The Development of Coping: Implications for Psychopathology and Resilience
Melanie J. Zimmer-Gembeck and Ellen A. Skinner
Resubmission #2: 20 May 2014
To appear in:
D. Cicchetti (Ed.), Developmental Psychopathology. Oxford, England: Wiley & Sons
Author contact information:
Melanie Zimmer-Gembeck
Griffith University
School of Applied Psychology
Parklands Dr, G40
Southport QLD 4222
Australia
Email: [email protected]
Tel: +61 7 5678 9085
FAX: +61 7 5678 8291
Ellen Skinner
Psychology Department
Portland State University
PO Box 751
Portland, OR 97207-751
Email: [email protected]
FAX: (503) 725-3904
Chapter Outline
Goal of the Chapter
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TRANSACTIONAL PERSPECTIVES: COPING AS INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN APPRAISAL
AND COPING PROCESSES AND RESOURCES 8
Stress, Appraisals, and Coping Associated with Adjustment and Psychopathology 9
Stressful life events 10
Challenges to summarizing research on coping 11
Links between Broad Categories of Coping and Psychopathology 13
Problem-focused and emotion-focused, and approach and avoidance coping 13
Active coping 17
Primary and secondary control coping 17
Connections between specific coping strategies and psychopathology 19
Do Subjective Appraisals of Stressful Encounters also Play a Role in Psychopathology? 22
Coping self-efficacy 24
Causal attributions 26
Strategies for Emotion Regulation, Coping, and Psychopathology 27
Patterns or Profiles of Coping as Correlates of Psychopathology 30
Transactional Models of the Links between Stress, Coping, and Psychopathology 32
Coping as a moderator, mediator, and mechanism 33
Coping as reciprocally related to psychopathology 36
Daily stress, coping and psychopathology 38
Summary of transactional research 39
Critique of Individual Differences Research on Coping and Psychopathology 43
NORMATIVE DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVES: COPING AS A SET OF BASIC
ADAPTIVE PROCESSES THAT ARE REORGANIZED WITH AGE 45
Normative Development of Coping during Infancy: Implicit Coping 49
Attachment and “external coping" 49
Proximity-seeking as an omnibus coping strategy 50
Internal working models and coping appraisals 51
Development of regulation and rudimentary coping 52
Goal-directed action and early “problem-focused coping" 52
Social referencing and the emerge of “interpersonal coping” 53
Normative Development of Coping during Early Childhood: Voluntary Coping 55
Representational capacities and coping, and the development of extrinsic motivation 56
Caregiving and the development of self-regulation in coping 57
Executive functions, problem-solving, and coping 58
Individual coping as a supplement to interpersonal coping 59
Normative Development of Coping during Middle Childhood: Reflective Coping 61
Regulatory development and coping, and construction from intrapersonal coping 61
Advantages of mental means of coping 63
“Mental” participation of social partners 64
Role of coping attempts and failures 65
Mental means supplement the coping repertoire and sturdy coping systems 65
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Normative Development of Coping during Adolescence: Pro-Active Coping 66
Regulatory developments and coping 67
Meta-cognition and coping 69
Identity development and coping 70
Coping flexibility and attunement, and the importance of social partners 71
Reflection and reappraisal 72
Conclusion 73
Normative Development of Coping and Developmental Psychopathology 74
DEVELOPMENTAL SYSTEM PERSPECTIVES: COPING AS PART OF DEVELOPMENTAL
CASCADES TOWARD PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND RESILIENCE 76
Temperament, Differential Pathways of Maladaptive Coping, and Psychopathology 79
Temperamental patterns as differentially-tuned primitive coping systems 80
Research on temperament and coping 81
“Easy” and “difficult temperaments 83
Inhibited “fearful” temperaments, the differential development of maladaptive coping, and
internalizing psychopathology 84
Impulsive “fearless” temperaments, the differential development of maladaptive coping, and
externalizing psychopathology 85
Temperament and differential pathways of coping and psychopathology 87
Attachment, Differential Pathways of Maladaptive Coping, and Psychopathology 88
Attachment and the differential development of coping 88
Anxious-resistant attachment relationships 90
Insecure avoidant attachment relationships 91
Disorganized attachment relationships 92
Insecure attachments and stress reactivity 92
Secondary attachment strategies and coping 93
Attachment and coping with interpersonal stressors 94
Coping as a mediator of the effects of attachment on psychopathology 96
Attachment and differential pathways of coping and psychopathology 99
Parenting, Differential Pathways of Maladaptive Coping, and Psychopathology 100
Family Stress, Differential Pathways of Maladaptive Coping, and Psychopathology 104
FUTURE RESEARCH AND TRANSLATION OF RESEARCH INTO ACTION 106
The Role of Coping in Developmental Cascades toward Psychopathology and Resilience
Translation of Basic Research on Coping into Action 110
Child age and developmental level 113
Coping, temperament, and family relationship history 115
Integrating coping measures more fully into prevention and intervention research 116
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
107
117
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Abstract
The goal of this chapter is to review conceptual and empirical progress in the study of the
development of coping and to identify important ways in which this work may be useful to
researchers studying the development of psychopathology and resilience. We divide the review into
three sections. We first summarize perspectives that identify coping as a transactional process,
reviewing theory and research on how individual differences in stress appraisals, coping, and
emotional responses are linked to psychopathology and adaptive functioning. In the second section
coping is described as a fundamental human adaptive process that involves the regulation of
multiple subsystems (like emotion and attention) that are activated by stress. In this section, agegraded developments in multiple ways of coping are considered in order to bring structure to
research on the negative and positive outcomes of coping for human adaptation, psychopathology,
and resilience. In the third section, coping is considered as an integral part of developmental
cascades that contribute to psychopathology and resilience. We review research on how coping is
associated with temperament, attachment, and parenting to identify examples of underlying risk and
protective factors. These factors likely play a role in developmental cascades that mark and
contribute to psychopathology and resilience. We end with suggestions for future research and
highlight some translational implications of research.
Keywords: stress, coping, emotion regulation, temperament, parenting, attachment
4
The Development of Coping: Implications for Psychopathology and Resilience
It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a
crisis, are very often the hardest to find in prosperous calm. The contours of all our
virtues are shaped by adversity.
-Gregory David Roberts in Shantaram
A primary justification for the study of coping is the notion that, when faced with adversity,
the ways people react to and deal with its challenges can make a material difference to their
subsequent development. If they are overwhelmed, they can become more vulnerable to subsequent
psychological problems and disorder; if they rise to the challenge, they can become toughened,
strengthened, and more resilient to future threats and difficulties. Akin to the concept of “host
resistance” in the study of whether exposure to germs will lead to illness or to immunity, the
concept of coping refers, not to the assets and liabilities people bring to their dealings with
adversity, but instead focuses on how people actually interact with the real problems, setbacks, and
difficulties they encounter daily, right on the ground. These myriad “ways of coping,” such as
problem-solving, negotiation, rumination, accommodation, escape, confrontation, and helpseeking, describe specific transactions along the arc of episodic encounters with stress, and suggest
one set of mechanisms through which adversity can erode individual resources to create long-term
liabilities or, alternatively, can help individuals accrue lasting competencies for managing stress.
Surprisingly, however, the strands of research that focus on coping have not been wellintegrated with research on resilience and the development of psychopathology. Despite coping's
potential centrality as a moderator and mediator of exposure to stress, coping is rarely included in
programs of study focusing on developmental psychopathology or resilience (c.f., Cicchetti &
Rogosch, 2009). By the same token, despite the fact that the adversities people face, like poverty
and maltreatment, shape both the array of problems they confront and the resources they can access
to deal with them, coping research rarely considers the effects of higher-order contexts (c.f., Tolan
5
& Grant, 2009). All of these areas would benefit from a further exploration of their inherent interconnections.
