Week 10: Coping Techniques & Cognitive Appraisal

Locus of Control and Stress

• Having a high internal locus of control is a protective factor against stress, as it allows individuals to perceive themselves as being in control of their lives.
• Individuals with a high internal locus of control are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors and have a positive impact on their health.
• On the other hand, individuals with a high external locus of control believe that events are outside of their control and are more likely to experience stress.

Attributional Style and Stress

• Attributional style refers to the patterns of causal inferences individuals make about why things happen to them.
• Optimists attribute bad events to temporary, specific, and external factors, while pessimists attribute them to enduring, global, and internal factors.
• Individuals with a pessimistic attributional style are more vulnerable to stress and are more likely to experience negative outcomes.

Cognitive Appraisal and Coping

• Cognitive appraisal is the process of evaluating and making sense of a stressor.
• Individuals with a positive problem-solving style are more resistant to stress and are better able to cope with stressors.
• Problem-solving style involves identifying effective strategies for coping with stress, including problem-orientation, problem definition, generation of alternative solutions, decision-making, and solution implementation.

Perceived Support and Resilience

• Perceived support is central to one's cognitive appraisal and is related to resilience, self-efficacy, optimism, and hope.
• Perceived support creates a sense of belonging, which is central to resilience and coping with stress.

Sense of Coherence and Coping

• Sense of coherence refers to one's worldview, which is comprised of three integrated factors: comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness.
• Individuals with a strong sense of coherence are better able to cope with stress and are more likely to experience positive outcomes.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

• CBT is a technique used to manage stress effectively by challenging dysfunctional automatic thoughts, assumptions, and beliefs and replacing them with healthier, realistic thinking patterns.
• Cognitive restructuring is a key component of CBT, which involves identifying, challenging, and replacing negative automatic thoughts.

Coping Strategies

• Coping strategies can be divided into four major categories: problem-focused, emotion-focused, social support, and meaning-making.
• Problem-focused coping involves dealing with the perceived cause of distress, while emotion-focused coping involves managing the distress caused by the problem.
• Social support coping involves seeking social support, while meaning-making coping involves using one's values, beliefs, and goals to shape meaning in stressful situations.

Types of Coping Strategies

• Problem-focused coping strategies include active coping, planning, and resistant coping.

• Emotion-focused coping strategies include denial, mental disengagement, alcohol-drug disengagement, and focus on and venting emotions.

• Social support coping strategies include seeking social support for instrumental and emotional reasons.

• Meaning-making coping strategies include positive reinterpretation and growth, acceptance, and turning to religion.### Stress Management and Coping

• Overgeneralization: a cognitive distortion where individuals overestimate their cleverness based on performance on one task.

Stress Inoculation Training (SIT)

• A cognitive-behavior modification training program to prepare individuals for stressful future encounters or treat current excess stress.
• Consists of three phases:
• Conceptual educational phase: helps clients understand their stress-related problems through collecting information and presenting it back to them in a collaborative manner.
• Skills acquisition and skills consolidation phase: developing coping skills for dealing with target stressors (e.g., cognitive restructuring, social support, emotion-focused coping, education).
• Application and follow-through phase: practicing to apply these skills during increasing levels of stress (e.g., role-playing).

Attributional Retraining and Learned Optimism

• Attributional retraining: programs designed to change attributional explanatory styles to cultivate learned optimism or greater sense of personal control over outcomes.
• Learned optimism: cultivating positive expectations when seeing connections between one's efforts and outcomes.
• Associated with modest improvements in academic performance.

Self-Forgiveness

• Process of letting go of a desire to punish, retaliate, or act destructively toward oneself due to one's actions.
• Receiving a cancer diagnosis can lead to self-blame, which is associated with greater distress, mood disturbances, and lower quality of life.

Humor

• Reframes the problem in a way to make the stress feel lighter, creating positive affect, emotional distance, and a new perspective.
• Coping humor is associated with high levels of self-esteem, perceived competency, and positive affect.

Pets and Social Support

• Pets offer nonevaluative social support, which can help in stress relief, especially for women when interacting with their dogs.
• Interacting with a therapy dog has been shown to decrease depression in undergraduate students and to lower stress hormones and blood pressure in healthy adults.