Emotion-Focused Compare And Contrast Folkman And Emotion-Focused Coping

This is one of the right contest in which coping strategies have to concern a full rehabilitation (including physical, psychological and social spheres). The adaptation to the disease depends on external and internal support systems. The external ones involve relationship with family, friends, work, medical interventions and counseling groups. The internal ones are based on the coping strategies that the subject would use to face multiple sclerosis’ problems.

Lazarus and Folkman (in 1984) identify two processes “cognitive appraisal and coping, as critical mediators of stressful person - environment relations and their immediate and long - range outcomes”. In the cognitive appraisal the person estimates subjectively what is happening. Coping instead “is defined as the person’s constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the person’s resources” (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). The coping process is characterized of two phases: programming and cognitive planning of the strategies to use to resolve the problem.
Coping has two main dimensions: emotion - focused coping (EFC) and problem - focused coping (PFC). The emotion –focused coping refers to emotional response aimed at reducing the emotive issue on stressful situations. The
problem – focused coping, instead, relates to the attempt to solving the problem through real actions to change the facts and also comparing with people that are living with the same disease. In these categories, a wide variety of specific strategies is described.
Jean and coll.
(1997) studied some patients with Sclerosis Multiple. To cope situations with disease-related stressors, the majority of patients used emotion – focused coping. These are considered dysfunctional strategies, in fact high levels of psychological distress were positively correlated with the utilization of these coping strategies. There was an independence between distress and patients who utilized problem – focused coping. So, emotional strategies are emphasized by anxious or depressed subjects when the situation looks threatening; problem – focused coping is used when the situation appears controlled and susceptible to
change.
The number of relapses is the strongest predictor of adjustment disease, meanwhile to keep a positive self – image, is a mark of good adaption.
The choice and the effectiveness of the coping strategies depend on external resources (family, friends, workplace, medical staff, counseling) and on internal ones depending on coping strategies utilized before the disease and on the way in which a patient directly deals with problems associated with Multiple Sclerosis.
The most important personal resources are self – esteem, realism and self – confidence. Useful instruments for coping’s evaluation are “Ways of Coping Checklist” (WCC) and “Coping with MS Scale” (CMSS). Some main subscales are unlighted: escape and avoidance, positive relearning, acceptance of responsibility, self – control, request for social support, planning of the problem’s resolution.
The relation between coping and depression in MS would change with the gravity of physical disability: the more severe is the physical disease, the more “escape and avoidance” strategies are utilized. One of the task of the caregivers is to identify people who are using wrong strategies and help them to recover a good control on the disease. Equally important is the role of the family through which is possible to improve knowledge about the problem, communicative skills and problem – solving with the family members.