Coping Framework Research Articles

Spousal Support for Patients With Rheumatoid Arthritis: Getting the Wrong Kind Is a Pain.

Research indicates that perceived support availability is beneficial, with support available from the spouse particularly important for well-being. However, actual support mobilization has shown mixed associations with recipient well-being. The primary goal of the present study was to go beyond examining the effects of global perceptions of support on recipient outcomes. Instead, we examined the effects of several specific types of support that have been found to be important in the clinical literature. In this study, we followed both members of couples in which one partner was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Patients provided reports on pain for both mornings and evenings across 1 week. Both partners also reported esteem, solicitous, and negative support mobilization received by the patient. We found that patient pain tended to increase across the day following increases in patient reports of negative support receipt and partner reports of solicitous support provision. We also found that patient pain tended to decrease across the day when partners reported increased levels of esteem support provision. Reverse causation analyses indicated higher levels of patient pain may lead partners to increase solicitous support mobilization to the patient. Findings underscore the importance of examining both partners’ reports of support within a dyadic coping framework. They further suggest that not all forms of support are equally beneficial, calling for a finer grained assessment of specific support transactions.

Coaching as stress-management intervention: The mediating role of self-efficacy in a framework of self-management and coping.

Coaching as stress-management intervention: The mediating role of self-efficacy in a framework of self-management and coping.

Religion and Mental Health among Central Asian Muslim Immigrants in Chicago Metropolitan Area

Migration creates opportunities but also bring challenges that cause stress and affect mental health of migrants. Stress among Muslim immigrants can be intensified by experiences of discrimination. This study addressed the meaning and role of religion as a mediator of stress and mental health among Central Asian Muslim immigrants. This paper explored whether religious coping worked for recent Muslim immigrants in the US, and how religion buffered migration and discrimination-related stress that negatively affected mental health of Central Asian immigrants. Drawing from different types of ethnographic and biological data, collected in Chicago Metropolitan Area, this study explored culturally embedded stress responses, and tested the religious coping framework upon experiences of a new minority group of Muslim immigrants in the US, expanding our knowledge on factors that inform health outcomes of immigrant population.

Managing non-cooperative behaviors in consensus-based multiple attribute group decision making: An approach based on social network analysis

In consensus-based multiple attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problems, it is frequent that some experts exhibit non-cooperative behaviors owing to the different areas to which they may belong and the different (sometimes conflicting) interests they might present. This may adversely affect the overall efficiency of the consensus reaching process, especially when some uncooperative behaviors by experts arise. To this end, this paper develops a novel consensus framework based on social network analysis (SNA) to deal with non-cooperative behaviors. In the proposed SNA-based consensus framework, a trust propagation and aggregation mechanism to yield experts’ weights from the social trust network is presented, and the obtained weights of experts are then integrated into the consensus-based MAGDM framework. Meanwhile, a non-cooperative behavior analysis module is designed to analyze the behaviors of experts. Based on the results of such analysis during the consensus process, each expert can express and modify the trust values pertaining other experts in the social trust network. As a result, both the social trust network and the weights of experts derived from it are dynamically updated in parallel. A simulation and comparison study is presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the SNA-based consensus framework for coping with non-cooperative behaviors.

Pathways from Resilient Coping to Safer Sex Communication Among African, Caribbean, and Black Women in Toronto, Canada: Results from a Cross-sectional Survey.

