Support-seeking Strategies Research Articles

Parental coping with the diagnosis of childhood cancer: gender effects, dissimilarity within couples, and quality of life.

Considering coping as dynamic process within the family, effects of gender and diagnosis are investigated. Dissimilarity within couples in coping with childhood cancer is studied longitudinally in its effects on quality of life of mothers, fathers, and the sick children. A total of 108 parents out of 54 complete families participated in a prospective study. Twenty-five families had a child newly diagnosed with cancer, 29 families had a child newly diagnosed with juvenile diabetes or epilepsy. The Coping Health Inventory for Parents, the Trier Coping Scales, and the Ulm Quality-of-Life Inventory for Parents were employed 1-2 weeks after diagnosis and again 10-12 weeks after diagnosis. In face of childhood cancer, parents develop more rumination, defense, and information seeking, and less social support seeking strategies compared to the control group. Mothers report more frequent and more effective coping compared with fathers, but mothers and fathers do not differ in their self-reported quality of life. No convergence within couples could be demonstrated in most of the corresponding coping styles. The strongest correlation between mothers and fathers appeared in the religious coping style (r=0.60, p<0.001). Coping dissimilarity within couples in social support seeking and religion is correlated with an improvement of parental quality of life. Parental dissimilarity in information seeking is correlated with a decrease in the child's quality of life. Coping dissimilarities between fathers and mothers have differential effects on the family members. For this reason, psychosocial interventions should support dis-synchrony when it appears adaptive, and they should help parents to overcome those differences that negatively affect their child.

A neglected window on hypothesis testing in adolescence: explicit standard order conditional selection tasks.

The paper reported four experiments on explicit standard order conditional selection tasks, which permit more direct inference of subjects' strategies than do other conditional selection tasks. The experiments allowed plausible rational support-seeking strategies to be reduced from nine to three, disproof strategies from six to three. The main strategy in early adolescence was either (1) models-based deduction, as suggested by Johnson-Laird and Byrne in 1991 or (2) rules-based deduction, as suggested by Rips in 1994, with a factual attitude to hypothesis and offered information. In late adolescence a substantial minority adopt a hypothetical attitude to both these things, which may be applied with either of these strategies or with (3) the nondeductive strategy suggested by Langford and Hunting in 1994. This general picture of developmental possibilities can be extended to Inhelder's and Piaget's problems requiring information search to test conditional and biconditional hypotheses, in particular their chemicals, pendulum, and rods problems. This extension is obtained by assuming that adolescents acquire a range of strategies for problems requiring more or less focussed information search, conditional selection tasks requiring the former, Piagetian formal operations tasks tending towards the latter. Current evidence does not indicate whether strategies (1) or (2) are dominant in younger adolescents or whether strategies (1) or (2) or (3) are dominant in older adolescents. Thus, the Piagetian argument that formal operations thinking passes from factual rules-based deduction to hypothetical rules-based deduction is only one of several styles of theory that can readily accommodate current evidence in this area.

Does hardiness contribute to mental health during a stressful real-life situation? The roles of appraisal and coping.

Israeli recruits (N = 276) completed questionnaires on hardiness, mental health, cognitive appraisal, and ways of coping at the beginning and end of a demanding, 4-month combat training period. Path analysis revealed that 2 components of hardiness--commitment and control measured at the beginning of the training--predicted mental health at the end of the training through the mediation of appraisal and coping variables. Commitment improved mental health by reducing the appraisal of threat and the use of emotion-focused strategies and by increasing secondary appraisal. Control improved mental health by reducing the appraisal of threat and by increasing secondary appraisal and the use of problem-solving and support-seeking strategies.

Attachment styles, coping strategies, and posttraumatic psychological distress: the impact of the Gulf War in Israel.

This study examines the association between adult attachment style and the way people reacted to the Iraqi missile attack on Israel during the Gulf War. One hundred forty Israeli students were interviewed 2 weeks after the war and classified according to their attachment style (secure, avoidant, or ambivalent) and residence area (dangerous vs. less dangerous). Ambivalent people reported more distress than secure people. Avoidant persons reported higher levels of somatization, hostility, and trauma-related avoidance than secure persons. These results characterized Ss living in dangerous areas. In addition, secure people used relatively more support-seeking strategies in coping with the trauma, ambivalent people used more emotion-focused strategies, and avoidant people used more distancing strategies. Findings are discussed in terms of attachment working models.