Stress, Appraisal, and Coping

460 Pages·1984·25.36 MB·English

by  Richard S. Lazarus PhD

STRESS,
APPRAISAL,
AND COPING
Richard S. Lazarus, Ph.D., 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.D., 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.D. 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. Lazarus, Ph.D.
Susan Folkman, Ph.D.
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
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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.
Bibliography: p. Includes index.
1. Stress (Psychology) I. Folkman, Susan. IT. Title
BF575.S75L32 1984 155.9 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.F. 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