Concluding Remarks: What it All Means

This chapter presents concluding remarks and the effects of the research that has been detailed in this title. It summarizes the arguments and theories put forward by each chapter in the title, and highlights common concepts and themes throughout.

Teaching Students How to Cope With Adversity: The Three Cs

This chapter explores adversity, and methods of teaching students how to cope with stress and adversity. It discusses the independent-self and the interdependent-self, the ‘Three Cs’ programme, which emphasizes cooperative community (social interdependence, interpersonal relationships, group skills), constructive conflict (the benefits of controversy, problem-solving training, peer mediation), and civic values.

Positive Psychology and Health: Situational Dependence and Personal Striving

Chapter 6 explores positive psychology and health in the context of situational dependence and personal striving. It includes a history of positive psychology, and relates Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to biopsychosocial health. The chapter discusses categories of coping strategies and strategies that reduce the impact of threats to health (such as unemployment, restructuring changes) as well as mediators (self-efficacy, goals, and optimism).

Work Stress and Coping in Organizations: Progress and Prospects

Chapter 5 discusses work stress and coping in organizations. It reviews the coping literature focusing on the workplace, presents a framework for the study of coping in organizations (including the organizational environment, cognitive appraisal, individual stress and coping behaviours). It discusses managerial health and well-being, the psychological effects of organizational change, and draws conclusions about coping with work stress.

Positive Emotions in Education

Chapter 8 explores positive emotions (such as hope or pride) in education. It outlines studies into the occurrence of positive academic emotions, measurement of positive academic emotions using the Academic Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ), the impact of positive emotions on students’ learning, self-regulation, and achievement, and cognitive and social origins of students’ positive emotions, including control-value theory.

Meeting Challenges in a Classroom Context

Chapter 7 focuses on the concept of positive educational psychology in the classroom context. It discusses learning according to the principles of positive psychology, goal setting and goal striving as part of the self-regulation process, the effects of a lack of self-regulation, self-regulation versus self-control, effort-management and volitional control.

Alone Together: Comparing Communal Versus Individualistic Resiliency

This chapter presents a comparison of communal and individualistic resiliency. It discusses the historical context of individualism and collectivism, individual versus communal-mastery, the correlates and impact of communal-versus self-mastery, and case studies of the role of self-and communal-mastery among inner-city women and Native Americans.

Adolescent Well-Being: Building Young People’s Resources

This chapter considers the ways in which a theory of coping can be used as a platform from which to explore adolescent health and well-being. It outlines conceptualizations and models of coping and puts forward an integrated model which takes into account many of the research paradigms that relate to coping. It emphasizes the role that coping may place in enhancing the quality of life of young people.

Proactive Coping and Quality of Life Management

Chapter 3 outlines proactive coping and quality-of-life management. It presents a brief history of coping in psychology, and discusses functions of coping, social support and stress, a theoretical model for proactive coping, the proactive coping inventory (PCI), and an application of the PCI to work stress and burnout.

Tenacious Goal Pursuits and Striving Toward Personal Growth: Proactive Coping

Chapter 2 discusses goal pursuits, personal growth, and proactive coping. This includes trends in stress and coping theory (response-based perspective, stimulus-based perspective, cognitive-transactional theory of stress, antecedents of stress and coping, and dimensions of coping), proactive coping theory, and research into proactive coping.