African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) women in Canada are disproportionately impacted by HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Although there is reported suboptimal consistent condom use with ACB women, limited research has explored safer sex communication among this population. Coping frameworks highlight the role that resilient coping and condom use self-efficacy may play in facilitating safer sex communication. Structural perspectives stress the need to explore associations between HIV vulnerabilities and food insecurity. We examined pathways from resilient coping to safer sex communication through the mediator of condom use self-efficacy among ACB women in Toronto. We conducted a cross-sectional survey with a purposive sample of ACB women aged 16 and older across Toronto, Canada. We conducted path analysis to test the direct effects of resilient coping on safer sex communication, and indirect pathways through the mediator (condom use self-efficacy) while controlling for food insecurity. Participant (n = 80; mean age 27, SD 7.93) ethnicities included African (58.8%, n = 47), Caribbean (30%, n = 24), and others (11.3%, n = 9). Participants with food security reported significantly higher safer sex communication. We found no direct effect of resilient coping on safer sex communication. Findings support the hypothesized mediation process; resilient coping was associated with condom use self-efficacy, which in turn was associated with safer sex communication. Findings that condom use self-efficacy mediated the association between resilient coping and safer sex communication align with theoretical assertions of the protective role of adaptive coping strategies. Findings can inform tailored HIV and STI preventive interventions with ACB women.

How Young Refugees Cope with Conflict in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Urban Schools

ObjectiveThis study compared how young people from diverse migration backgrounds (refugee, immigrant, and local) cope with interpersonal conflicts with an aim to understand how practitioners can most effectively support young people of different backgrounds. Productive, non‐productive, and reference to other coping styles were expected to differ according to students’ age, exposure to trauma, and migration backgrounds.MethodsMixed methods were used to explore the meaning of conflict within culturally and linguistically diverse school settings, and investigate how social factors influenced students’ preferred coping styles in relation to conflict. Eighty students attending mainstream and specialist language schools in Melbourne completed measures regarding their exposure to traumatic events and preferred coping styles when dealing with conflicts.ResultsSignificant positive correlations were found between exposure to trauma and age, as well as exposure to trauma and the use of non‐productive coping across the sample. Analyses on traumatic event items revealed that young refugees, compared to immigrant or locals, were more likely to have been exposed to events such as sudden death of a person, fire, or war zones.ConclusionsFindings suggested practitioners must consider how multiple factors such trauma, social environment, and everyday stressors influence how young people cope with conflict. Universal interventions with a problem‐solving and coping framework are likely to be beneficial to those students exposed to trauma and whole school communities.

The influence of expatriate spouses’ coping strategies on expatriate and spouse adjustment

PurposeDrawing upon Folkman and Lazarus’ (1984) coping framework and interdependence theory (Thibaut and Kelley, 1959), the purpose of this paper is to investigate how expatriate spouses’ coping strategies (problem-focused and emotion-focused) affect expatriate spouse adjustment and expatriate adjustment. In addition, the authors also examine the mediating effect of expatriate adjustment on the spouse coping strategies-spouse adjustment relationship.Design/methodology/approachTo test these relationships, the authors collected multi-source data from 191 expatriate spouses and their expatriate partners living in 37 countries.FindingsThe results revealed that problem- and emotion-focused coping strategies positively and negatively, respectively, influenced all types of spouse adjustment: personal, interaction, and cultural. Both forms of spouse coping also influenced expatriate adjustment. The authors also found that expatriate adjustment mediated the relationship between expatriate spouses’ coping strategies and spouse adjustment.Practical implicationsThe results suggest that multinational organizations should pay equal attention to the adjustment of both their expatriates and their spouses. Both expatriates and their spouses should be included in the initial selection process and in pre-departure training to get well equipped before the international assignment. Training spouses to adopt problem-focused coping strategies would help to facilitate the effective adjustment of both spouses and expatriates.Originality/valueThe research provides one of the first examinations that investigate expatriate spouses’ coping strategies and their impact on expatriate and expatriate spouse adjustment. This research also highlights the interdependency of expatriates and their spouses.

