STRESS, APPRAISAL, AND COPING Richard S., has been Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1957. After obtaining his doc- torate in 1948 from the University of Pittsburgh, he taught at Johns Hopkins University and at Clark University where he was Director of Clinical Training. He has published extensively on a variety of issues in personality and -clinical psychology, and was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969. He has been a pioneer in stress theory and research, exemplified by his 1966 book, Psychological Stress and the Coping Process, and by his influential psychophysiological re- search during the 1960s.
Professor Lazarus maintains an active pro- gram of research as Principal Investigator of the Berkeley Stress and Coping Project, and continues to be a major figure in emotion theory, as well as personality and clinical psychology. Susan Folkman, Ph., is Associate Research Psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Co-Principal Investigator of the Berkeley Stress and Coping Project. After a career of full-time parenting, Dr. Folkman began her doctoral work in 1975 and re- ceived her Ph.
from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters based on her research, and has rapidly gained a reputation for her ability to expand appraisal and coping theory and to test it empirically. STRESS, APPRAISAL, AND COPING Richard S. Susan Folkman, Ph.
Springer Publishing Company New York Copyright © 1984 by Springer Publishing Company, Inc. 11 West 42nd Street New York, NY 10036-8002 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Springer Publishing Company, Inc. Springer Publishing Company, Inc. 11 West 42nd Street New York, NY 10036-8002 060708/10 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lazarus, Richard S.
Stress, appraisal, and coping.9 84-5593 ISBN 0-8261-4191-9 Printed in the United States of America To Bunny; To David Foreword My first encounter with Richard Lazarus was during my graduate student days, back in the early 1970s. I wanted to study meditation as an intervention in the physiology of stress arousal, and at the time Lazarus was leading the way in such studies of stress. After a meeting with him in his Berkeley office in which I described what I was hoping to do, he gave me some technical advice and most kindly helped me obtain a copy of a film he had used with success in his own work to prime stress arousal in experimental subjects. I did not realize it then, but through the lens of history I see clearly that Lazarus had already begun to play a major role in shifting the thinking of psychology as a field.
At that time experimental psychology was in the thrall of behaviorists, who took as the proper study of our field the readily observable responses of organisms (whether pigeons or people) to a given stimulus. For behaviorists like B. Skinner (with whom I shared an occasional elevator ride in those days in Harvard's psychology building, William James Hall), the workings of the mind were but a "black box" between stimulus and response, nothing worthy of studying. But Lazarus saw that how we think about and perceive the events of our lives has direct physiological consequence: Mental events have biological outcomes.
That insight may seem all too obvious today, but in the Zeitgeist of those times it was a radical proposal. His experiments and theoretical writing played multiple roles in the history of psychology. For one, they kept alive the study of emotions during a time when the behaviorist tide was washing it away. For another, his findings highlighted the role of cognition in emotion, help- ing open the door within experimental psychology for the cognitive v vi Foreword revolution that was to overtake the behaviorist outlook in influence.
His work on the emotional consequence of "subception," or messages that come to us outside our conscious awareness, kept alive theoretical stances with roots in psychoanalysis that were later verified by affective neuroscience—another field that itself is to some extent a legacy of the experimental wave Lazarus's work began. Lazarus's stress research led to the studies of how people cope with adversity, an early contribution to what became behavioral medicine. And his insights on the power of appraisal helped build an atmosphere of receptivity for another approach just beginning to make headway in the 1970s: Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy. This re-issue of one of his classic works, Stress, Appraisal, and Coping, written with his colleague Susan Folkman, makes accessible a seminal document in the evolution of psychology.
