Despite the importance that is attributed to coping as a factor in psychological and somatic health outcomes, little is known about actual coping processes, the variables that influence them, and their relation to the outcomes of the stressful encounters people experience in their day-to-day lives. This study uses an intraindividual analysis of the interrelations among primary appraisal (what was at stake in the encounter), secondary appraisal (coping options), eight forms of problem- and emotion-focused coping, and encounter outcomes in a sample of community-residing adults. Coping was strongly related to cognitive appraisal; the forms of coping that were used varied depending on what was at stake and the options for coping. Coping was also differentially related to satisfactory and unsatisfactory encounter outcomes. The findings clarify the functional relations among appraisal and coping variables and the outcomes of stressful encounters.

In this study we examined the relation between personality factors (mastery and interpersonal trust), primary appraisal (the stakes a person has in a stressful encounter), secondary appraisal (options for coping), eight forms of problem- and emotion-focused coping, and somatic health status and psychological symptoms in a sample of 150 community-residing adults. Appraisal and coping processes should be characterized by a moderate degree of stability across stressful encounters for them to have an effect on somatic health status and psychological symptoms. These processes were assessed in five different stressful situations that subjects experienced in their day-to-day lives. Certain processes (e.g., secondary appraisal) were highly variable, whereas others (e.g., emotion-focused forms of coping) were moderately stable. We entered mastery and interpersonal trust, and primary appraisal and coping variables (aggregated over five occasions), into regression analyses of somatic health status and psychological symptoms. The variables did not explain a significant amount of the variance in somatic health status, but they did explain a significant amount of the variance in psychological symptoms. The pattern of relations indicated that certain variables were positively associated and others negatively associated with symptoms.

This study examined daily stress processes among 75 married couples across 20 assessments during a 6-month period. The somatic and psychological effects of common everyday hassles were investigated. Overall, there was a significant relationship between daily stress and the occurrence of both concurrent and subsequent health problems such as flu, sore throat, headaches, and backaches. The relationship of daily stress to mood disturbance was more complex. The negative effects of stress on mood were limited to a single day. with the following day characterized by mood scores that were better than usual. Furthermore, striking individual differences were found in the extent to which daily stress was associated with health and mood across time. Participants wiih unsupporlive social relationships and low self-esteem were more likely to experience an increase in psychological and somatic problems both on and following stressful days than were participants high in self-esteem and social support. These data suggest that persons with low psychosocial resources are vulnerable to illness and mood disturbance when their stress levels increase, even if they generally have little stress in their lives. Despite long-standing misgivings about its usefulness, the concept of stress continues to generate great interest because of the conviction that it is a causal factor in illness. This conviction has motivated widespread use of measures of stress based on life events and also lies behind our own measure of stress based on daily hassles. There are methodological and theoretical grounds for questioning much of the research that has attempted to relate stress, whether measured in terms of life events or hassles, to long-term health status. One difficulty is that stress itself is not a simple variable but a system of interdependent processes, including appraisal and coping, which mediate the frequency, intensity, duration, and type of psychological and somatic response. Most investigators of the stress-health relationship treat stress as a unitary variable and do not take these processes into account. A second difficulty is that much of the research that attempts to demonstrate the causal relationship between stress and This article is based on a dissertation submitted by the first author to the University of California, Berkeley. Richard S. Lazarus served as chairman of the dissertation committee.

This article examines the influence of daily stressors on mental health in a community sample. Ss were 166 married couples who completed diaries each day for 6 weeks. In pooled within-person analyses, daily stressors explained up to 20% of the variance in mood. Interpersonal conflicts were by far the most distressing events. Furthermore, when stressors occurred on a series of days, emotional habituation occurred by the second day for almost all events except interpersonal conflicts. Contrary to certain theoretical accounts, multiple stressors on the same day did not exacerbate one another's effects; rather, an emotional plateau occurred. Finally, on days following a stressful event, mood was better than it would have been if the stressor had not happened. These results reveal the complex emotional effects of daily stressors, and in particular, they suggest that future investigations should focus primarily on interpersonal conflicts.In recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that minor, everyday stressors influence health and psychological wellbeing (DeLongis, Coyne, Dakof, Folkman, & Lazarus, 1982;Eckenrode, 1984;Kanner, Coyne, Schaefer, & Lazarus, 1981). As a result, there has been a reorientation in stress research from a nearly exclusive emphasis on major events to an appreciation of the significance of minor environmental stressors. These minor stressors (e.g., work deadlines, marital arguments) are an important focus of research because they provide a means of describing the stressful features of enduring relationships (e.g., spouse, friend) and roles (e.g., worker, student).Despite the growing research interest in minor stressors, work to date has implicitly assumed that all minor stressors are equivalent. This is exemplified by the almost universal practice of aggregating these stressors into a summary measure for analytic purposes. Thus, with one notable exception (Stone, 1987), ~ there have been no studies of the differential effects of minor stressors on health and well-being. This type of aggregation may obscure important variation in the microprocesses underlying psychological well-being. Previous studies of major stressors have demonstrated that stressor disaggregation reveals important variability in effects (e.g., Eckenrode & Gore, 1981;Kessler & McLeod, 1984). Similarly, analyses of coping proAuthors' names are listed alphabetically. This research was supported by Merit Award I-MOI-MH42714, Research Scientist Development Award I-KO1-MH00507, Research Grants 2-ROI-MH41135 and 1-RO 1-MH42714, and Training Grant 5 T32-MH 16806, all from the National Institute of Mental Health.We thank Steve Hopkins for research assistance and James Coyne, John Eckenrode, Elaine Wethington, and Camille Wortman for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.Niall Bolger is now at the University of Denver. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ronaid C. Kessler, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1248. 808cesses show strong variability in res...

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The central question of this article is how the dynamics of stress and coping change with the circumstances of living and the processes of aging. The answer has remained obscure for three main reasons. First, the state of the art in the measurement of stress and coping is still primitive. Second, personal beliefs, values, and commitments, which develop from a person's unique history, shape the appraisal of stress and the manner in which stress is coped with and therefore have profo und consequences for morale, social and work functioning, and somatic health. Third, most of the observations relevant to the central question have been obtained cross-sectionally; however, because the significance of any given event is embedded in the individual's personal, lifelong drama, it is important to examine stress and coping longitudinally as well.

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Confounding is a major source of uneasiness among many who do research on the relationship between stress and adaptational outcomes such as psychological symptoms and somatic health. A commonly proposed solution, illustrated by a recent article by Dohrenwend, Dohrenwend, Dodson, and Shrout, is to purify the independent variable, stress, by focusing on its environmental aspects and by making it independent of psychological response variables such as perceptions or appraisals. Such a solution, however, is neither possible nor desirable, and it obviates relational, cognitive theories of psychological stress such as our own. In this article, we closely examine the problem of confounding and circularity in stress research and provide new data. We argue that the appraisal process should not and cannot be removed in the measurement of psychological stress, and therefore some confounding is inevitable. Like emotion, stress is best regarded as a complex rubric consisting of many interrelated variables and processes rather than as a simple variable that can be readily measured and correlated with adaptational outcomes.