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Coping As a Mediator of Emotion

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Coping As a Mediator of Emotion Journal of Personality and Social Pswholog* Copyright 1988 b> [he American Psychological Association, Inc. 1988. Vbl 54. No. .1,466-175 0022-3514/8S/$00.7S Coping as a Mediator of Emotion Susan Folkman and Richard S. Lazarus University of California, Berkeley There is widespread conviction among health care professionals that coping affects emotion. Yet theory and research have traditionally emphasized the effects of emotion on coping. The present research addresses this imbalance bv evaluating the extent to which coping mediated emotions dur- ing stressful encounters in two Caucasian, community-residing samples. Subjects' recently experi- enced stressful encounters, the ways they coped with the demands of those encounters, and the emotions they experienced during two stages of those encounters were assessed repeatedly. The ex- tent to which eight forms of coping mediated each of four sets of emotions was evaluated with a series of hierarchical regression analyses (of residuals). Coping was associated with changes in all four sets of emotions, w ith some forms of coping associated with increases in positive emotions and other forms associated with increases in negative emotions. There is a long-standing and widely held cons'iction among Child & Waterhouse, 1952; Sarason, Mandler, & Craighill, researchers and practitioners in the fields of mental health and 1952). behavioral medicine that the ways people cope with the de- The understanding of the relationship between emotion and mands of a stressful event make a difference in how they feel coping that derives from these two theoretical models is incom- emotionally. Yet despite this conviction, there is little under- plete for two important reasons. First, the complexity of emo- standing about the ways coping processes actually affect the tion and coping processes is underestimated. Emotion, for ex- emotion response. ample, tends to be treated as unidimensional drive or arousal. Historically, coping has been viewed primarily as a response However, emotions depend on cognitive appraisals of the sig- to emotion. Within the animal model of stress, for example, nificance of the person-environment relationship for the indi- coping is defined as learned behaviors that contribute to sur- vidual's well-being and the available options for coping (cf. Laz- vival in the face of life-threatening dangers (e.g.. Miller. 1980: arus, 1982; Lazarus, Averill, & Opton. 1970: Lazarus & Folk- Ursin. 1980). These behaviors are initiated by fear, which moti- man, 1984; Lazarus, Kanner. & Folkman, 1980). Any one vates the behavioral response of avoidance or escape, and by stressful event, even an ordinary daily encounter, usually has anger, which motivates confrontation or attack. Within the ego- more than one implication for well-being and more than one psychology model, coping includes cognitive processes, such as option for coping (e.g., Folkman, Lazarus, Dunkel-Schetter, denial, repression, suppression, and intellectualization, as well DeLongis, & Gruen, 1986). As a result, people are likely to ex- as problem-solving behaviors, that are invoked to reduce or perience multiple and often conflicting emotions, as has been manage anxiety and other distressing emotion states (e.g.. Men- seen in young children who feel both happy and sad about ninger. 1963; Vaillant. 1977). something that has transpired (Harris, 1985; Terwogt, Schene, Much of the research on the relationship between emotion & Harris. 1985) and in students preparing for exams who feel and coping in humans has focused on the ways in which emo- both threat and challenge emotions (Folkman & Lazarus, tion—in the form of anxiety—can interfere with cognitive 1985). And in these models coping tends to be treated as either functioning and hence coping (e.g., rCrohne & Laux. 1982: approach-avoidance behavior or defensive processes. However, Schwarzer, 1984: Spielberger, 1966, 1972; van der Ploeg, people use not just approach-avoidance behavior or defensive Schwarzer. & Spielberger. 1984). Two mechanisms of interfer- processes to cope with the complex demands and constraints of ence have been emphasized, a motivational one in which atten- a given stressful encounter, but a wide range of cognitive and tion is redirected from a task at hand to a more pressing emer- behavioral strategies that have both problem-solving and gency (e.g., Easterbrook, l959;Schonpflug, 1983), and a cogni- emotion-regulating functions (e.g., Felton, Revenson, & Hin- tive one in which anxiety-related thoughts that are irrelevant to richsen, 1984; Folkman & Lazarus, 1980, 1985; Folkman, Laz- performance impede functioning (e.g., Alpert & Haber, 1960; arus, Dunkel-Schetter, DeLongis, & Gruen, 1986; Folkman, Lazarus, Pimley. & Novacek, 1987; McCrae, 1982, 1984; Vital- iano, Russo, Carr, Maiuro, & Becker, 1985). Second, these theoretical models emphasize a unidirectional This research was supported by grants from the MacArthur Founda- causal pattern in which emotion affects coping both by motivat- tion and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (DA02976). ing it and impeding it. However, the relationship between emo- Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Susan Folkman. who is now at the University of CaliforniaSchool of Medicine, tion and coping in stressful encounters is bidirectional, with Division of General Internal Medicine, A405. 