Quantifying uncertainty in parameter estimates of ultrasonic inspection system using Bayesian computational framework

Abstract This paper will aim to characterise statistically the uncertain parameters in an ultrasonic (UT) inspection system from limited signal measurements and prior information in order to enhance the confidence on the probability of detection (POD) curve. The POD curve is widely used in industry to quantify the capability of a non-destructive testing technique to detect a defect with a given specifications. A realistic estimation of the POD requires to consider the uncertainty in the input parameters. However, in practice the uncertainties are seldom well quantified, which may cause problems for the POD estimation and its reliability to qualify robustly an inspection system. To address this issue, one proposes to characterise the uncertain parameters based on the information content in the UT signal. One of its distinctive features which can be used to solve the challenging inverse problem is the amplitude of the signal. A Bayesian approach seems a convenient framework for coping with limited number of measurements and prior information from experts’ judgement to keep POD cost as low as possible. An illustration which consists to control a tube with an embedded defect is provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methodology to quantify uncertainty in the input parameters. The nested sampling (NS) algorithm is used to make Bayesian inference for an efficient exploration of the posterior space. To reduce the computational requirements, the UT physical model is replaced by an emulator based on the least square support vector machines method. The obtained results show that by combining a limited number of measurements with priors may be a promising way to characterise statistically the uncertain parameters within reasonable computational time and acceptable accuracy. The study is carried out numerically by exploiting synthetic data generated from an UT physical model.

Reflecting on a journey of resilience in children’s blood and cancer nursing

Reflective practice is recognised as an integral part of being a highly skilled and successful health care professional. Many benefits have been identified from being a reflective practitioner including the opportunity for critical thinking, growing self-awareness and supporting individual resilience. There is a growing body of literature recognising the negative emotional impact that caring for children with cancer and blood disorders can have on health professionals. Currently there is an emerging interest in a more strengths-based approach focused on maintaining staff wellbeing. Resilience has been suggested as a framework for coping and maintaining wellbeing in areas, like children’s oncology and has been used as a term to describe the ‘surviving’ health professional. This paper explores the first author’s (GA) experiences of being a children’s oncology nurse and paediatric palliative care nurse specialist in the context of existing empirical and theoretical literature, with a particular focus on how GA developed resilience. Reflective examples of practice are used within the context of themes identified from a recent literature review exploring how resilience is defined within empirical literature.

PROFESSIONAL BURNOUT AND TIME PERCEPTION IN POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

The professional burnout and its prevention is one of the central issues in clinical psychology and organizational psychology. Despite a big array of this subject publications, the study of professional burnout predictors and search for the tools providing its effective prevention continues. Objective: studying of individual psychological characteristics of persons with PTSD within the framework of professional burnout and proactive coping. Type of the study: analytic, prospective. Sampling: 148 people who sought psychotherapy, of which Group 1 is comprised of people with PTSD - 65 people, and Group 2 is comprised of people without PTSD - 83 people. Methods of research - psychological tests: "Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory» (ZTPI), "Maslach Burnout Inventory" (MBI), "Proactive Coping Inventory" (PCI), "BAK-conflict". Results: According to the MBI questionnaire, 75 % of the people examined in Group 1 and 28 % those in Group 2 had high and extremely high rates of professional burnout; differences on the scales of the ZTPI questionnaire are "negative past" and "fatalistic present". According to the "BAK-conflict" questionnaire, the following indicators were detected in Group 1: low self-esteem, poor quality of relationships in a dyad (the "You sphere") and relationships in a team (the "Us sphere"); disorders of perception of time parameters (the "Grand-Us sphere"); as well as the risk factors of psychosomatic diseases - an excess in the corporeality sphere, a deficit in the spheres of sociability and spirituality. According to the PCI questionnaire in Group 1, the subjects used "proactive overcoming", "reflexive overcoming", "preventive overcoming", and the "search for emotional support". Conclusions: Due to the changes in perception of time (the predominance of negative past and fatalistic present) patients with PTSD undergo a deformation of the personality relations system of attitudes and a reduction of proactive coping, which may be a cause of relations development. For the prevention of relationships in individuals with PTSD during the psychotherapeutic intervention it is necessary to take into account the "traumatic experience", to form a strong "Me-concept" of the personality based on the adequate development of the perception of time, harmonious You-relations, relying on the experience of ancestors (Grand-Us) that allows to reduce the importance of the "negative past" and the "fatalistic present," and to build a long-term perspective of the future.