The natural overlaps among coping, developmental psychopathology, and resilience have
been expanded over the last several decades by a major shift in conceptualizations guiding the study
of coping during childhood and adolescence. This shift was initiated in the 1980s with the
publication of the book Stress, Coping, and Development in Children (edited by Garmezy & Rutter,
1988) and the seminal article in Psychological Bulletin entitled “Coping with stress during
childhood and adolescence” (Compas, 1987a), and then it accelerated rapidly during the late 1990s
(Eisenberg, Fabes, & Guthrie, 1997; Skinner & Edge, 1998a; Wolchik & Sandler, 1997). Since that
time, conceptualizations of coping during childhood and adolescence have branched off from work
on coping during adulthood (Aldwin, 2007), after which it was largely patterned, to focus not only
on individual differences, but also on the development of coping. This “new” way of looking at
coping, which takes the concept back to its roots as an adaptive process (Murphy & Moriarity,
1976; White, 1974), has forced a reconsideration of the very definition of coping as well as the
meaning of “ways of coping,” their antecedents and consequences, the role of social partners, and
most importantly, qualitative shifts with age in how the adaptive processes that comprise coping are
organized across infancy, childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood (Skinner & ZimmerGembeck, 2007, in press).
Goal of the Chapter
The goal of this chapter is to review conceptual and empirical progress in the study of the
development of coping and to identify important ways in which this work may be useful to
researchers studying the development of psychopathology and resilience. We present our review
and ideas in three sections, each representing a different perspective on coping. An overview of the
6
contributions of each of these perspectives to an understanding of the connections between coping,
psychopathology, and resilience is provided in Table 1. The first section focuses on coping as a
transactional process, basically as constituting individual differences in appraisals and ways of
dealing with stressful demands and the emotions they generate. In this section, we review what is
known about the links between different ways of coping, appraisals, and coping resources, on the
one hand, and different forms of psychopathology and adaptive functioning, on the other hand. We
primarily draw from research on children and adolescents, but research with adults is also reviewed
when it is important for identifying future directions for research with youth. We also provide
conceptual and methodological critiques of this work to date.
------------------------------Insert Table 1 about here
------------------------------The second section describes coping as a fundamental human adaptive process that involves
the regulation of multiple subsystems (like emotion and attention) that are activated by stress, and
that also shows regular age-graded developments in how such regulation is accomplished. We
explain how a developmental perspective requires a reorientation of the study of coping, including a
developmentally-friendly definition of coping itself. We review studies of normative age
differences and age changes in adaptive and maladaptive ways of coping, and knit together research
from within and outside the coping area, to create a picture of the neurophysiological
underpinnings, and qualitative shifts in coping as it develops from birth to emerging adulthood.
This section highlights the important roles that close relationships with caring adults play in the
healthy development of coping, and explains how stressful encounters can provide opportunities for
the development of coping and regulatory capacities, resources, and efficacy, if demands are
7
manageable, interpersonal supports are sufficient, and parents (and other adults) help children
channel setbacks and failures adaptively—by learning and growing from them. We describe how
these basic building blocks all work together to contribute to the normative development of
appraisals, coping, and personal and social coping resources in order to show how they inherently
provide a platform or foundation for more complex theories and research on the development of
psychopathology or resilience.
The third section brings together work on individual differences and normative development
to consider coping from a multi-level dynamic developmental systems perspective. According to
this approach, coping is always part of developmental cascades that contribute to resilience or
psychopathology. Profiles of adaptive and maladaptive coping can be considered both markers and
mechanisms for cascades leading in a multitude of directions, and are important processes that
shuttle individuals back and forth between different pathways. We draw from work on
temperament, attachment, and family stress to identify examples of underlying biological and
overarching contextual risk and protective factors that shape developmental transitions and
dynamics, and so likely play a role in developmental cascades that mark and contribute to
psychopathology and resilience. We end the chapter with some suggestions about how future
research can productively combine work on the development of coping with work on the
development of psychopathology and resilience.
Transactional Perspectives:
Coping as Individual Differences in Appraisal and Coping Processes and Resources
Early work on coping during childhood and adolescence, inspired by research with adults,
focused on coping as a transactional process that unfolds in several recursive steps (Folkman &
Moskowitz, 2004; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). According to this perspective, as pictured in Figure
8
1, coping transactions are initiated by encounters with stress, defined as internal and external events
that individuals appraise as important to their well-being and as taxing or exceeding their resources
(Lazarus & Folkman, 1986, p. 63). Cognitive appraisals, focusing on the extent to which the
stressor is personally relevant and amenable to personal control, result in views of the encounter as
constituting a threat (i.e., impending harm), a loss (i.e., irreversible harm that has already been
incurred), or a challenge (i.e., a stressor the individual is confident about mastering).
------------------------------Insert Figure 1 about here
------------------------------These appraisals trigger bouts of coping, defined as “cognitive and behavioral efforts to
master, tolerate, or reduce external and internal demands and conflicts among them” (Folkman &
Lazarus, 1980, p. 223), which utilize personal and social resources to solve the stressful problem or
manage the individual’s negative emotional reactions to it. These efforts produce coping outcomes,
which, by feeding back to both the stressful event and individuals’ reappraisal processes, can
terminate or prolong the stressful transaction. According to this perspective, coping can be seen as a
process that involves a wide variety of ways of reacting to and dealing with stressors that are
organized sequentially, forming an interconnected action sequence or coping episode (Folkman &
Lazarus, 1985).
Stress, Appraisals, and Coping Associated with Adjustment and Psychopathology
A primary focus of research on stress and coping across the lifespan has been on correlating
the many ways of coping with indicators of adjustment, such as internalizing behavior (e.g.,
depressive and anxiety symptoms or disorders) or externalizing behavior (e.g., behavior problems
and aggression or conduct disorder). In fact, in 2000, Coyne and Racioppo reported that the
9
cumulative number of publications with coping as a keyword totaled almost 25,000 articles, with
the great majority focused on identifying stress and coping as risks or resources for mental health
and adjustment. Literally thousands of additional studies have been published in the past 15 years.
The size of the literature makes it difficult to achieve a comprehensive review, but a few trends are
apparent. For example, in the most recent decades, contemporary research has focused on stress and
coping as correlates of physiological functioning and physical health (Appleton, Buka, Loucks,
Gilman, & Kubzansky, 2013; O'Leary, 1990; Penley, Tomaka, & Wiebe, 2002; Walker, Smith,
Garber, & Claar, 2007), and even more recently, there has been a small but a growing number of
studies that focus explicitly on stress, coping, and psychopathology (e.g., Boxer, Sloan-Power,
Mercado, & Schappell, 2012; Tolan, Gorman-Smith, Henry, Chung, & Hunt, 2002). Multiple
reviews summarize much of this research (Bridges, 2003; Clarke, 2006; Compas, Connor-Smith,
Saltzman, Thomsen, & Wadsworth, 2001; Compas, Orosan, & Grant, 1993; Decker, 2006;
Frydenberg, 1997; Nes & Segerstrom, 2006; Penley et al., 2002; Petticrew, Bell, & Hunter, 2002;
Seiffge-Krenke, 2011; Taylor & Stanton, 2007; Wolchik & Sandler, 1997).
