Coping

Definition

Coping refers to the thoughts and behaviors that people use to deal with stressful situations. Although most psychologists limit the concept of coping to conscious and intentional efforts to manage stressful encounters, some theorists have argued that more automatic and unintentional ways of dealing with stressful circumstances should be included within the coping rubric.

History and Background

The history of coping as a psychological construct mirrors the history of academic psychology since the mid-20th century. Three streams of thought during the 1940s and 1950s converged to herald the study of coping: the psychoanalytic notion of defense mechanisms, the concept of stress, and experimental psychology's return from its exclusive focus on observable behavior to the study of mental processes.

Freud's concept of defense—the mind's way of keeping out of awareness unpleasant thoughts and feelings—was popularized by his daughter, Anna Freud, who described various defense mechanisms in detail. According to Anna Freud, some defense mechanisms are more effective or adaptive than others, an idea that foreshadowed current thinking regarding the relative effectiveness of various coping strategies. Anna Freud also observed that although there are many defense mechanisms, people tend to have preferred defenses for dealing with threatening situations, an idea that anticipated current thinking about “coping styles.” But the most direct way in which the notion of defense mechanisms influenced the development of the coping field is through its focus on the mind's ability to respond to threatening experiences in an effort to reduce the experienced threat.

At the same time—during and soon after World War II—there was keen interest in how soldiers dealt with the demands of combat and why some soldiers handled combat better than others. Hans Selye had introduced the concept of biological stress, including the body's response to such stress. Selye's 1950 address at the American Psychological Association meeting prompted psychologists to consider whether the psychological stress of combat might be met with mental efforts to reduce the threatening experience.

The third precursor of coping as a focus of study was the “cognitive revolution” in psychology. As George Miller has noted, this was actually a counterrevolution. The original revolution came earlier in the 20th century when an influential group of experimental psychologists, most notably B. F. Skinner, shifted psychology's focus from the science of mind to the science of behavior. In their effort to focus exclusively on observable behavior, these experimental psychologists viewed people's thoughts and feelings as irrelevant to psychological science. Although social and clinical psychology had never abandoned mental constructs, the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s was psychology's enthusiastic return to the study of how people think about themselves and their world.

The concepts of defense mechanisms and psychological stress—and psychology's renewed efforts to understand mental mechanisms—set the stage for [Page 191]Richard Lazarus's pioneering studies of coping. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lazarus conducted a series of now classic studies to determine whether people's ways of thinking about a stressor affected their reactions to the stressor. Lazarus and his colleagues showed threatening films to research participants while recording their heart rate and sampling reports of their subjective stress. One film captured a series of subincision operations performed on a young man's genitals. The other film depicted bloody woodshop accidents.

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