Okay. Stress and coping itself is not exactly “so retro”. It’s a continuing human experience since whenever we started encountering stress and then evolved the ability to cope with it. But the 1980s brought about an important shift in stress and coping theory to understand how humans cope with stress.
In particular, important research by Lazarus and Folkman in the 1980s helped us understand stress and coping. You don’t always hear about these researchers. But their Transactional Model of stress and coping is influential in how we view mental health, stress, and resilience. They conducted multiple studies to understand how individuals cope with stress and what predicts whether individuals will experience resilience or experience more hardship after stressful life events.
Lazarus and Folkman uncovered two important aspects of coping: primary appraisals and secondary appraisals. At a very basic level, effective coping with stress is not only what the difficulty is, but how the individual believes they can handle it.
Primary appraisals refer to the degree to which an individual believes something is even a stressor in the first place. Is it something that will require them to exert effort and resources to cope with? Secondary appraisals subsequently occur when the primary appraisal yields a “yes” answer. Secondary appraisals concern whether an individual believes they have the resources or ability to cope with a stressor(s). When a person believes they have the ability, they tend to adjust well.
Other researchers assert that this second step is really what accounts for how well we cope with stressors. Bandura spent much of his latter career uncovering the power of “self-efficacy”. (Yes, the same Bandura who uncovered the power of behavioral modeling and imitation in his “Bobo Doll” experiments). He found that how well humans believe they handle adversity predicts how well they adjust to it.
Social psychology research even finds that believing we can cope or handle a situation is actually adaptive even if that is not accurate. This overconfidence leads us to accept opportunities and risks that we would not otherwise take on. Those risks sometimes lead to good outcomes for us, like applying and getting a dream job or successfully pursuing romantic interests.
So how does this all matter for therapy? Many of our approaches to therapy can examine the difficulty the person is experiencing, but then also beliefs in their ability to handle it. Many difficulties like anxiety and depression lead people to think that they are unable to handle many difficult stressors. But multiple therapeutic modalities (e.g., CBT, ACT, DBT, promoting social support, IPT etc.) help clients approach their beliefs about their coping ability in different ways.
Folkman and Lazarus’ theory therefore provides practical options on how therapists can proceed in terms of how clients cope with stressors themselves and beliefs about doing so. These foci help clients move from adversity to resilience.