Stressful life events. Across these reviews, it is clear that major life stressors, including the
death of a loved one, witnessing a traumatic event or experiencing abuse by family members or
others, are common experiences among children and adolescents, occurring for about 25%. An
even greater number of children and adolescents experience repeated, sometimes daily, hassles
related to school (e.g., fights or problems with teachers or academic performance) and interpersonal
relationships (e.g., conflicts or problems with parents, siblings, and peers; Donaldson, Prinstein,
Danovsky, & Spirito, 2000). Both significant life events and daily hassles have been associated
with increasing symptoms of psychopathology over time, including depression, anxiety, and
delinquent behavior (Compas, 1987a, 1987b; Compas et al., 2001). Although these associations are
10
usually small to moderate in most studies, associations are much stronger when specific stressors
are examined, such as peer victimization (Harper, 2012; Kochenderfer-Ladd & Skinner, 2002;
Zimmer-Gembeck, Hunter, & Pronk, 2007; Zimmer-Gembeck et al., 2013), friendship and
romantic formation or dissolution (Nieder & Seiffge-Krenke, 2001; Seiffge-Krenke, 2011; ZimmerGembeck, Siebenbruner, & Collins, 2001); racial discrimination (Berkel et al., 2010; Brittian et al.,
2013; Pascoe & Smart Richman, 2009; Umaña-Taylor & Updegraff, 2007), or community violence
(Fowler, Tompsett, Braciszewski, Jacques-Tiura, & Baltes, 2009).
Despite clear evidence that the experience of stressful life events is a risk factor for children
and adolescents, it has been widely acknowledged that, in order to understand the development of
psychopathology, it is important not only to attend to the intensity and chronicity of stressful
events, but also to take into account individuals' appraisals of stress, their coping responses, their
feelings of efficacy in being able to carry out successful coping efforts, and their personal and
social resources for coping (Moos & Holohan, 2003; Taylor & Stanton, 2007). In the remainder of
this first section we summarize and build on previous reviews linking stress and coping with
psychopathology and positive adjustment, emphasizing studies of childhood and adolescence. We
begin with what is known about general coping categories and their associations with
psychopathology. We then consider how psychopathology and adjustment are related to specific
coping strategies, to cognitive appraisals of stressful events, to coping self-efficacy, and, more
recently, to profiles or combinations of coping strategies and resources. We end with a summary of
transactional models of the connections between stress, coping, adjustment, and psychopathology,
as well as findings from new and innovative research studies, using intensive repeated measures,
which provide evidence of reciprocal linkages between coping and psychopathology.
Challenges to summarizing research on coping. In integrating studies of coping, we faced
11
three challenges that have often been noted in the literature. The first was to figure out how to
compare the many ways of coping examined across different studies—which show little
consistency and typically employ different or partially overlapping lists of ways of coping.
Hundreds of ways of coping have been identified, which have been combined into dozens of
instruments to assess them, primarily through standardized self-report questionnaires, written openended responses, or open-ended interviews, but also via others' reports of coping (e.g., spouses,
parents, teachers, friends), and, less frequently, diary methods and observation (Skinner, Edge,
Altman, & Sherwood, 2003). In efforts to manage coping’s apparent complexity, many researchers
who examine the links between coping and psychopathology have boiled these variegated response
options down to two categories, sometimes referred to as problem-focused vs. emotion focused,
engagement vs. disengagement, approach vs. avoidance, or active vs. passive (and described in
more detail in subsequent sections).
A second challenge, given their potential overlap, was to distinguish between ways of
coping and psychopathology, both conceptually and in terms of measurement. Maladaptive ways of
coping sometimes are so closely connected to psychopathology that researchers have questioned
whether coping assessments tap symptoms rather than predictors of disorder (Compas et al., 2001).
Moreover, studies sometimes use measures that confound personal or social attributes, stress, and
psychopathology, so that, for example, interrelations between coping and psychopathology might
be explained by overlapping item content related to levels of stress and emotional distress
(Austenfeld & Stanton, 2004; Coyne & Racioppo, 2000; Lazarus, 2000; Park, Armeli, & Tennen,
2004). As a result, in measurement work, researchers have had to carefully remove items from
coping inventories that overlap with measures of emotional distress, and internalizing and
externalizing behavior (Ayers, Sandler, West, & Roosa, 1996; Connor-Smith, Compas, Wadsworth,
12
Thomsen, & Saltzman, 2000; Treynor, Gonzalez, & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2003).
A third challenge to integrating work on coping stems from the broad array of stressor
domains (e.g., medical conditions, victimization, environmental disasters) that are covered in
current research on children and adolescents. It is now clear that conclusions about whether certain
kinds of coping responses are adaptive versus maladaptive across a range of mental health
outcomes (e.g., Kendall & Terry, 2008) depend heavily on the type of stressor with which children
and adolescents are dealing, particularly on identifiable features of stressful events like their
severity or perceived controllability (Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2011; Zimmer-Gembeck &
Skinner, 2011). In fact, in recent years, this conclusion seems to be implicitly acknowledged in the
coping literature as research has become even more differentiated and focused-- as reflected in the
increasing proliferation of special population studies in which researchers often focus on a single
specific stressful health condition, chronic situation, or acute event, with the aim of explaining one
or many potential adjustment outcomes.
Links between Broad Categories of Coping and Psychopathology
Problem-focused and emotion-focused, and approach and avoidance coping. One of the
most commonly known broad categorizations of coping is the differentiation of strategies that are
primarily problem-focused from those that are more emotion-focused (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984).
Problem-focused coping is usually defined to include strategies enacted in an attempt to modify or
directly confront the stressful event, such as problem-solving and direct action. Emotion-focused
coping is usually defined to include responses that serve the purpose of managing emotional
reactions to stress, such as social withdrawal, distraction, and emotional venting. Studies that
examine the association of problem-focused and emotion-focused coping categories with
psychopathology have considered a wide range of outcomes, most frequently depression, anxiety,
13
loneliness, suicidal ideation, self-esteem, and positive well-being. A smaller number of studies have
assessed additional outcomes, such as stress reduction, physiological reactions, or physical health
(e.g., Appleton et al., 2013).
In reviewing the literature on problem-focused and emotion-focused coping and adjustment
among children and adolescents, Losoya, Eisenberg, and Fabes (1998) noted two general trends: (1)
problem-focused coping strategies are associated with fewer emotional and behavioral problems,
and greater social competence, whereas emotion-focused coping is generally associated with more
internalizing and externalizing symptoms; and (2) these findings are not uniform across studies and
generally depend on the type of stressor or features of the stressor. Subsequent research confirms
both of these trends. For example, in one recent study, the use of more problem-focused coping
responses was correlated with fewer symptoms of mental health disorders (Li, DiGiuseppe, & Froh,
2006), but other studies found no such associations (e.g., Horwitz, Hill, & King, 2011). Findings
are slightly more consistent across studies of emotion-focused coping, in that greater use of these
strategies is correlated with elevated symptoms of mental health disorders (Horwitz et al., 2011;
Rafnsson, Johnson, & Windle, 2006).
However, a recent study, which also found that problem-focused coping was associated with
better mental health, draws attention to the different forms that emotion-focused coping can take,
producing a more differentiated pattern of associations with psychopathology (see Stanton, DanoffBurg, Cameron, & Ellis, 1994, for similar conclusions in work with adults). In a study of 214
adolescents coping with their parents' cancer, some emotion-focused strategies, specifically those
that also had an approach or active component such as cognitive reappraisal, were associated with
better mental health, whereas those strategies that had the function of venting emotions or of
avoiding emotions or stressors were associated with worse mental health (Krattenmacher et al.,
14
2013; see Austenfeld & Stanton, 2004, for more detail on emotion-focused coping subtypes). In
summary, the general evidence points to the positive role of problem-focused coping and the
negative role of emotion-focused coping in adjustment. Yet, such findings are often inconsistent
across studies potentially because the broad categorization of problem-focused versus emotionfocused may not always adequately discriminate the pattern of coping responses that account for
increasing mental health problems or effective resolution and adaptation.
Although the broad categorization of problem-focused versus emotion-focused coping is
probably better known (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), the most commonly used categorization of
coping in recent studies of children and adolescents refers to general styles of approach (sometimes
also called active or engagement coping) and avoidance (sometimes also referred to as
disengagement coping; e.g., Causey & Dubow, 1992; Compas et al., 2001; Ebata & Moos, 1991;
Jaser et al., 2007; Lengua & Stormshak, 2000). Definitions of approach coping, which often share
many of the same responses as problem-focused coping, include cognitive or behavioral efforts to
manage the stressor. These are usually measured as problem-solving, cognitive reappraisal,
information or support seeking, and taking concrete action. Avoidance coping includes both
cognitive and behavioral responses that serve the function of avoiding the distressing event or
circumstances. Most often this is measured as distraction from the stressor, ignoring the situation,
denial or minimization, withdrawal, escape, and/or wishful thinking.
