Social Problem Solving and Health.

Abstract

Counseling psychology is committed to helping people meet the challenges and solve the problems they encounter in daily routines and in stressful circumstances. To a great extent, this holds true for other professional psychology specialties (including clinical, educational and health psychology) as clients usually seek professional assistance in solving the problems they face. Thus, the study of problem-solving abilities—their measurement and correlates—and efficient ways to improve these abilities is of keen interest to clinicians and researchers. Counseling psychology has played an influential role in this area of inquiry. Historically guided by early cognitive-behavioral theorists (D’Zurilla & Goldfried, 1971), counseling psychology contributed essential theoretical refinements (Heppner & Krauskopf, 1987) and measurement tools (Heppner, 1988) that remain landmark events. However, related and subsequent theoretical and empirical contributions—appearing primarily in outlets associated with clinical and health psychology, and in the larger, multidisciplinary literature—have yet to be sufficiently integrated with contributions from counseling psychology. This lack of scholarly integration has not necessarily impeded advancements and applications, but it has thwarted a deeper theoretical understanding of the mechanisms at work in the learning and application of social problem-solving abilities.