Coping as Action Regulation under Stress

Abstract

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 part-ners 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 transac-tions 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. 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 conse-quences 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 emotions, appraisals, and motivations, can be designated as adaptive or maladaptive only after considering how they influence action. Actions are the means by which individuals interact with the environment, and it is to actions that social and physical environments respond. Capacities of the coping system. The core questions of a theory of coping focus on what is needed for " successful " transactions with a challenging or threatening environment. Since its goal is to detect and respond to danger, a coping system needs several capacities: First, it needs to monitor and detect threats and problems, and secure clear and accurate information (White 1974). Second, it needs to cali-brate its responses to actual issues: Under-reactions based on ignorance or denial can render the system vulnerable to attack, but over-reactions based on panic or fear can use up needed resources and lead to exhaustion (Williams 2010). Third, the system needs to maintain its internal organization (White 1974), that is, its com-posure or equanimity, so that it has full access to accurate information about its internal states and resources: emotions, cognitions, motivations, energy level, capabilities, strategies, and especially its own genuine priorities and commitments. Fourth, the coping system needs the capacity to act in concert with external and internal conditions, that is, the self-discipline, skill, and will to do what is needed and to do its part in dealing with stressors. Fifth, it needs the capacity to access and benefit from additional resources, both social and material, when environmental demands overwhelm its own resources. Sixth, it needs the capacity to flexibly adjust actions as conditions on the ground change, to recover from setbacks, and keep its options open (White 1974). Seventh, it needs to do all this as automatically as it can, with as little energy as possible, in order to preserve resources. And finally, the system needs to remember and learn from past stressful transactions, so as to act more effectively in present circumstances and also to anticipate and prevent problems in the future. Developmental potentials of the coping system. It is clear that newborns come with rudimentary equipment to detect and respond to threats. In fact, it could be argued that an important function of the sensory system is detection of threats, and an important function of the motor system is responding to them. At the same time, the limitations of both these systems are also apparent: Although newborns never 4 1 Coping as Action Regulation under Stress