Aldwin (1994) observed that “contemporary American culture has become nearly obsessed with stress and how to cope with it” (p. 71). Modern technology has raised our hopes that most adversities of life have easy and rapid solutions. The various self-help books and media programs on stress and what to do about it attest to the importance of this concept and attempts to cope. Much of applied psychology, especially the fields of clinical and counseling psychology, consists of efforts to enhance an individual’s coping responses. The ascriptor term coping did not appear in the index of Psychological Abstracts until the mid-1960s, and it was not included in the 1983 Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychology (Harre & Lamb, 1983). However, interest in coping, or at least the usage of the term, has grown rapidly, so that in the 1994 index of Psychological Abstracts, there were over 400 references under the ascriptor term coping behavior. This growth parallels the increase in the articles on stress, since in most models, coping is the organism’s response to stress in the attempt to control, avoid, or prevent emotional distress (Pearlin & Schooler, 1978). In a review of performance and aging, the well-known gerontologist Welford (1992) states that the “problems for older people in coping both individually and on a social scale ... are probably the greatest challenge at present to applied psychology in relation to aging and will become more urgent as the proportion of old people in the population increases” (p. 191).
KeywordsCoping Strategy Coping Style Religious Coping Coping Mechanism Social Stress
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