When reviews and the latest research are considered, there is substantial evidence that,
among children and adolescents, approach and active forms of coping are associated with positive
adjustment as well as with fewer symptoms of mental health problems. Such findings are generally
consistent with the findings for problem-focused coping strategies (Compas et al., 2001; Fields &
Prinz, 1997; Holahan & Moos, 1991; Lengua & Stormshak, 2000). Evidence is especially strong
15
when measures of approach coping tap the use of these responses relative to avoidant forms. In
contrast, avoidant forms of coping are very frequently associated with risks for heightened negative
outcomes, such as greater psychological distress and elevated behavior and other externalizing
problems (Krattenmacher et al., 2013; Rohde, Lewinsohn, Tilson, & Seeley, 1990; Seiffge-Krenke
& Klessinger, 2000).
Three reviews have summarized evidence about the associations of approach and avoidant
coping categories with psychological adjustment among children and adolescents. In the first
review of 21 such studies (Fields & Prinz, 1997), approach/active strategies, such as seeking social
support and direct problem-solving, were associated with greater social competence and fewer
internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. In a second review (Compas et al., 2001), two
classes of coping – “active” coping (which typically entails problem-solving, problem-focused
support, and/or information-seeking) and “engagement” coping (which includes not only problemsolving, but also constructive emotional expression and support-seeking) were associated with
fewer internalizing problems in 29 of 40 studies, fewer externalizing problems in 15 of 18 studies,
and greater social and academic competence in 17 of 20 studies. Within the broader factors of
problem-focused and engagement coping, the individual ways of coping that have been found to be
linked most closely to better functioning include problem-solving and positive reappraisal (Compas
et al., 2001).
This review also noted that two kinds of coping, emotion-focused coping (which usually
includes expression of negative affect, denial, and/or wishful thinking) and “disengagement coping”
(which typically entails problem avoidance, cognitive avoidance, and social withdrawal) seem to be
detrimental to positive functioning, in that they are linked to elevated internalizing and
externalizing problems. The individual ways of coping that have been found to be most consistently
16
associated with poor adjustment include cognitive and behavioral avoidance, social withdrawal,
wishful thinking, self-blame, resigned acceptance, emotional discharge, venting, and self-criticism
(Compas et al., 2001).
Active coping. In the third review, Clarke (2006) conducted a meta-analysis to summarize
effect sizes from 40 studies of youth age 21 and under focusing on the connections between
active/approach coping in response to interpersonal stressors and adjustment. In analyses of
externalizing behavior, internalizing behavior, social competence, and academic performance, only
the association between active coping and social competence was significant, with a mean effect of
.11 (CI .01 to .21). The effect of active coping on internalizing was moderated by age, however,
with a stronger, and surprisingly positive, effect found in adolescents (.14, 17 studies) compared to
preadolescents (-.04, 10 studies). Thus, it appears that, on average, active coping with interpersonal
stress may have a small link to more internalizing symptoms among adolescents, but not among
preadolescents. It may be helpful, however, to interpret this finding of age moderation in
connection with the controllability of the stressor. Clarke (2006) found that the type of stressor was
a particularly important moderator of the effects of coping: Active coping in response to
controllable events was positively associated with healthy functioning (.05 to .22), but negatively
associated when used in response to uncontrollable events (-.06 to -.19). In particular, utilization of
active coping is especially adaptive in situations that children and adolescents expect to be
amenable to personal control, such as school-related tasks. When situations are objectively less
controllable, such as the experience of parental conflict or medical procedures, active coping may
not be associated with adaptation or positive outcomes and, sometimes, may actually predict mental
health problems. In these situations, some kinds of coping that reduce the experience of stress, such
as self-distraction, may be more adaptive.
17
Primary and secondary control coping. Following up on studies suggesting that the
effects of different ways of coping depend on whether target events are amenable to personal
control, recent research has focused on the (objective, researcher-defined) controllability of
environmental stressors (Forsythe & Compas, 1987). Most coping researchers now agree that the
use of active coping is associated with fewer externalizing problems and greater social competence,
but only when it is deployed in response to controllable stressors as compared to uncontrollable
ones. This has also been extended to understanding other broad categories of coping and
psychopathology, specifically categories like “primary” and “secondary” control coping
(Rothbaum, Weisz, & Snyder, 1982), in which “primary” control coping refers to attempts to
change the stressful situation through typical problem-focused, active, and approach ways of
coping, whereas secondary control coping refers to strategies that allow people to accommodate to
events, placing less effort on trying to change them. Secondary control strategies include cognitive
reappraisal, focus on the positive, distraction, and willing acceptance (Connor-Smith et al., 2000).
In general, research suggests that it is more adaptive to use primary control coping when
dealing with controllable stressors, and secondary control coping when dealing with uncontrollable
ones. For example, one study found that adolescents were lower in internalizing symptoms when
they used more secondary control efforts (i.e., accommodation) to adapt to the stress of having a
depressed parent (an uncontrollable event; Langrock, Compas, Keller, Merchant, & Copeland,
2000). Extending this finding, another study reported that adolescents with depressed parents are
better adjusted when they used active secondary control, such as positive thinking and cognitive
restructuring, in response to situations that are less controllable (e.g., family stress) and used active
primary control, such as problem-solving and emotional modulation, in response to more
controllable situations (such as peer stress; Jaser et al., 2007). Finally, in a third study of 204
18
children and adolescents and their experiences of uncontrollable stressors (parental depression and
inter-parental conflict), those who used more secondary control coping strategies of acceptance,
distraction, cognitive restructuring and positive thinking were lower in both child- and parentreports of anxiety and depressive symptoms, as well as lower in aggressive behavior (Fear et al.,
2009).
In summary, these reviews and recent empirical evidence illustrate that the fit between the
situation and the use of approach or accommodative coping responses is an important indicator of
likely adaptive or maladaptive outcomes among children and adolescents (and adults; also see
Miller, 1992). Although it is still rare for studies to examine both the objectively defined
controllability of stressful events and participants’ own perceptions of controllability, these findings
highlight the crucial importance of the capacity to accurately diagnose the controllability of
stressors in order to implement approach or active coping or to draw upon accommodative and
distraction techniques depending on the needs of the stressful situation. Rather than relying only on
approach and active coping attempts, children and youth, when faced with uncontrollable stressors,
may benefit from accommodation strategies, such as positive reinterpretation and distraction, in
order to deal with emotions, shield themselves from stress, promote acceptance, and allow them to
move forward, all of which may be more healthy for concurrent and later mental health
(Brandtstädter & Rothermund, 2002; Compas, Banez, Malcarne, & Worsham, 1991; Forsythe &
Compas, 1987; Losoya et al., 1998; Miller & Green, 1985; Roth & Cohen, 1986).
Connections between specific coping strategies and psychopathology. Although less
frequently a focus of research when compared to studies examining broad coping categories, there
have also been more fine-grained investigations of specific coping strategies and their links to
psychopathology or competence (e.g., Decker, 2006; Khurana & Romer, 2012; Zimmer-Gembeck,
19
Skinner, Morris, & Thomas, 2013). In general, results of studies of specific coping responses and
adjustment or psychopathology are consistent with the findings for approach/active/primary,
secondary control/accommodative, and avoidance coping and psychopathology. In particular,
problem-solving, a form of active and approach coping, is one of the most adaptive specific
responses for maintaining good mental health in the face of stress. In a review of 12 studies of
stress, coping, and personal attributes in adolescents with cancer, two specific coping strategies
were consistently related to lower levels of depressive symptoms, namely, problem-solving and
seeking alternative rewards (Decker, 2006). In other research with adolescents or young adults,
help-seeking (Gould et al., 2004), planning (Aldridge & Roesch, 2008) and positive reinterpretation
(Stewart et al., 1997), as well as problem-solving (Khurana & Romer, 2012), were each associated
with greater competence or fewer symptoms of mental health problems.