“And Yet It Was a Blessing”: Psychodynamic Insights for Well-Being While Coping with Serious Illness (TH368)

•Highlight moments in coping with terminal illness from the narrative and firsthand reflections of a patient's spouse.•Identify key insights from psychodynamic theory that provide a useful framework for psychological coping.•Strategize techniques and best practices in providing stability, wisdom and supportive structures to accompany patients and spouses facing terminal illness. Some patients and families make striking statements amid the tragedy of illness, such as, “…and yet it was a blessing.” It appears that these patients have a sense of holistic well-being as they approach death, which has developmentally emerged throughout the trajectory of their life-limiting illness. This phenomenon of “Existential Maturity” provides foundational principles to both capture and comprehend the unique nuances that foster psychologically coping. Lessons from traditions such as self-psychology, development and attachment theory provide inroads for better understanding this process. Moreover, clinicians' awareness of Existential Maturity can enhance patients' well-being, identity, relationships and quality of life as they face mortality. In this concurrent session, a patient's spouse will speak from her experience of accompanying her husband through the dying process. Her narrative will serve as a platform for highlighting various psychodynamic processes normative in terminal illness. A friend and psychoanalyst who accompanied the patient and spouse will reveal how the works of thinkers such as Winnicot, Bolwby, Kohut, Erickson and others illuminated the dynamics of their journey with serious illness. Finally, experts in palliative care and psychodynamic theory will provide practical techniques for clinicians to utilize these insights when caring for patients and families. The groundbreaking elements of this presentation are the firsthand, synthesized reflections from a patient's spouse and a collaborative discovery of the dimensions of the couple's experiences that are generalizable to many who face mortality. Moreover, clinicians of all disciplines will acquire skills to apply this framework of Existential Maturity in psychological coping towards a state of thriving at the end of life. As the field of palliative care quickly expands in breadth, this session offers greater depth to the psychological processes of each clinical encounter.

Daily Communal Coping in Couples With Type 2 Diabetes: Links to Mood and Self-Care.

Adjusting to the challenges of a chronic illness does not affect patients alone but also influences social network members-most notably spouses. One interpersonal framework of coping with a chronic illness is communal coping, described as when a problem is appraised as joint and the couple collaborates to manage the problem. We sought to determine whether daily communal coping was linked to daily mood and self-care behavior and examined one potential mechanism that may explain these links: perceived emotional responsiveness. Patients who had been diagnosed with diabetes less than 5 years ago and their spouses (n = 123) completed a daily diary questionnaire that assessed communal coping and mood for 14 consecutive days. The patients also reported daily self-care behaviors. We used multilevel modeling to examine the links of communal coping to patient and spouse mood and patient self-care. Because both patients and spouses reported their mood, the actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) was employed to examine mood. Multilevel APIM showed that actor communal coping was associated with lower depressed mood, higher happy mood, and lower angry mood and partner communal coping was linked to higher happy mood. Patient communal coping was related to better dietary and medication adherence, and spouse communal coping was linked to better medication adherence. Perceived emotional responsiveness partially mediated the relations of communal coping to mood but not to self-care behaviors. Communal coping on a daily basis may help both patients and spouses adjust psychologically to the illness as well as enhance patient self-care behaviors.

The Role of Affect and Coping in Diabetes Self-Management in Rural Adults with Uncontrolled Diabetes and Depressive Symptoms.

