Psychology2016

Stress and Health 449

Coping Strategies

11.10 Distinguish between problem-focused and emotion-focused coping
strategies to stress.

Coping strategies are actions that people can take to master, tolerate, reduce, or minimize
the effects of stressors, and they can include both behavioral strategies and psychological
strategies. While there are medications used for the treatment of stress-related problems,
as well as nonmedical treatments such as hypnosis ( to Learning Objective 4.9)
and meditation (discussed later in this chapter), let’s take a look at some other methods
for coping with stress.

PROBLEM-FOCUSED COPING One type of coping strategy is to work on eliminating
or changing the stressor itself. When people try to eliminate the source of a stress
or reduce its impact through their own actions, it is called problem-focused cop-
ing ( Folkman & Lazarus, 1980; Lazarus, 1993). For example, a student might have
a problem understanding a particular professor. The professor is knowledgeable
but has trouble explaining the concepts of the course in a way that this student can
understand. Problem-focused coping might include talking to the professor after
class, asking fellow students to clarify the concepts, getting a tutor, or forming a
study group with other students who are also having difficulty to pool the group’s
resources.

EMOTION-FOCUSED COPING Problem-focused coping can work quite well but is
not the only method people can use. Most people use both problem-focused coping
and emotion-focused coping to successfully deal with controllable stressful events
(Eschenbeck et al., 2008; Folkman & Lazarus, 1980; Lazarus, 1993; Stowell et al., 2001).
Emotion-focused coping is a strategy that involves changing the way a person feels or
emotionally reacts to a stressor. This reduces the emotional impact of the stressor and
makes it possible to deal with the problem more effectively. For example, the student
who is faced with a professor who isn’t easy to understand might share his concerns
with a friend, talking it through until calm enough to tackle the problem in a more
direct manner. Emotion-focused coping also works for stressors that are uncontrolla-
ble and for which problem-focused coping is not possible. Someone using emotion-
focused coping may decide to view the stressor as a challenge rather than a threat,
decide that the problem is a minor one, write down concerns in a journal, or even
ignore the problem altogether.

Ignore it? But won’t that just make matters worse?

True, ignoring a problem is not a good strategy when there is something a person
can actively do about solving the problem. But when it is not possible to change or elim-
inate the stressor, or when worrying about the stressor can be a problem itself, ignoring
the problem is not a bad idea. Researchers working with people who had suffered heart
attacks found that those people who worried about a future attack were more likely to
suffer from symptoms of severe stress, such as nightmares and poor sleep (both factors
that increase the risk of a future heart attack), than were the people who tried to ignore
their worries (Ginzburg et al., 2003). to Learning Objective 14.5.
Using humor can also be a form of emotion-focused coping. A study on the
effects of laughter found that laughter actually boosted the action of the immune sys-
tem by increasing the work of natural killer cells (cells that attack viruses in the body).
In this study, participants were shown a humor video for 1 hour. Blood samples were
taken 10 minutes before the viewing, 30 minutes into the viewing, 30 minutes after
viewing, and 12 hours after viewing the humor video. There were significant increases

coping strategies

actions that people can take to master,

tolerate, reduce, or minimize the

effects of stressors.

An audience watches what is obviously

a funny movie, one of the more popular

choices for filmgoers. A large part of the

success of such comedies can be attributed

to the human need to laugh—laughter helps

us cope with many of life’s stresses.

problem-focused coping

coping strategies that try to eliminate

the source of a stress or reduce its

impact through direct actions.

emotion-focused coping

coping strategies that change the

impact of a stressor by changing the

emotional reaction to the stressor.