On the other hand, there are also specific strategies that seem to prompt heightened or
increasing adjustment problems. In particular, aggressive and ruminative coping are among the
strategies that seem most detrimental to child and adolescent mental health. In one study, both were
associated with more internalizing symptoms and more peer reports of withdrawal or isolation from
others (Sandstrom, 2004). In a second study, however, an even wider range of maladaptive coping
strategies was identified (Horwitz et al., 2011). In this study of 140 adolescents seeking pediatric
emergency services, five ways of coping and appraisals were measured including denial, substance
use, use of emotional support, behavioral disengagement, and self-blame. All were associated with
more heightened depressive symptoms and more frequent suicidal ideation for boys, for girls, or for
both. Unique coping and appraisal correlates of elevated depressive symptoms were behavioral
disengagement, self-blame, and seeking emotional support. The one unique correlate of suicidal
ideation was the greater use of emotional support, suggesting that emotional support seeking may
20
also reflect level of distress.
Other studies have found that behavioral disengagement, often assessed as behaviors that
imply giving up or helplessness, is a risk factor for elevated depressive symptoms (e.g., Kaminsky,
Robertson, & Dewey, 2006; Nolen-Hoeksema, Girgus, & Seligman, 1992; Wadsworth & Compas,
2002), and the use of distraction as a response to the stressor of discrimination is a risk factor
associated with increased internalizing disorders over time (Brittain et al., 2013). Taken together,
denial, rumination, aggression or opposition in response to stress, as well as helplessness or
disengagement, blaming the self, and seeking emotional support are most indicative of greater
symptoms of mental health problems among children and adolescents. Moreover, distraction may
also be a risk for elevated symptoms, especially if it is used when stressful events are within
personal control and active coping might be more productive.
Although most studies have focused on older children or adolescents, there is also evidence
that there are specific coping strategies associated with problems or competence in younger
children. For example, Eisenberg et al. (1997), in their study of children 2-4 years of age who were
re-assessed again at ages 6-8 and 8-10, found that the use of destructive coping (more venting and
avoidance/distraction, and less cognitive restructuring), especially when reported by teachers rather
than parents, was negatively associated with concurrent and future levels of social competence and
positively associated with externalizing symptoms and problem behaviors. Simultaneously,
constructive coping (the use of instrumental coping and support seeking) was associated with
greater social competence. In a study of 153 young children (Blair, Denham, Kochanoff, &
Whipple, 2004), pre-schoolers higher in parent-reported and teacher-reported passive coping (e.g.,
avoidance and denial of the problem) showed more signs of emotional and social maladaptation,
and the use of passive coping sometimes exacerbated the effects of irritable or sad-fearful
21
temperaments on externalizing or internalizing symptoms. In contrast, actively facing the problem
(e.g., problem-solving) was associated with fewer internalizing symptoms. Thus, even in very
young children, there is emerging evidence that active coping rather than avoidant coping or
passivity in response to stressful demands from the environment may be important for maintaining
mental health and building social competence. Moreover, the capacity for adaptive coping may
counteract temperamental challenges in the early years of life.
Do Subjective Appraisals of Stressful Encounters also Play a Role in Psychopathology?
According to the transactional perspective, individuals’ subjective appraisals of stressful
encounters are a key part of the stress and coping process (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Appraisals,
including perceptions of threat, harm, loss, or controllability, as well as attributions of causality,
responsibility, or blame, are important because they are imbued with emotion, prompt other
cognitions, and guide subsequent behavior (Lazarus, 1994). In particular, appraisals can be
motivating or demoralizing, can calm emotion or amplify distress, and can foster continued
engagement with the environment or lead to disengagement and helplessness (Roesch & Weiner,
2001; Weiner, 1985).
One complication within the research on appraisals, coping, and psychopathology, however,
is that empirical distinctions between appraisals and coping are not always clear (Folkman, 1984).
In some studies, causal attributions have been included as a way of coping (see Folkman, 1984, for
a review). For example, self-blame, a form of internal attribution, has been examined as a coping
strategy (e.g., Horwitz et al., 2011); and some multi-dimensional measures consider blaming others,
sometimes referred to as “projection,” as a maladaptive way of coping (Skinner, Pitzer, & Steele,
2013). As Aldwin (2007) concluded, this research remains "muddled" (p. 182), and theories are
needed that either clearly differentiate between appraisals and coping or explicitly posit that
22
appraisals and reappraisals are integral parts of coping processes themselves.
Regardless of the challenges facing researchers, it is now widely accepted that, along with
children's coping responses, it is also important to consider their perceptions of control and other
appraisals of stress in the development of psychopathology (Chorpita & Barlow, 1998; Skinner,
1995; Weems & Silverman, 2006). In general, the impact of stressful events appears to depend not
only on the objective stressors themselves, but also on subjective appraisals of stress, and these may
vary from child to child. As would be expected, appraisals are important correlates of emotional
reactions to stress and to mental health (Compas et al. 2001; Zimmer-Gembeck, Lees, Bradley, &
Skinner, 2009). For example, the appraisal of a stressful event as more threatening has been
associated with children’s self-reported symptoms of anxiety, depression, and conduct-related
problems following parental divorce (Sandler, Kim-Bae, & MacKinnon, 2000).
One study illustrates the importance of appraisals in understanding how stress and coping
are linked to psychopathology among children and adolescents. This study also raises the
possibility that appraisals may be as important (or maybe even more important) than coping for
understanding the development of psychopathology. Lengua and Long (2002) examined threat and
challenge appraisals, active and avoidant coping, and adjustment problems (depression, motherreported internalizing and externalizing symptoms, and self-reported internalizing and externalizing
symptoms) among 101 8- to 12-year-old children. Challenge appraisals were expected to be
associated with active coping, as has been found in other research (Santiago-Rivera, Bernstein, &
Gard, 1995). In contrast, threat appraisals were expected to be associated with maladaptive
outcomes, because previous research had demonstrated that they were associated with depression,
anxiety, and conduct problems in children experiencing parental divorce (Sandler, Tein, Mehta,
Wolchik, & Ayers, 2000) and were found to be the conduit linking the stressor of inter-parental
23
conflict to internalizing symptoms (Grych, Fincham, Jouriles, & McDonald, 2000). Although
higher stress levels, appraisals of greater threat, and use of more avoidant coping were associated
with elevated internalizing and externalizing symptoms in simple correlations, coping had no direct
effects on internalizing and externalizing symptoms once the significant impacts on symptoms of
stress levels, threat appraisals, and temperament were accounted for in a multivariate model.
Other studies have found that the fit between appraisals and coping is important to consider
when predicting psychopathology. For example, in a study of 76 adolescents who reported their
coping and appraisals of the controllability of their cancer-related stress, the match between coping
style and appraisals of controllability was associated with fewer depressive symptoms, less anger,
less distress, and less anxiety (Sorgen & Manne, 2002). Thus, using more problem-focused coping
when controllability was perceived to be high or using more emotion-focused coping when
controllability was perceived to be low was associated with less distress and fewer symptoms.
These findings show that, just as has been found for objectively defined controllability, subjective
appraisals of controllability can be important to understanding the implications of coping for
adjustment and psychopathology. However, to date, few studies have directly tested this "goodness
of fit" hypothesis in children and adolescents (c.f., Forsythe & Compas, 1987) and findings remain
rather mixed even in studies of adults or university students (e.g., see Park et al., 2004, for a
discussion and an example of mixed findings).