Many patients with diabetes have poorly controlled blood sugar levels and remain at risk for serious diabetes complications, despite access to effective diabetes treatments and services. Using the transactional model of stress and coping framework, the study investigated the contributions of affect (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule) and coping (maladaptive and adaptive coping from the Brief Cope) on diabetes self-management behaviors, namely diet and exercise. One hundred seventy-eight rural adults with uncontrolled diabetes and moderate depressive symptoms completed the measures. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that positive affect and negative affect were significantly associated with diet and exercise, even after adjusting for diabetes severity, illness intrusiveness, and diabetes knowledge. However, two path analyses clarified that adaptive coping mediated the relationships between affect (positive and negative) and self-management behaviors (diet and exercise). Comprehensive diabetes treatments that include self-management support can assist patients in recognition and use of adaptive emotion-focused coping skills.

Religiosity as a Protective Factor of Psychological Well-being among Older Black, White and Asian Christians in the United States

Research suggests that older adults in stressful situations are more likely to use spiritual coping resources than other age groups in order to cultivate meaning in their lives in general as well as in difficult life situations. Based on the stress and coping framework, this study examines the role of religiosity in terms of spiritual connectedness as well as church attendance in predicting depressive symptoms among U.S. older Asian, Black, and White Christians in the context of functional limitations. Our findings suggest that older American Christians are not a homogenous group. Specifically, older Asians, when compared with Whites, reported more frequent church attendance but lower levels of spiritual connectedness, and higher levels of functional limitations and depressive symptoms. In the additive model, spiritual connectedness did not independently explain the variance in depressive symptoms for any racial group. In the interaction model, church attendance was found to be a robust factor in accounting for lower levels of depressive symptoms only for Asians, and spiritual connectedness moderated the negative impact of functional limitations on depressive symptoms only for the Black Christian sample. This finding provides support to the argument that although Blacks struggle with health difficulties, they are more likely than Whites to seek solace from religion through a personal sense of spiritual connectedness with a supernatural, omnipotent God. Among the older Asian Christians, this and other literature suggest a rather stable trend of improved depressive symptoms with higher levels of religious involvement among this population.

Acculturative stress and coping strategies among Mainland Chinese university students in Hong Kong: A qualitative inquiry.

Despite the growing population of Mainland Chinese students at the local government-funded universities in Hong Kong, little is known about their acculturation experiences and psychosocial adjustment. Drawing on an acculturation framework (Berry, 2003) and theories of coping (Folkman, 1984), resilience (Masten, 2001), and socioecological processes (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), this article provides an in-depth account of acculturative stress and coping behaviors experienced by Mainland Chinese university students in Hong Kong. Using qualitative research methods, we conducted seven focus groups with a total of 32 Mainland Chinese students from a public university in Hong Kong over a 3-month period. Analytic strategy included identifying the unit of analysis, coding, sorting code, checking code, and creating salient themes. Findings suggested that Mainland Chinese university students faced acculturative stress stemming from "language barriers," "prejudice and discrimination," "cultural differences," and "transport, food, and accommodation." The study also found that the participants used a number of adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies in the face of acculturative stress. As an extension of this research, future studies should examine the subtle difference between a subculture (Hong Kong) and its mother culture (Mainland China) and how that affects acculturative stress. Implications of these findings are discussed at the levels of theory, policy, and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record

Should we talk? Co-rumination and conversation avoidance in job search

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to adopt an approach/avoidance coping framework to examine the relationships of job search co-rumination (i.e. engaging in repeated and excessive conversations with a friend about job search problems) and job search talk avoidance (i.e. persistently seeking to escape conversations about the job search) on job search intensity and job search procrastination.Design/methodology/approachThe authors surveyed 196 new labor market entrants (i.e. graduating students) at two points in time during their last semester in college.FindingsThe authors found that job search co-rumination is positively related to job search intensity, while job search talk avoidance is positively related to job search procrastination. Interestingly, though, the expected negative relationships between job search co-rumination and job search procrastination and between job search talk avoidance and job search intensity were not significant.Practical implicationsThis study has implications for both job seekers and career counselors. For job seekers, understanding how their communication patterns influence their behaviors (and ultimately their success) can help them to see the benefits of a balanced approach to sharing about their job search. Furthermore, career centers could organize either job search mentoring or peer group programs to help job seekers navigate the intricacies of the job search process.Originality/valueThis study contributes to understanding whether and how talking (or not) with others (i.e. friends and relatives) about one’s job search influences one’s job search behaviors, such as intensity and procrastination.

