Stress, Personal Coping Resources, and Psychiatric Symptoms: An Investigation of Interactive Models

Abstract

In the last ten years, there has been considerable interest in the moderating influence of coping resources on the effects of stress; research has focused mainly on environmental coping resources, such as social support. This paper explores possible interactions between stressors, both acute and chronic, and personal coping resources; interactions are estimated separately for schizophrenic, depression and anxiety symptom clusters. Personal coping resources are conceived of in terms of individual dispositions that may have consequences for either the amount of typical coping effort expended or coping ability. Two related dispositional characteristics are considered: fatalism and inflexibility. Both low fatalism and low inflexibility are found to have a strong moderating influence on the impact of stress, but, perhaps more important, these effects depend both on the type of stress and the symptom outcome considered. These findings are interpreted in terms of a general contingency theory for the role of socialfactors in explaining psychiatric disorder, emphasizing the differences between the types of symptoms involved.