Coping self-efficacy. An additional set of appraisals that seem to be important to coping
and mental health following encounters with stress can be found in global beliefs about one’s
capacity to cope effectively or successfully, sometimes referred to as coping self-efficacy (Smith,
Calkins, & Keane, 2006; see also Galatzer-Levy, Burton, & Bonanno, 2012, for a similar construct
referred to as coping flexibility). Building on the view that a sense of efficacy in coping promotes
24
the subsequent use of constructive coping strategies, coping self-efficacy has been defined to
include beliefs about one's own ability to manage stressful events themselves, as well as
perceptions of one’s capacity to understand and adaptively regulate one's emotional reactions to
stress. Adolescents who report more coping self-efficacy tend to cope more successfully with
stressful events and to receive more interpersonal support (Sandler, Kim-Bae et al., 2000; Sandler,
Tein et al., 2000). It is not yet clear whether coping self-efficacy should be differentiated from the
stress and coping process, for example, by considering it to be akin to a personal or a social
resource. However, because high coping efficacy also reflects a history of successful coping, it is
probably best conceptualized as an indicator of self-perceived coping success, so that it captures not
what young people actually do in response to stress but how effectively they feel they have done it.
In such instances, coping efficacy might be considered a mediator that links coping to mental health
outcomes, and such pathways have been documented. In one study of children (Sandler, Kim-Bae
et al., 2000), approach coping was negatively associated with depression and anxiety, and avoidant
coping was positively associated with emotional adjustment problems, with coping efficacy fully
mediating these associations.
The importance of considering both coping and coping efficacy when trying to understand
mental health was also suggested by a comprehensive study of children of alcoholic parents (Smith
et al., 2006). In this study, in which all constructs were assessed via multiple reporters (mothers,
father, teachers, children), children who had a history of more positive parenting (supportive
parenting practices and consistent discipline) used more active and support-seeking coping and
were higher in coping efficacy. Moreover, all of these factors were important in explaining why
children differed in their levels of externalizing and/or internalizing symptoms. In particular,
children’s active coping and coping self-efficacy mediated associations between positive parenting
25
and lower symptoms. Yet, some findings depended on the reporter, on whether the outcome was
internalizing or externalizing symptoms, and whether the child had an alcoholic parent.
Causal attributions. Appraisals can also involve causal attributions or explanations for
why an event occurred. These appraisals and attributions include not only estimations of the
controllability of the event itself, but also explanations about its cause, such as whether it was
caused by the self or by something outside the self (sometimes called locus) or whether the cause
was stable (vs. unstable) or global (vs. specific). Although no review of the role of attributions in
coping during childhood and adolescence could be located, one meta-analysis was conducted that
included 27 studies of adults who were coping with illness (Roesch & Weiner, 2001). When the
results of these studies were quantitatively combined, internal attributions were found to be
associated with more approach coping responses. Attributions that stressful events were more
unstable and controllable were associated with more coping responses of all kinds, (approach and
avoidance, problem- and emotion-focused). For example, patients who appraised their illnesses as
stable and uncontrollable used more avoidance coping and were less well adjusted than those who
viewed their illnesses as more unstable and controllable. Moreover, there was evidence that the
effects of attributions on psychological adjustment were fully mediated via all coping responses
(except for behavioral avoidance). Thus, in adults, at least when they are coping with an often
uncontrollable stressor like illness, appraisals are important to understanding coping responses,
adaptation, and psychopathology.
The results of these studies raise the possibility that causality and attributional processes
may also be critical for understanding coping prior to adulthood, or at least by late childhood or
early adolescence. When focusing on these younger age groups, however, such findings should be
considered only suggestive, given the cognitive changes that occur between childhood and
26
adulthood. Perhaps the development of causal beliefs and attributions may explain some of the
changes in coping that are found with increasing age (Band & Weisz, 1990; Zimmer-Gembeck &
Skinner, 2011). It may also be the case that causal beliefs and attributions become more closely tied
to coping processes with increasing age (Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2011).
Strategies for Emotion Regulation, Coping, and Psychopathology
Coping is often aimed at regulating emotional experiences, either by changing one's own
responses or by modifying the stressor that prompted the emotional reaction (Compas et al., 2014;
Losoya et al., 1998). Overall, emotion dysregulation, usually assessed via measures originally
designed to assess coping, is thought to be a core feature of many forms of psychopathology (e.g.,
see Aldao & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2010; Aldao & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2012; Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema,
& Schweizer, 2010; Webb, Miles, & Sheeran, 2012). Because of the clear conceptual and
methodological overlaps, research on emotion regulation and the dysregulation of negative affect
and their links to psychopathology often seem to be tantamount to studies of stress and coping,
allowing some conclusions about coping and psychopathology to be drawn from such work.
Not surprisingly, the basic findings from these two bodies of research are similar: Just as
with studies of stress, coping, and psychopathology among children and adolescents (and even
adults), complex interrelations have been found in the associations between psychopathology and
the multitude of available emotion regulation strategies. At the same time, two general patterns can
be discerned. First, three specific emotion regulation (or coping) strategies have been widely
theorized to be protective against psychopathology, namely, (1) cognitive reappraisal of the
stressful event, defined as generating benign or positive interpretations or perspectives on stressful
situations as a means of reducing distress (Aldao et al., 2010; Gross, 1998; John & Gross, 2004);
(2) problem-solving, which involves conscious attempts to change a stressful situation or contain its
27
consequences; and (3) acceptance, which refers to willingly consenting to emotions as they are
without judgment. Second, and also overlapping with research on coping, three emotion regulation
strategies have been identified as risk factors for the development of psychopathology, namely, (1)
suppression, defined as the control and repression of unwanted thoughts and emotions and their
expression; (2) avoidance, which involves evading an array of unwanted psychological experiences,
including emotions, sensations, memories, and urges; and (3) rumination, which refers to
repetitively focusing on negative and distressing experiences and emotions and their causes and
consequences.
Testing these expectations using a range of measures of coping and emotion regulation
associated with stress, Aldao and Nolen-Hoeksema (2010) found that university students who relied
more often on cognitive reappraisal and problem solving also reported fewer indicators of
psychopathology (symptoms of anxiety, depression, and eating disorders), whereas symptoms were
more elevated in students who relied more often on suppression and rumination. Moreover,
associations were stronger between maladaptive strategies and symptoms than between adaptive
strategies and symptoms.
These patterns of findings were also confirmed in a meta-analysis of 114 studies that
examined the associations between six forms of emotion regulation and four psychopathologies:
Aldao et al. (2010) found that there were large effects of rumination on depression and anxiety,
medium to large effects for avoidance, problem-solving, and suppression, and small effects for
reappraisal and acceptance. Three of these coping strategies - rumination, avoidance and
suppression - were associated with heightened levels of depression, anxiety, and (somewhat less
strongly) substance use and eating disorders. The other three responses-- problem-solving,
reappraisal, and acceptance-- were associated with lower levels of symptoms. The strongest effect
28
was for rumination and the weakest effect was for acceptance. John and Gross (2004) also reviewed
evidence of the links between adjustment and the emotional regulation strategies of reappraisal and
suppression, concluding that research has predominantly supported the positive implications of
reappraisal and the negative implications of suppression. Most recently, many, but not all, of these
associations were confirmed in a review of 306 experimental studies of emotion regulation and its
effects of a range of outcomes including distress and adjustment (Webb et al., 2012).
Much less research has examined the use of these emotion regulation strategies in children
and adolescents. It may be that some of these strategies are not as widely used in younger age
groups, given their cognitive complexity and the autonomous actions required to execute them.
