Emotion-Focused Coping

Emotion-focused coping is one of several broad types or categories of coping that have been proposed by stress researchers, notably Richard Lazarus, Susan Folkman, Norman Endler, and Charles Carver. Emotion-focused coping may be defined as efforts to manage a stressful encounter by changing feelings and thoughts about the source of stress. That is, “emotion focus” is an internally directed strategy for coping, in contrast to problem- or task-focused efforts at coping that seek to change external reality. Emotion focus also implies an active attempt to restructure affect or cognition so as to minimize the distress caused by threatening or harmful events. Active processing of the event differentiates emotion-focused coping from another internally directed class of coping strategies, avoidance coping, which describes attempts to suppress thoughts ...