress perspective emphasizes how stressful life experiences are embedded into social structures and hierarchies. The psychological stress perspective highlights internal processes that occur during stressful situations, such as individual appraisals of the threat and harm of the stressors and of the ways of coping with such stressors. Finally, the biological stress perspective focuses on the acute and long-term physiological changes that result from stressors and their associated psychological appraisals. Stress and coping are inherently intertwined with adult development.

1993 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 255-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fraser N. Watts ◽  
Shernaaz M. Webster ◽  
Colin J. Morley ◽  
John Cohen

Expeditions provide a valuable opportunity for studying processes of coping with a stressful situation. An expedition to India organized by the British Schools Exploring Society has already been reported as being accompanied by positive changes on self‐report personality scales. This paper is concerned with detailed cognitive coping measures completed throughout the 6 weeks of the expedition. It needs to be noted that the results relate to young adults and to those who provided detailed coping information; the generalizability of the result is a matter for future research. The expedition presented a mixture of physical and social stresses. Men enjoyed the physical experience more than women, but women enjoyed the social experience more than men. There was generally greater reliance on personal resources than on social support in coping with stress. This was particularly true for men in coping with physical stress and women in coping with social stress. In general, the physical stresses had been better anticipated than the social ones. Positive reformulations were much more widely used as coping strategies than avoidance/resignation strategies, especially so for physical stresses. However, use of avoidance/resignation strategies was the better predictor of outcome, with those who used them being least likely to show positive personality change as a result of the expedition. The results are related to current research on stress and coping.


Author(s):  
Bernadette Kneidinger-Müller

Mobile communication media such as smartphones have dramatically increased the social availability of users. The perpetual contact is experienced quite ambivalently, not only as a big advantage of technological development but also as a new reason for increasing communication overload. This chapter details how people evaluate mobile availability in their everyday lives and how they cope with experiences of overload and stress. Using the transactional theory of stress and coping (Lazarus & Cohen, 1977), data from a diary study and qualitative interviews with German smartphone users are analyzed. The findings emphasize the high level of subjectivity that influences how everyday experiences of smartphone usage and mobile availability are evaluated.


INYI Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 15-19
Author(s):  
Negar Alamdar

The scholarship on gender-based violence (GBV) against refugee youth has succeeded in highlighting the significance of micro social psychological or situational analyses. Missing, however, are analyses that incorporate structural approaches, especially as informed by critical feminist and critical race theories. This review not only suggests ways in which structural analyses may proceed by further recommending the conceptual utility of integration and dislocation as key concepts in refugee studies, GBV and analyses of youth. These concepts mediate the relationships between two fundamental and prevailing units in the social theorizing – micro and macro-analyses. By incorporating more holistic, relational and critical foci regarding systems of domination (misogyny, racism, youth discrimination, homophobia) within the political economy and culture and their embedded institutions, more systemic and long term remedies are recommended.


1991 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-160
Author(s):  
Gail Wagnild ◽  
Agnes Hoffman ◽  
Kitty Grupp

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 848-872 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haneen Elias ◽  
Muhammad M. Haj-Yahia

In the last two decades, there has been a growing understanding that the therapeutic encounter with sex offenders takes a cost and has consequences on therapists. Despite the increasing research on the consequences of treating sex offenders, these studies in fact, have merely described the consequences, without providing an outlook for how therapists cope with them. The study presented in this article was part of a larger qualitative research project conducted among social workers, using in-depth semi-structured interviews. Emphasis is placed on therapists’ perceptions of the intrapersonal and interpersonal consequences they experience from treating sex offenders, as well as the strategies they use to cope with these consequences. The study’s central findings concern the therapists’ perception of the intrapersonal consequences, which included two levels: primary responses and cumulative responses, and their perception of the interpersonal consequences that included their parenting relationships, intimate relationships, their attitude toward others (strangers and acquaintances), loss of their quality of life, and further positive consequences. The findings indicated a sequence and integrated use of the strategies to cope with the consequences. The results are discussed in light of the theoretical framework of Lazarus and Folkman’s stress and coping theory. The limitations of the study as well as its implications for future research are discussed.


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