However, some research has been conducted, which has identified multiple emotion regulation
deficits among children with internalizing and externalizing psychological difficulties (for a review
see Zeman, Cassano, Perry-Parrish, & Stegall, 2006). Across these studies, deficits in emotion
regulation and coping have been measured as biased or misguided appraisals of the threat and
challenge of stressful events, and excessive emotional reactions and displays. All of these deficits
appear to be heightened among children with depression, anxiety, or bulimia nervosa (compared to
children without these disorders), but patterns of deficits differ for children with internalizing
versus externalizing disorders. In particular, children with elevated depressive and anxiety
symptoms have been found to display poorer emotional awareness and emotional understanding,
report lower self-efficacy regarding their ability to regulate their emotions and cope with stress,
show a less well-developed emotional vocabulary, have difficulties expressing and regulating their
anger, and more often display inappropriate expressions of sadness. In contrast, children identified
as having elevated externalizing disorders seem to suffer from emotional under-control resulting in
displays of high emotional intensity, evince poorer inhibition of anger as evidenced by facial and
29
other displays, and respond to distressing events with less sadness than would be typical for other
children.
Patterns or Profiles of Coping as Correlates of Psychopathology
Emerging evidence suggests that coping strategies may be deployed in clusters or may
interact in ways that heighten their effects on adjustment and psychopathology. Although recent
studies have addressed this issue, the notion of coping patterns or clusters is not new. For example,
Timko, Moos, and Mickselson (1993) argued for the importance of the relative or combined use of
a range of coping strategies for psychopathology more than two decades ago. However, subsequent
research has identified a number of important combinations of coping responses or coping
resources.
First, generalizing from findings across multiple studies, positive reinterpretation combined
with acceptance may be especially beneficial for adjustment in uncontrollable situations, whereas
positive reinterpretation combined with active coping may be especially beneficial to adjustment in
controllable situations. Second, contrary to the idea that people rely on problem-focused versus
emotion-focused coping strategies, multiple studies have found that coping strategies such as
positive reappraisal, reinterpretation, or distraction (i.e., emotion-focused strategies) actually often
occur in combination with or promote or antecede problem-focused coping, suggesting that calming
emotion may promote constructive problem solving, and that it may be this combination that aids
good adjustment when facing stressful events, especially when events are objectively controllable
(e.g., Mattlin, Wetherington, & Kessler, 1990; Shimazu & Schaufeli, 2007; see also Folkman, 1984
for a review). Third, the negative effects of internalizing coping strategies, such as isolating oneself
and emotional venting, may be weakened if they are used in conjunction with more active
strategies, such as problem-solving (Kingsbury, Coplan, & Rose-Krasnor, 2013). Fourth, social
30
support may be most beneficial to relieving distress in situations of low personal control. In
general, combinations or sequences of different coping strategies, theoretically or empirically
derived, may turn out to be particularly helpful in understanding social and emotional adjustment
following stressful events, both in the short and the longer term.
At least two studies of adolescents have gone somewhat further in tackling this issue by
implementing person-centered approaches (i.e., data clustering techniques) to better understand
how the use of particular combinations of coping strategies may contribute to adjustment and
mental health problems (Boxer et al., 2012; Tolan et al., 2002). In a first study, focused on youth
living in impoverished areas of the inner-city (Tolan et al., 2002), 372 12- to 16-year-old
adolescents provided information two times over a one year period about their use of 12 ways of
coping when facing difficulties or feeling tense. Stress (social) was also measured, and the
psychopathological outcomes were youth reports of their internalizing and externalizing symptoms,
as well as teacher reports of the same symptoms. About 50% of the items formed seven coping
categories (seeking support, venting emotion, avoidance by substance use, distraction, positive
thinking, seeking guidance, and humor) and these were subjected to cluster analysis. Five clusters
were accepted as the best representation of differentiation among adolescents in their person-level
patterns of coping responses, and these were labeled as (1) support and guidance seekers, (2)
minimal copers, (3) emotional substance users, (4) emotion-focused copers, and (5) complex
copers. After controlling for demographic differences and stress levels between coping groups, the
lowest concurrent internalizing symptom levels were found for support and guidance seekers and
minimal copers. Over time, minimal copers showed greater increases in internalizing symptoms
when compared to support and guidance seekers. In contrast, the highest concurrent externalizing
symptom scores were reported by emotional substance users and emotion-focused copers; emotion-
31
focused copers also had greater increases in externalizing symptoms over time when compared to
support and guidance seekers and complex copers. Such findings suggest that reliance on seeking
support and guidance, relative to other coping strategies, to manage stressful events during
adolescence may serve to deflect the escalation of both internalizing and externalizing symptoms.
In a second study, the focus was on coping with stress and violence among 131 adolescents
living in a distressed metropolitan area (Boxer et al., 2012). Coping included externalizinginternalizing coping (which included such strategies as aggressive responses, emotional venting,
and high emotional reactions) and distancing; and mental health was measured as symptoms of
PTSD, externalizing, and internalizing. Three coping cluster groups were found, namely, those
identified as (1) low in all forms of coping, (2) high in internalizing-externalizing coping but low in
distancing, and (3) high in distancing but low in internalizing-externalizing coping. The low coping
group showed the highest levels of competence, whereas the high internalizing-externalizing group
reported elevated symptoms of all disorders relative to the other two coping groups. At the same
time, however, this study illustrates the continuing problem of potential overlap in measures of
stress, coping, and psychopathology. The measure of coping responses had obvious overlap with
symptoms, and the levels of stress experienced by youth were assumed and not directly assessed,
making it likely that the group of adolescents who reported the lowest levels of coping was also
exposed to the fewest stressful events related to neighborhood violence. Once these methodological
issues are addressed, however, person-centered analyses that identify coping patterns have much
potential to inform our understanding of developmental pathways of psychopathology and
resilience.
Transactional Models of the Links between Stress, Coping, and Psychopathology
Partly because the direct associations between stress exposure (or adversity) and
32
psychopathology have been rather small, transactional theories often posit complex roles for
appraisals, coping, and coping resources in the processes that protect (or harm) children and
adolescents at risk for psychopathology (Fields & Prinz, 1997; Lazarus & Folkman, 1994; Moos &
Holahan, 2003; Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007). At least four kinds of general models
depicting the role of coping and its associated processes can be identified (see Figure 2): Coping
has been conceptualized as a moderator, mediator, mechanism, and reciprocal process in the
relations between stress and psychopathology. Because of such theoretical developments, studies of
mediators and moderators have become the norm rather than the exception in coping research. As a
result, there is research to support or refute all of these more complex views, as described in this
section.
------------------------------Insert Figure 2 about here
------------------------------Coping as a moderator, mediator, and mechanism. One of the most straightforward
models posits that all (or some forms) of coping are moderators that minimize, buffer, or
exacerbate the negative effects of stress on adjustment or on the onset or relapse of
psychopathology (Aldwin, 2007). Coping can be thought of as a stabilizing or destabilizing factor
that helps maintain positive psychological adjustment during stressful periods or may explain why
stressors lead to psychopathology. From this perspective, coping efforts should be most helpful
when stress is severe and distress is high. Consistent with this notion, Holahan and Moos (1991)
found that under high stress, personal and social resources (self-confidence, easygoing disposition,
family support) were related to better psychological adjustment indirectly through their link to
greater reliance on approach coping responses. Under low stress, only personal and social resources
33
were related to adjustment (directly).
When tested, moderation effects are often found, although not consistently across studies
and not for all ways of coping. Nevertheless, some of the differences are consistent with theory and
conceptual frameworks. For example, in one study, moderation effects were found for problemfocused coping but only main effects of coping on psychological symptoms were found for
emotion-focused coping strategies (Aldwin & Revenson, 1987). To explain this finding, the authors
argued that emotion-focused coping may, to a large extent, reflect pre-dispositional characteristics
and that such characteristics may be more likely to show main, but not moderating, effects. In
contrast, problem-focused strategies may be more situational specific - they are influenced by
situational constraints and affordances - and, therefore, may have their effects by interfering or
modifying the situation, which, in turn, has implications for adjustment.
