Coping-Focused Coping Methods

Coping is a technique in which people use when dealing with stressful events. It is referred to anything that one might feel, think, and/or do in order to reduce stress. Because people cope differently, there are several different coping methods that people undergo based on what stressful event they have experienced. One particular coping method, meaning-focused coping, is ways that people find to accomplish the meaning of a stressful situation. When something tragic happens in one’s life, let’s say a house fire, one may look at it as if “everything happens for a reason” or even, “Material things can be replaced, but people cannot, so it’s good no one is hurt.” When dealing with the meaning-focused coping strategy, one decreases the stress by reframing the stress of being rejected. Psychologist, Susan Folkman, argues that people disregard the role that positive emotion plays in coping and reinstates our coping energy. Folkman and Lazarus introduced a stress coping model in 1984 and later on updated it. The initial model displayed an arrangement of activities following an event: Appraisal, Coping, Outcome, Emotion (Britton, 2009). In the model were two pathways from a threatening event that led to positive emotion; as the second pathway led to unfavorable distress. In the improved model, it included impacts of positive emotion while people deal with negative results. There are several different kinds of meaning-focused coping that people deal with when handling a certain situation.