6 1 Coping as Action Regulation under Stress

mainstream psychology as an explicit concept, coping has been defined as an

indicator of competence, a specific person–context transaction, personality in action
under stress, a repertoire of strategies, a function of emotion, an outcome of tem-
perament, an expression of stress physiology, and a quality of action regulation.
(For historical overviews, see Aldwin 2007; Lazarus 1993; Lazarus and Folkman
1984; Murphy 1974; Parker and Endler 1996; Snyder 1999.)
Current conceptualizations in adulthood have their early roots in the psycho-
logical and medical literatures, which introduced key ideas that shaped the field
long before “coping” first appeared as a term in Psychological Abstracts in 1967. Its
early forerunners in psychoanalytic work on defenses (Freud 1894/1962) influenced
several generations of ego psychologists (Haan 1977; Valliant 1986; see Cramer
1998), who viewed coping as part of a taxonomy of ego processes. From this work,
current conceptualizations have incorporated the idea that coping occurs not only in
response to environmental demands, but also in reaction to intrapsychic pressures;
that some modes of adaptation are unintentional or even unconscious; and that the
ego (or self) and its regulatory functions are central to processes of coping.
A second strand of work on coping emerged from research on stress, a concept
prominent in the health and social sciences since the early 1930s. Notions of coping
surfaced as part of the recognition that exposure to toxins did not lead in any linear
fashion to specific psychological or somatic outcomes. Living organisms display
“host resistance” to the effects of stress. From this work, current conceptualizations
have incorporated the importance of considering the stressors or specific demands
with which an individual is actually dealing; the idea of the active individual; and
the view that coping is a process that stands between stressful life events and their
consequences for mental and physical health and functioning.
The study of coping during childhood has its own historical roots in child
psychologists’ long-standing interest in the impact of stress on children, starting in
the early 1900s with attempts to document the effects of, for example, maternal
deprivation, hospitalization, serious illness, and exposure to wartime conditions, as
well as more recent attention to the effects of poverty, parental unemployment,
divorce, and maternal physical and mental illness. However, the field of coping in
childhood and adolescence began in earnest in the 1980s with the publication of
two seminal works: the volume Stress, Coping, and Development edited by
Garmezy and Rutter (1983) and the Psychological Bulletin paper by Bruce Compas,
entitled “Coping with Stress during Childhood and Adolescence” (1987). These
publications made clear that coping is an inherently social enterprise; that it is built
on stress physiology and temperament; and that its study permeates a range of
topics considered by researchers of child and adolescent development.
Transactional models of coping. Today, transactional conceptualizations
dominate the field of stress and coping during adulthood (Aldwin 2007). In these
approaches, coping is defined as “constantly changing cognitive and behavioral
efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as
taxing or exceeding the resources of the person” (Lazarus and Folkman 1984,
p. 141). Because these conceptualizations arose partly as a reaction to definitions of
coping as an outcome of personality processes ordered along a hierarchy of ego