Coping: The Psychology of What Works

Most people take the process of coping for granted as they go about their daily activities. In many ways, coping is like breathing, an automatic process requiring no apparent effort. However, when people face truly threatening events--what psychologists call stressors--they become acutely aware of the coping process and respond by consciously applying their day-to-day coping skills. Coping is a fundamental psychological process, and people's skills are commensurately sophisticated. This volume builds on people's strengths and emphasizes their role as positive copers. It features techniques for preventing psychological problems and breaks from the traditional research approach, which is modeled on medicine and focuses on pathology and treatment. Collecting both award-winning research and new findings, this book may well set the agenda for research on stress and coping for the next century. These provocative and readable essays explore a variety of topics, including reality negotiation, confessing through writing, emotional intelligence, optimism, hope, mastery-oriented thinking, and more. Unlike typical self-help books available at any newsstand, this volume features the work of some of the most eminent researchers in the field. Yet like those books it is written for the general reader, as well as for the specialist, and includes numerous practical suggestions and techniques. It will prove an invaluable tool for a wide range of readers.

Review :
"A virtual `who's who' and `what's what' in coping research, this book provides a cutting-edge overview of the field of coping and its relation to personality and emotion. This is not a stale, dry presentation of where the field has been, but a forward-looking collection of papers on where the field is going." --Drew Westen, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School "This is an excellent overview of some of the fundamental issues in adaptation and coping. The authors integrate the vast literatures on personality, social processes, and clinical applications. Their reflections and recommendations are timely and of practical relevance. I recommend it highly." --Michael J. Mahoney, Ph.D., author of Human Change Processes and editor of Constructivism in the Human Sciences "Most of the major figures in the field of stress and coping have contributed to this outstanding volume. Unlike other reviews of the stress and coping literature, this collection focuses on coping strategies and efforts that work, when they work, and why they work. This is a volume you'd want to give to your graduate students and to your child head off to the first year of college. The work is useful not only for its descriptions of the resources that effective copers have, but also for understanding the efforts that people can make when they are having more difficulty coping." --Shelley E. Taylor, Professor of Social Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles "Snyder has assembled a stellar group of theorists and researchers with an exceptional range of expertise in the arguably most important process in psychology: coping. The chapters are very well-written and provide superb coverage of the range, breadth, and depth of the issues involved in understanding coping processes. The combination of a prominent editor, first-rate authors, and a readable and comprehensive examination of coping should make this volume required reading for all mental health professionals." --Rick E. Ingram, Ph.D. Department of Psychology Doctoral Training Facility San Diego State University "This volume provides one of the most timely, engaging, and optimistic approaches to the psychology of coping that is available in the literature today. The editor and chapter authors are leaders in developing a new focus in coping theory and research that embraces what Martin E.P. Seligman has recently called 'psychology's forgotten mission, ' namely to report and build on human resilience and health." --John H. Harvey, Professor of Psychology, University of Iowa, and Editor of the Journal of Personal & Interpersonal Loss "This is an encouraging and enlightening book that presents exciting research challenges. It would be a good library reference text, and a useful clinical tool in medical settings. The ideas presented and the work done with children and older students would also commend this book to school personnel." -- R.G. Schnurr, PhD, Annals of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, Vol 33, No 4, June 2000