EMOTION FOCUSED

COPING
Chapter 4
Objectives
• Understanding ways of increasing happiness in yourself
• Describe what is Emotion-Focused Coping?
• Understanding advantages of Emotional Coping
• Describe Neurobiological Basis of Emotional Responses
Connecting with the Past…
Nation’s Happiest?
• In Pakistani survey about mental well-being, one shoe mender described that
he is very happy as his work is admired in all neighborhood.
• A 1998 survey of 1,003 American adults by Opinion Research Corporation
gave a similar reply. In this survey people were asked “Who of the following
people do you think is the happiest?” and people responded “Oprah
Winfrey” (23%), “Bill Gates” (7%), “the Pope” (12%), “Chelsea Clinton” (3%),
and “yourself” (49%), with the remaining 6% answering “don't know.”
• It has been generally seen that people involved in charity work and human
service consider themselves as comparatively happier.
• How would you respond to “Last time I was the happiest when…..”
Personal Mini-Experiment
Generational Disparity about Emotional States
• Ask your grandparents or any other 5 people of their age how
optimistic, happy, and contented they are in their lives on a sale of 0-
100 and also what makes them feel so.
Now pose the similar question to 5 people/students of your age group
and compare the answers. You have to bring this mini survey result in
the next class.
COPING

• Coping is defined as the thoughts and behaviors used to manage the

internal and external demands of situations that are appraised as
stressful (Folkman & Moskowitz,2004; Taylor & Stanton, 2007).
• Coping has several important characteristics. First, the relationship
between coping and a stressful event is a dynamic process.
• Coping is a series of transactions between a person who has a set of
resources, values, and commitments and a particular environment
with its own resources, demands, and constraints
Conti..
• Thus, coping is not a one-time action that someone takes but rather a
set of responses, occurring over time, by which the environment and
the person influence each other.
• A second important aspect of coping is its breadth. Emotional
reactions, including anger or depression, are part of the coping
process, as are actions that are voluntarily undertaken to confront the
event.
Factors that effect Coping
1. Personality traits:
• The personality characteristics that each person brings to a stressful event
influence how he or she will cope with that event.
• Research has especially focused on negative affectivity (Watson & Clark,
1984), a pervasive negative mood marked by anxiety, depression, and
hostility.
• People high in negative affectivity (also called neuroticism) express
distress, discomfort, and dissatisfaction in many situations and thus feel
difficulty coming out of such situations.
 2. Positivity or Positive Affect
• Positive emotional functioning promotes better mental and physical
health.
• Positive emotional states have been tied to lower levels of stress
indicators such as cortisol and better immune responses to challenges
e.g. a disease encounter such as exposure to a flu virus.
• When people are feeling positive, they also invest time and effort to
overcome obstacles in pursuit of their goals (Haase, Poulin,&
Heckhausen, 2012), which may accordingly affect their mood and lower
their stress levels.
• In addition to promoting general well-being, positivity promotes several
specific psychological resources that improve coping (Taylor & Broff man,
2011), to which we next turn.
3. Psychological Resources
• Optimism: An optimistic nature can help people cope more
effectively with stress and reduce their risk for illness (Scheier,
Carver, & Bridges, 1994).Optimism also promotes active and
persistent coping efforts, which improves long-term prospects
for psychological and physical health.
• Optimism is usually beneficial for coping. But because optimists
are persistent in pursuing their goals, they sometimes
experience short-term physiological costs. When optimists’
expectations are not met, they may feel stressed, and
compromised immune functioning may be a short-term
consequence.
Conti…
Psychological Control: is the belief that one can determine one’s own
behavior, influence one’s environment, and bring about desired
outcomes. The belief that one can exert control over stressful events
has long been known to help people cope with stress (Taylor, Helgeson,
Reed, & Skokan, 1991; Thompson, 1981).