400 Parnassus Avenue, each affecting the other. The behavioral flow begins with a trans- San Francisco. California 94143-0320. action that is appraised as harmful, beneficial, threatening, or 466 COPING AS A MEDIATOR OF EMOTION 467 Person-Environment Encounter based on data from two samples, one in which the subjects were community-residing married couples with young children liv- ing at home and a second in which the subjects were retired, Appraisal community-residing adults over the age of 65. Although the Priaary Secondary samples are demographically similar, some procedures and measures were modified for use with the older sample to ad- I > EMOTION <—I dress questions concerning aging that are dealt with elsewhere Quality and Intensity (cf. Folkman, Bernstein, & Lazarus, 1987; Huffine, Folkman, & Lazarus, 1987). Despite these differences, the overlap in the I two studies was sufficient to allow us to draw upon both for the COPING present analysis. Problem-focused Emotion-focused Three major questions were addressed: (a) Does coping in 1 fact mediate the emotion response in stressful encounters? (b) Altered Person-Environment Changge in AttentioAttention or If so, are the effects limited to certain types of emotions, or are Relationship Meaning they evident across all emotions, including positive and negative ones? (c) To what extent is there specificity in the association between diverse forms of emotion-focused coping and problem- Reappraisal focused coping and changes in the emotion response? For exam- EMOTION ple, are all forms of coping associated with the reduction of dis- Quality and Intensity tress, or are some forms associated with increases in distress? Method Hew Person-Environment Encounter Samples Figure I. Coping as a mediator of emotion. The people selected for the two studies were primarily Protestant or Catholic, had at least an eighth-grade education, had an above-marginal family income ($18,000 for a family of four in 1980 in the younger sample, and $10,000 for retired individuals or couples in 1982 in the challenging. The appraisal process generates emotion. The ap- older sample), and were not bedridden. Qualified subjects were identi- praisal and its attendant emotions influence coping processes, fied through random-digit dialing. Prospective subjects received a letter which in turn change the person-environment relationship. explaining the study and then a telephone call from a project interviewer who answered questions and requested a home interview. The altered person-environment relationship is reappraised, Younger sample. The younger sample consisted of 85 married cou- and the reappraisal leads to a change in emotion quality and ples living in Contra Costa County with at least one child at home. The intensity. Viewed in this way, coping is a mediator of the emo- female portion of the sample was restricted to women between the ages tion response. The process is summarized in Figure 1. of 35 and 45; their husbands, whose ages were not a criterion for eligibil- Mediator variables are often confused with moderator vari- ity, were between the ages of 26 and 54 and were also studied. Forty-six ables. Moderators are antecedent conditions such as gender, so- percent of the qualified couples who received letters agreed to be in the cioeconomic status, or personality traits that interact with other study. The mean age of the women was 39.6 years, and the mean age of conditions in producing an outcome. An example is a goal hier- the men was 41.4 years. The mean number of years of education was archy that a person brings to an encounter. This hierarchy inter- 15.5, and the median family income was $45,000. Eighty-four percent acts with relevant environmental variables to produce an ap- of the men and 57% of the women were employed for pay. People who refused to be in the study were compared on age, religion, and educa- praisal and its attendant emotion response. A mediating vari- tion; they differed significantly from those who participated in the study able, on the other hand, is generated in the encounter, and it only in years of education (M = 14.3). Ten couples dropped out of the changes the relationship between the antecedent and the out- study, an attrition rate of 11.8%. These couples were excluded from the come variable. As a mediator, coping arises during the en- analysis, yielding a final sample of 75 couples, or 150 men and women. counter and transforms the original appraisal and its attendant Subjects who dropped out did not differ from those who remained in emotion in some way. The difference between moderator and the study with respect to age, religion, or education (information on mediator variables is conceptually and methodologically im- income was not available for those who dropped out).
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