The Transactional Model Of Stress And Coping

Stress can come from anything we do in our daily lives, even if it is a positive or negative change. To measure the amount of stress a single event can cause two men named Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe came up with the Social Readjustment Rating Scale. Over time this scale has been modified to accommodated for

Defining attributes are “characteristics most frequently associated with the concept and those which help distinguish the concept from other concepts” (Walker& Avant, 2011, pp. 162-163). A quote, from a translation of Hans Seyle’s work, reveals how challenging it can be to pinpoint stress’s attributes. According to Seyle “Stress, in addition to being itself, was also the cause of itself, and the result of itself” (American Institute of Stress (n.d.). In light of this quote, and following a review of the literature, three defining attributes of stress are:

Seaward, B. (2015). Managing stress: Principles and strategies for health and well-being. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Our book describes stress as “any circumstances that threaten or are perceived to threaten one’s well-being and tax one’s coping ability” (Weiten, 2014). Stress is not necessarily a traumatic, life destroying event. It can be as simple a small change in one’s daily schedule. People will have multiple stresses throughout their lifetime. Some will be little and daily, but overtime these add up and can affect you in many ways. Stress can be positive or negative and can take many forms; a few being frustration, internal conflict, change, and pressure. All of which make almost a daily appearance in my life (Weiten, 2014).

1. Randall, R., Cox, T. & Griffiths, A. (2007). Participants ' accounts of a stress

Coping strategies have been shown to have a significant impact on the mental and physical health of various populations (Lehavot, 2012). Two types have coping strategies are commonly discussed: problem focused and emotion focused. Problem-focused coping is action oriented and involves trying to change the stressful situation. Examples of problem focused coping strategies include seeking information, planning, and taking action. Problem focused coping strategies are adaptive and are associated with positive adjustment after stressful events. Emotion focused coping involves changing the emotional aspects of the situation and includes both active and avoidant strategies. Examples of emotional focused coping include focusing on positive aspects of the situation, seeking emotional support from others (active strategies), and mental or behavioral disengagement (an avoidant strategy). Active emotion-focused strategies are generally considered to be adaptive, and avoidant emotion-focused coping strategies maladaptive. However, findings have shown mixed results.

Stress research and the framework in which personality is studied in relation to the coping process, has recently conceptualized in the ‘‘third generation’’ research (Ebstrup et al, 2011). The framework in regards to the third generation research refers to roles of personality in coping while maintaining strong operational distinctions between coping, personality appraisal, and adaptational outcomes. The issue that arises is that each patient’s tolerance for stress is different. Personality is a factor that is related to how a person handles many life changes and experiences. This relationship is between personality and coping leads to the

The Transactional Model of Stress and Coping is a layout that Dr. Richard Lazarus first wrote about as a system that deals with the theory of stress. Dr. Lazarus along with help from Dr. Susan Folkman spent most of their lives doing work in the field of stress research. The Transaction Model of Stress and Coping was designed to deal with how people analyze and deal with stressors. Stress is brought on by the environment that a person lives in. Stress can be an either positive or negative weight on the human body that can be caused by internal situations or external environments. This model analyzes how people deal with events in life, either drastic or normal, and how those events affect the human body with cognitive appraisal and coping

The Lazarus’ transactional model of stress includes Primary Appraisal, Secondary Appraisal, and Coping effort. Primary Appraisal involves analyzing the importance of a stressor or dangerous incident which consists of stages such as dangerous, threat of harm, threat of loss, challenge to face, and benign (Pg.61). The Secondary Appraisal considers the controllability of one’s stressor and his/her resources to meet the challenge (Pg.61). For example, according to authors Kottler and Chen an individual who is wealthy views the loss of one hundred dollars as an insignificant event, while an underprivileged person sees losing one hundred dollars as a tragedy. Coping effort utilizes approaches to act as a go-between for primary and secondary appraisals.

Lazarus and Folkman's cognitive theory of stress helps psychologists evaluate stressful events and calculate how someone would react to them. The four subcategories of this theory will take someone step-by-step in how to recognize and react to a stressor. These categories are: Stressful Event, Primary Appraisal, Secondary Appraisal, and Stress Response. Understanding these categories will lead to a further understanding of how a person reacts to a certain stressor.

The model conceptualizes stress as a result of imbalance between demands and resources or when external or internal pressure of stressors exceeds an individual’s perceived ability to cope. This means factors that appear to be stress in one set of individuals might be a welcome challenge for other set of individuals who have the better ability to cope with the stressors by negating them successfully. The importance of the transactional model is that, it also introduces room for intervention. This means that stress can be reduced by enhancing the self and psychological resources of an individual .This will help the individuals to grow a changed perception of the stressors, that earlier caused stress. The overall aim is to enable the individuals to cope with stress and increase their confidence to overcome the negative effect of those stressors.

The authors discovered that males tend to evaluate the resources available to them when encountering a stressful situation and stress levels are then dependent on whether resources are available. Alternately, females employ these resources and stress then depends on the success of coping strategies in managing the situation. Watson et al. suggest that this displays females utilize coping strategies before experiencing stress while males experience stress prior to using coping strategies.

Coping strategies refer to the specific efforts, both behavioral and psychological, that people employ to master, tolerate, reduce or minimize stressful events. There are two general coping strategies which have been distinguished. Problem-focused strategies are efforts to do something active to alleviate stressful circumstances, where as emotion-focused coping strategies involve efforts to regulate the emotional consequences of stressful or potentially stressful events. Typically, people use both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping in their stressful episodes, which suggests that both types of coping are useful for most stressful events (Folkman & Lazarus, 1980).

The external component of the Biopsychosocial Model of stress involves environmental events that precede the recognition of stress and can elicit a stress response. A previously mentioned, the stress reaction is elicited by a wide variety of psychosocial stimuli that are either physiologically or emotionally threatening and disrupt the body's homeostasis (Cannon, 1932). We are usually aware of stressors when we feel conflicted, frustrated, or pressured. Most of the common stressors fall within four broad categories: personal, social/familial, work, and the environment. These stressful events have been linked to a variety of psychological physical complaints. For example bereavement

Discuss Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman’s and stress and coping paradigm and in view of this paradigm explain age and individual difference in the experience and handling of stress