Those of us now laboring in any of the multiple fields he helped found will still find in this historic work ideas that enrich our thinking. Daniel Goleman Contents Foreword V Preface xi 1 The Stress Concept in the Life Sciences 1 A Bit of History 2 Modern Developments 6 The Concept of Stress 11 Sum man/ 21 2 Cognitive Appraisal Processes 22 Why Is a Concept of Appraisal Necessary? 22 The Place of Cognitive Appraisal in Stress Theory 25 Basic Forms of Cognitive Appraisal 31 Research on Cognitive Appraisal 38 Cognitive Appraisal and Phenomenology 46 The Concept of Vulnerability 50 The Issue of Depth 51 Summary 52 3 Person Factors Influencing Appraisal 55 Commitments 56 Beliefs 63 Summary 80 4 Situation Factors Influencing Appraisal 82 Novelty 83 Predictability 85 vii viii Contents Event Uncertainty 87 Temporal Factors 92 Ambiguity 103 The Timing of Stressful Events in Relation to the Life Cycle 108 A Comment on the Selection and Treatment of Variables 114 Summary 115 5 The Concept of Coping 117 Traditional Approaches 117 Coping Traits and Styles 120 Limitations and Defects of Traditional Approaches 128 Summary 139 6 The Coping Process: An Alternative to Traditional Formulations 141 Definition of Coping 141 Coping as a Process 142 Stages in the Coping Process 143 The Multiple Functions of Coping 148 Coping Resources 157 Constraints Against Utilizing Coping Resources 165 Control as Appraisal; Control as Coping 170 Coping Over the Life Course 171 Prospects for the Study of Coping Styles 174 Summary 178 7 Appraisal, Coping, and Adaptational Outcomes 181 Social Functioning 183 Morale 194 Somatic Health 205 Concluding Comments 221 Summary 223 Contents ix 8 The Individual and Society 226 Three Perspectives 226 Stress, Coping, and Adaptation in the Individual 234 Social Change 251 Summary 258 9 Cognitive Theories of Emotion 261 Early Cognitive Formulations 262 The Fundamental Tasks of a Cognitive Theory of Emotion 265 Attribution Theory 271 The Relationship Between Cognition and Emotion 273 Emotion and the Problem of Reductionism 278 Summary 284 10 Methodological Issues 286 Levels of Analysis 286 Traditional Research and Thought 291 Transaction and Process 293 The Design of Transactional, Process-oriented Research 299 The Measurement of Key Concepts 306 Summary 325 11 Treatment and Stress Management 334 Approaches to Treatment 334 How Treatment Works 343 Therapy from the Perspective of Our Stress and Coping Theory 353 Stress Management Versus One-on-One Therapy 361 Summary 374 References 376 Index 437 This page intentionally left blank Preface The idea for this book originated about 10 years after the publication of Psychological Stress and the Coping Process by Lazarus in 1966, when it became evident that the field had not only grown and matured, but that it had also changed greatly in character. Cognitive ap- proaches to stress had become widely accepted and, along with renewed interest in emotions and psychosomatic (or behavioral) medicine, the issues of stress and coping in adult life and aging, as well as stress management, were gaining attention. Most important, the concepts of cognitive appraisal and coping, not yet in the main- stream of thought in 1966, had become major themes of interdiscipli- nary theory and research, and our own approaches to these con- cepts had further developed and expanded.
It was again time to pull together the field of stress, coping, and adaptation from the perspec- tive of our current research and thought. This book, then, has a historical connection with its 1966 forebear; it shares its objectives and metatheoretical orientation, but its character and basic content are new. We have three main objectives. First, we present in detail our theory of stress, focusing on cognitive appraisal and coping.
Our approach is plainly partisan, and reflects a longstanding stake in certain theoretical and metatheoretical perspectives. Second, we ex- amine major movements within the field from the perspective of our theory, including issues of behavioral medicine and concern with the life course, emotion, stress management, and treatment. Third, since stress, coping, and adaptation represent both an indi- vidual psychological and physiological human problem—and a col- lective problem because humans function in society—our concerns xi xii Preface are multilevel and multidisciplinary. Therefore, our intended audi- ence includes clinicians (psychiatrists, social workers, nurses, and clinical psychologists), sociologists, anthropologists, medical re- searchers, and physiologists.
Although our own emphasis is clearly psychological and centered on individual coping and adaptation, our concerns touch on each of these disciplines. A book such as this requires choices, sometimes painful ones, about how much to cover, in how much detail, with how much scholarship, and at what level of complexity. We have not tried to be encyclopedic or to cover every topic that could conceivably be in- cluded under the rubric of stress. The research literature is now voluminous; we have not here reviewed it for each of the topics covered, but emphasize the most important issues and research rele- vant to our conceptualization.
We have had to be highly selective and have experienced ambivalence about whether or not to cite par- ticular discourses or research studies. This is an idea book, not a review of research; where possible, we cite reviews the reader can turn to. We closed the book on new citations in the summer of 1983. We have tried to keep the text to a manageable size, which may disappoint those researchers whose work is not included.
We made the decision to forgo an examination of the physiol- ogy of stress, on which there are numerous treatments, whereas there are few scholarly books devoted to the psychological and so- cial aspects of stress from the cognitive standpoint. A workable pys- chophysiology of stress depends as much on a vigorous understand- ing of psychological and social processes as it does on a sound knowledge of physiology. We view our contribution as mainly in the former areas. We also chose not to examine developmental issues.
Relevant research on developmental aspects of stress and coping is growing, but as of this moment it seems premature to examine the topic in this book. This is not an undergraduate text or a self-help book; it is ori- ented toward professionals in many disciplines who might appre- ciate an integrative theoretical analysis of the subject matter. When one writes a book for biological and social scientists and practi- tioners, however, one must be wary of overestimating knowledge across disciplines. We have made every effort to be clear without assuming such prior knowledge.
We hope sociologists will under- stand that we are not sociologists and that we are not writing exclu- sively for them; and similarly for physiologists, anthropologists, and so on. It is our hope not only that social and biological scientists and practitioners can read what we have written with understanding, Preface xiii but that graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and educated laypersons too would appreciate this book. We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of a number of persons who read specific chapters and gave us comments and ad- vice. These include James Coyne, Anita DeLongis, Christine Dunkel- Schetter, Rand Gruen, Theodore Kemper, D.
Paul Lumsden, and Leonard Pearlin.