Self-Esteem: High self-esteem is tied to effective coping. It seems to be

most protective at low levels of stress; at higher levels of stress, the
stressful events themselves can overwhelm the benefits of self-esteem
(Whisman & Kwon, 1993).
Coping Styles:
i.e. a propensity to deal with stressful events in a particular way.
• Approach Versus Avoidance: Some people cope with a threatening event with an
avoidant (minimizing) coping style, whereas others use an approach (confrontative,
vigilant) coping style, by gathering information or taking direct action. Although each
style can have advantages, on the whole, approach-related coping is more successful
than avoidant coping, and it is tied to better mental and physical health outcomes
(Taylor & Stanton, 2007).
• Proactive Coping: Much coping is proactive; that is, people anticipate potential
stressors and act in advance, either to prevent them or to reduce their impact
(Aspinwall, 2011; Aspinwall & Taylor, 1997).
Proactive coping requires first, the abilities to anticipate or detect potential stressors;
second, coping skills for managing them; and third, self-regulatory skills, which are the
ways that people control, direct, and correct their actions as they attempt to counter
potential stressful events.
 Approaches to Coping
• Problem-Focused and
Emotion-Focused Coping
• Problem-focused coping involves attempts to do something constructive about the
stressful conditions that are harming, threatening, or challenging an individual. When
using a problem-focused coping strategy, an individual seeks information and generates
solutions to address the issue or problem encountered. Such a strategy is active and fact
based.
• Emotion-focused coping involves efforts to regulate emotions experienced due to the
stressful event. Typically people use both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping
to manage stressful events, suggesting that both types of coping are useful (Folkman &
Lazarus, 1980).
Example on spot!
• Some people cope by trying to solve whatever problem they’re faced with. For
example, if you’re feeling lonely, you could join a local group to try to make new
friends. If you’re stressed at work, you might find ways to set stronger work-life
boundaries or look for a new job.
• This is called problem-focused coping. But not everyone copes with stress and
challenges this way.
• Other people may change the way they feel about the situation, instead of
fixing the issue itself. This is called emotion-focused coping.
• For example, instead of trying to meet new people, you might journal when you
feel lonely to try to process what you’re feeling. Or you might practice
mindfulness to manage your work-related stress rather than looking for a new
position.
• You might not always do one or the other, either. It varies with situation
majorly.
Emotional Coping Approach
• An important type of emotional coping is emotional-approach coping, which
involves clarifying, focusing on, and working through the emotions experienced I
response to a stressor (Stanton, 2010).
• Stanton, Paras, and Austenfeld (2002) stated that “coping through emotional
approach might be said to carry adaptive potential, the realization of which may
depend on the situational context, the inter-personal situation, and attributes of
the individual.” What they call emotional approach involves active movement
toward, rather than away from, a stressful encounter.?????
• Emotional-approach coping improves adjustment to many chronic conditions,
including chronic pain and medical conditions such as pregnancy and breast
cancer.
• Even managing the stress of daily life can benefit from emotional-approach
coping (Stanton et al., 2000). Coping via emotional approach appears to be
especially beneficial for women (Stanton et al., 2000).
Stanton, Kirk, Cameron, and Danoff-Burg (2000) identified two related but distinct
processes involved in emotion-focued coping:
1. Emotional Processing
2. Emotional Expression

Emotional Processing: Emotional Expression:

Emotional Processing or attempt to Emotional expression or free and
understand emotions include: intentional displays of feeling include:
• I realize that my feelings are valid • I feel free to express my emotions.
and important. • I take time to express my emotions.
• I take time to figure out what I am • I allow myself to express my
really feeling. feelings.
• I delve into my feelings to get a • I let my feelings come out freely.
thorough understanding of them.
• I acknowledge my emotions.
Research on Emotion Focused
Coping
• Working with an undergraduate population, Stanton and colleagues (2000)
found that students who were dealing with a parent’s psychological or
physical illness coped better with their stressors if they were assigned to
sessions that matched their emotional approach tendencies.
• Emotion-focused coping can also be a key component related to medical
issues such as cardiac stress, cancer survivors etc.
• In a study examining different types of coping as predictors of disease
severity of acute coronary syndrome, patients who used emotion-focused
coping had less severity overall. The researchers hypothesize that emotion
focused coping may moderate certain physiological responses to a stressful
event such that the heart has reduced reactivity to stress (Chiavarino et al.,
2012).
• Similarly, studies that showed the impact of emotion-focused coping
on women’s adjustment to breast cancer found that over a 3-month
period, women who used emotion-focused coping perceived their
health status as better, had lower psychological distress, and had
fewer medical appointments for cancer related pain and ailments, as
compared to those who did not.
• These researches have a great implications for creating psychological
interventions for those who show symptoms of diseases related to
stress reactions.
Research in Pakistan
• A research conducted in Pakistan hospitals in early 2000s showed significantly
higher scores of the sample on Fighting Spirit and Anxious Preoccupation,
whereas they obtained lower scores at Passivity and Submissive Acceptance.
• Moreover, patients with higher adaptive adjustment reported better level of
performance while maladaptive adjustment was correlated with poor
performance.
• Fighting Spirit refers to the strength of the patient to challenge the disease.
Patients possessing this skill find out as much as possible about their condition,
demand a say in choice of treatment, and often seek out complementary
therapies in which they themselves can take an active role, for example, adopting
new diet, exercise or undertaking a course of psychotherapy.
• They are resolved to live as fully as possible, often aiming towards defined
practical goals. An example item is, I’m determined to live for my daughter’s
wedding (who is 3 year old).
Advantages of Emotional Coping
• This coping approach may foster a better understanding of our
experiences and direct our attention to central concerns (Frijda,
1994).
• Furthermore, over time we may develop the tendency to face our
stressors directly and repeatedly (instead of avoiding them on
occasion) and
• thereby habituate to certain predictable negative experiences.
• The benefits of emotion-focused coping styles may have mediating
qualities as well. For instance, researchers have found that, when
dealing with the stress of chronic racism, racial and ethnic minority
individuals’ positive appraisal of emotion focused coping options
may intervene in the relationship between self-esteem, life
satisfaction, and racial identity development
• Specifically, when individuals of racial and ethnic minority groups feel
that they have ways of coping emotionally with experiences of
discrimination, greater self-esteem and greater life satisfaction were
more closely linked with a strong identification with their racial
group.
• Food for thought: Can you think about some disadvantages?
Neurobiological Basis of
Emotional Responses
• On the neurobiological level, Depue (1996) points to the involvement
of the behavioral activation system, and LeDoux (1996) reveals that a
particular brain structure, the amygdale, plays a significant role in
processing matters of emotional significance.
• Specifically, LeDoux suggests that, under stress-free life
circumstances, our thinking is governed by the hippocampus, but
during more stressful times, our thought processes-and hence aspects
of our coping-are ruled by the amygdale.
The lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) present in thalamus and
acts as a relay station between the eye and the visual cortex
The Case of a Hurricane
Survivors
• “While standing in a line for hurricane relief with dozens of survivors, I (the
researcher) witnessed people who were avoiding all emotions, some who
were approaching their emotions productively, and some who were frankly
overwhelmed by what they were experiencing. My guess is that those who
were approaching their emotions productively are doing better today than
those who did not. I was a visitor to the disaster area; my mother’s home was
damaged, but she was safe and sound. She and I chatted with many of her
neighbors who had lost their homes and were trying to pull their lives
together”.
• “I struck up a conversation with a fellow about my age that I thought I
recognized from high school. It turned out that Ted was from the New Orleans
area, about 150 miles away. He and his family had survived Hurricane Katrina,
but his home was uninhabitable. He moved to New Iberia to find a home for
his family, and then Hurricane Rita hit that town. Ted told me the whole story”
“He heard that Katrina had pushed five feet of water into his family’s New Orleans
home, but he was not allowed to go back and see it because of the unsafe
conditions. He found his way to New Iberia and rented an apartment for his wife
and two boys. Then, Ted said, “Rita hit and scared the hell out of my family.”
He told me that he felt frightened because he might never be able to keep his wife
and boys safe again. Ted expressed his emotions in simple, honest language that
communicated the depths of his fear and sadness. Ted and I chatted some more,
and it was clear that he had spent a great deal of time with his wife, processing
their emotions.
I asked him about how his boys were coping. He laughed, “Kids are amazing!” He
said that they didn’t understand the need for all the changes in their lives, but
they had coped well with the ups and downs. At that time, he told me, “Yesterday,
we bought the boys bunk beds, and I put them up last night. I placed my son in the
top bunk, and then, well, you know what he said? ‘Daddy, it is starting to feel like
we have a home again.’” Ted teared up and said, “I hope this line starts moving.”
Case study Analysis
Q1. What was researcher’s observation about the Hurricane Survivors?
Q2. What emotions were expressed by Ted and How?
Q3. What can be other ways of emotional expression
Q4. What would have been the consequences if Ted didn’t vent out his
emotions?
References
Taylor, S. E. (2010). Health psychology. Oxford University Press.
Snyder, C.R., & Lopez, S.J. (2007). Positive Psychology. London: Sage
Publications (pp. 149-152).
[Link]
[Link]