In an attempt to control for the effects of event type on sex differences in coping, men and women responded to an identical achievement-related stressor under controlled laboratory conditions. Although men and women were similar in their cognitive appraisal of the situation, they nonetheless reported differences in preparatory coping. Women reported seeking social support and using emotion-focused coping to a greater extent than men, whereas men reported using relatively more problem-focused coping than women. The masculinity and femininity of respondents failed to moderate the relation between sex and coping. These results are inconsistent with a purely situational explanation of sex differences in coping but are consistent with the notion that men and women are socialized to cope with stress in different ways.
In a cross-sectional study, 36 breast cancer patients and Iheir husbands provided information about how each recalled coping with stress during a course of radiation Iherapy. Both spouses also were askcd lo repon on onc anou~er's coping efforts and to provide information about Lheir own current psychological adjustment and marital satisfaction. The results indicated that wives engaged in more extensive and varicd coping cflorts than their husbands did and h a t the coping strategies which husbands and wives used were largely independent. Consistent with numerous other studies, self-reported coping related to one's own outcomes. The authors also found significant crossover associations between the coping reports of one spouse and the other spouse's outcomes: husbands' outcomes were somewhat more stsongly corrclated with their wives' reporis of their own coping than vice versa. A similar pattern of lindings emerged for the coping data provided by one spouse about Ihc other. These data suggest that to understand more fully the link between cancer and psychosocial adjustment after Lreatment, researchers should consider the coping of spouses as well as patients.
The present study examined the association between relationship satisfaction and dispositional coping in 70 dating and married couples. Couple members completed Spanier's Dyadic Adjustment Scale and provided information about their own coping as well as their perceptions of their partners' coping. Three important findings emerged from the correlational analyses. First, relationship satisfaction related to both self-reported coping and report-of-other coping (reports made by one member about the other member's coping). Regarding the latter, the strongest associations were between married females' report-of-other and their partners' satisfaction with the relationship. Second, there was limited support for the notion that the more similarly couple members cope the more satisfied they will be with the relationship. Third, the more similarly couple members believed they coped, the more satisfied each member was with the relationship, regardless of whether the coping dimension was adaptive or not.
Using a retrospective design, the authors assessed several different aspects of social support (perceived, received, satisfaction with received, and support seeking) in 95 spouses of cancer survivors. The goals of the investigation were to (a) describe in detail the differences between husbands and wives on these support dimensions and (b) explore whether the relation between support and adjustment was different for husbands as compared to wives. While husbands and wives were generally similar‐in their general perceptions of available support and in the amount of support they reported seeking, consistent with our hypothesis, compared to husbands of breast cancer victims, wives of prostate cancer victims reported receiving more support and being more satisfied with the support they received. Measures of social support predicted husbands’reports of marital satisfaction and adjustment, but not wives’reports. Partial correlation analyses indicated that sex differences in these support‐adjustment links were not attributable to differences in age, or in the time between completing treatment and participating in the study. Sex differences observed in the present study are interpreted as highlighting the need for theory development to account for the complex mechanisms underlying links between supportive transactions and marital satisfaction and adjustment.
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