Coping as Action Regulation under Stress
Advances over the last two decades have helped shape developmentally-friendly conceptualizations of coping. Building on constructs of regulation, definitions now have an explicit place for the emotional, behavioral, motivational, attentional, cognitive, a
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Coping as Action Regulation under Stress
Because of its “bewildering richness” (Pearlin and Schooler 1978, p. 4), coping has always been a challenging phenomenon to conceptualize. Coping incorporates stress physiology and temperament, and involves the coordination of emotion, behavior, attention, motivation, and cognition. Hundreds of ways of coping have been studied. Individual attributes, relationships, and social contexts influence how coping unfolds. Families, peers, neighborhoods, and schools present demands and act as filters for resources and stressors, forming back-up systems that protect children and adolescents (or leave them vulnerable) while their coping capacities are developing. Children’s coping, in turn, influences the reactions of social partners and contributes to the accumulation of short-term resources and liabilities. Coping is part of an iterative process that both reflects and contributes to the development of mental and physical health and disorder. Despite this complexity, however, coping, at its heart, is a process of adaptation, “adaptation under relatively difficult circumstances” (White 1974, p. 49). Adaptation is, of course, something that living systems do in interaction with their environments. And the function of coping is to help organisms deal with transactions with the environment that tax or exceed their resources (Lazarus and Folkman 1984), that can’t be dealt with “in a purely mechanical or habitual way” (White 1974, p. 49). Typically, when a living system is challenged, threatened, or harmed, it “fights back,” attempting to resist personal damage and struggling to remain intact. That is coping. But because it is a living system, the object of these extensive re-balancing processes is not merely to fend off harm and maintain homeostasis. It also strives to reach its proximal goals and to use exchanges with the environment as a source of growth and development. That is coping, too.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 E.A. Skinner and M.J. Zimmer-Gembeck, The Development of Coping, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41740-0_1
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Coping as a Fundamental Adaptive Process
A view that ties coping back to its most basic function as a set of fundamental adaptive processes has implications for its conceptualization: Coping is a system that comprises transactions with the social and physical environments; the consequences of coping are not limited to the resolution of stressful episodes, but accrue in the health, development, and survival of individuals, relationships, and groups; and coping incorporates evolution-based species general innate structures or stress physiology. Moreover, it implies that “ways of coping” are not simply lists of things people can do in times of trouble. Instead, their taxonomy should reflect basic sets of adaptational processes and should help differentiate the effects of stress on functioning and adaptation. Finally, it focuses coping on “action” as the unit of study. Other facets of coping, such as
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