South Asian women's coping strategies in the face of domestic violence in the United States

ABSTRACTWe conducted in-depth telephone interviews with a convenience sample of 20 South Asian women experiencing domestic violence in the United States. Utilizing the emotion-focused and problem-focused coping framework, the researchers analyzed the narratives of abused South Asian women. Emotion-focused coping strategies include (a) spirituality and/or religion and (b) the role of children. Problem-focused coping strategies include (c) informal and formal support and (d) strategies of resisting, pacifying, safety planning. Implications for practice and future research in the United States and internationally are discussed.

Evasive Actions: The Gendered Cycle of Stress and Coping for Those Enduring Workplace Bullying in American Higher Education

Previous studies have confirmed that American higher education professionals endure workplace bullying at a rate higher than the general population. Close to two-thirds of American higher education employees were affected by workplace bullying and often endure the bullying at least two to three years. While the frequency of workplace bullying has been examined, along with the corresponding cost of employee disengagement, an analysis of how higher education employees cope with the stress of workplace bullying is absent from the literature. Within the theoretical stress and coping frameworks, this essay examined how higher educational personnel cope with stressful workplace bullying. A chi-square analysis was utilized on a sample (n=355) of American higher education respondents to determine the difference of the gender for respondents’ reactions. The chi-square analysis showed that women were more likely to quit/resign from a job in reaction to workplace bullying, and men are more likely to take more sick time in response to workplace bullying.

International Debate Over Geoengineering and Geoengineering Governance

In the face of the severe challenge of global climate change, all countries find it difficult to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2[Formula: see text]C above pre-industrial levels, let alone 1.5[Formula: see text]C. In recent years, geoengineering has gained increasingly more attention from the international community as an unconventional option to deal with climate change, and it has also provoked heated debates. This paper attempts to sort out related concepts, the focus of controversies and the research progress in terms of geoengineering, analyzes the international background of heated debate over geoengineering, probes into the governance of geoengineering under the framework of coping with climate change, and offers some suggestions for China to make strategic plans for geoengineering development.

Coping with the Stress in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit: Can Mindfulness Be the Answer?

BackgroundMothers of infants with complex congenital heart disease are exposed to increased stress which has been associated with numerous adverse health outcomes. The coping mechanisms these mothers use critically effect the familial illness adaptation and most likely infant outcomes. Currently no data-based strategies have been developed for mothers to facilitate their coping, and proactively promote their adaptation in the critical care settings. A potential strategy is mindfulness which is currently used in other clinical settings with stress-reduction effects. Purpose(1) To investigate coping mechanisms of mothers whose infant with complex CHD is admitted in the CICU, and (2) to explore the acceptability and feasibility of mindfulness as a potential stress-reduction intervention for these mothers. Design and MethodsA descriptive qualitative study obtained perspectives from 14 mothers during three focus groups. A qualitative conventional content analysis was performed using ATLAS.ti. ResultsIn congruence with the Stress and Coping framework, themes identified mostly emotion-regulatory coping mechanisms including both active and passive strategies such as positive thinking, denial, distraction, relying on support systems, and focusing on baby. Mindfulness was an acceptable and feasible approach for most participants, however, practice unfamiliarity, time and space concerns, and personal preferences were identified as potential barriers for future dissemination. ConclusionsMindfulness can potentially promote illness adaptation by utilization of active coping mechanisms. Early interventions can provide immediate, and potentially long-term stress relief. Intervention settings, format, and time-frame should be flexibly tailored to the trajectory of parental distress and familial adjustment.