A second model (see Figure 2) views coping as a mediator or an adaptive process that itself
is embedded in or shaped by stress, and is the primary (or only) pathway through which stress
exerts its proximal effects on adjustment and psychopathology (Aldwin, 2007). According to this
model, one of the reasons that adversity has deleterious effects is that stressful life events trigger
maladaptive coping in children and adolescents, which then puts them at risk for the development
of psychopathology. For example, avoidant coping, often measured as denial or withdrawal, has
been found to mediate between stressful circumstances and distress, on the one hand, and
concurrent or later adjustment, on the other. In one study, avoidant coping mediated the negative
effect of living in a homeless shelter on women's depressive symptoms (Rayburn et al., 2005), and
other studies have also found avoidant coping, particularly behavioral rather than cognitive
avoidance, to mediate the impact of stress on adjustment (Barker, 2007; Holahan, Moos, Holahan,
Brennan, & Schutte, 2005; Roesch & Weiner, 2001). In a recent study of two samples, one early
34
adolescents and the other adults, followed for 7 or 12 months, respectively, rumination mediated
the association of more stressful life events with increased anxiety symptoms in adolescents and
adults, and mediated the association of more stressful life events with increased anxiety and
depressive symptoms among adults (Michl, McLaughlin, Sheperd, & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2013).
However, other studies have found that other forms of coping do not mediate the effect of stress on
adjustment or psychopathology (e.g., Aldwin & Revenson, 1987) and, instead may have more
direct effects on adjustment in some circumstances (such as the main effect of active coping with
controllable events on more positive adjustment; Clarke, 2006).
A third model (see Figure 2) posits coping as a mechanism through which protective factors
exert their impact. Protective factors would include social resources, like social support, as well as
personal resources, like optimism, personal control or mastery, self-esteem, or coping efficacy,
which are hypothesized to proffer their protective effects at least in part by promoting constructive
coping and discouraging reliance on maladaptive coping responses (Taylor & Stanton, 2007). From
this perspective, in order to demonstrate the effects of coping per se, it would be essential to show
that coping behaviors have unique effects on psychopathology over and above the effects of the
pre-existing personality and other characteristics that shape them (Carver & Connor-Smith, 2010).
Complicating matters even further, there is new evidence that some coping responses
interact with each other, and that coping responses and resources may also interact with each other,
suggesting that some personal traits or environmental conditions (i.e., coping resources) may
exacerbate or deflect the positive or negative effects of coping on outcomes (Dagan et al., 2011;
Shimazu & Schaufeli, 2007; Taylor & Stanton, 2007). For example, Jacobsen et al. (2002) found
that posttraumatic stress symptoms were most elevated among cancer patients who reported a
combination of low social support and greater use of avoidant coping. Dagan et al. (2011) found
35
that unsupportive spousal behavior was associated more strongly with distress among adult cancer
patients when the patients were also low in personal control.
Coping as reciprocally related to psychopathology. The fourth model (see Figure 2)
views coping as part of a set of reciprocal processes binding it to psychopathology. According to
these models, stress, coping and psychopathology have bidirectional or reciprocal effects, whereby
stress interferes with coping processes and contributes to maladjustment or psychopathological
outcomes; at the same time, maladjustment and psychopathology generate later experiences of
stress and undermine the development of coping responses and resources (Conway, Hammen, &
Brennan, 2012; Hammen, 2005; Lazarus, 2000; Liu, 2013; Roesch & Weiner, 2001; Rudolph &
Asher, 2000).
Evidence from longitudinal studies has accumulated that documents both directions of these
reciprocal effects. Results from time-lagged studies show that psychopathology can make it
increasingly more difficult to cope adaptively with stress, just as multiple studies show that poor
coping is associated with increasing adjustment problems and psychopathology. For example,
multiple studies have shown that children (Zeman et al., 2006), adolescents (Littleton, Axsom, &
Grills-Taquechel, 2011) and adults (Aldao et al., 2010; Roemer, Orsillo, & Salters-Pedneault, 2008)
with elevated levels of depression, anxiety or other forms of distress symptoms find it more
difficult to use constructive coping strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, problemsolving, and attentional redeployment. Depressed children also report using fewer strategies to
regulate their negative emotions than non-depressed children (Garber, Braafladt, & Weiss, 1995)
and adolescents with heightened depressive symptoms, relative to their non-depressed peers, report
using more cognitive avoidance and resigned acceptance to cope with stressors, and less problemsolving and positive reappraisal, all of which have been associated with the development of
36
psychopathological symptoms (Ebata & Moos, 1991; Littleton et al., 2011). Such findings also
extend to the flip-side of these reciprocal relationships, as seen in the connections between coping
and competence, whereby children rated higher in social competence by their parents also make
more use of constructive coping strategies, such as problem-solving and support-seeking, compared
to children rated as less competent (Zimmer-Gembeck, Lees, & Skinner, 2011).
Although both directions of effects are not typically examined together in a single study, a
few investigations have explicitly targeted and found bidirectional effects. In one such study, adults
with more psychological symptoms (measured with the Langner 22-item Screening; Langner, 1962)
experienced increasing stress and reported more maladaptive coping over time at the same time that
maladaptive coping was found to predict increasing psychological symptoms over time (Aldwin &
Revenson, 1987). In another study, reciprocal associations were found between distress related to a
university mass shooting, coping responses, and PTSD symptoms, with maladaptive forms of
coping (avoidance, social withdrawal, wishful thinking, and self-criticism) related to increased
distress over time, at the same time that levels of PTSD symptoms were associated with changes in
coping over time (Littleton et al., 2011). As another example, adolescents' peer stress in the form of
rejection by classmates has been associated with increasing depressive symptoms over time
(Bagwell, Schmidt, Newcomb, & Bukowski, 2001; Garber et al., 1995; Panak & Garber, 1992;
Parker, Rubin, Price, & DeRosier, 1995) and multiple, other forms of adolescent stress also have
been associated within a chain of events that create increases in depressive symptoms over time (for
a review see Compas et al., 1993).
However, it is important to point out that some longitudinal studies explicitly looking for
bidirectional effects have found evidence for one pathway, but not the reverse. For example, one
study which showed that coping was associated with increasing or decreasing mental health
37
symptoms over time, did not find the converse temporal associations between earlier symptoms and
changes in coping (Wadsworth & Berger, 2006); and another study revealed that some forms of
psychopathology (e.g., PTSD) may prompt increasing maladaptive coping with stress over time, but
such coping was not associated with escalation in symptoms over time (Littleton et al., 2011).
In most cases, patterns of reciprocal relations between psychopathology and coping must be
pieced together from multiple studies separately documenting complementary directions of effects.
For example, studies have shown that adolescents' heightened depressive symptoms predict their
reports (and their classmates' reports) of increasing peer stress over time (Zimmer-Gembeck et al.,
2009) or other stress (Compas, Howell, Phares, Williams, & Giunta, 1989; Windle, 1992).
Moreover, for adolescents, high levels of depressive symptoms can prompt increasing use of coping
responses such as social isolation and avoidance (see Hammen, 1999 for a review), and, in turn,
higher levels of withdrawal, isolation, or avoidance have been associated with increasing stress and
distress among children (Gazelle, 2010; Prinstein & La Greca, 2002), adolescents (Littleton et al.,
2011), and adults (Barker, 2007; Holahan et al., 2005; Shah, Gupchup, Berrego, Raisch, & Knapp,
2012). It is important to highlight the key role that avoidance coping seems to play in these
bidirectional pathways between stress and depression.
Daily stress, coping and psychopathology. Stress, coping, and mental health also seem to
be reciprocally linked across very short, even daily, temporal episodes. Because such series of
interrelations can unfold so rapidly, stress and coping researchers have found the application of
diary research designs particularly useful and informative. In these designs, participants often
complete an initial assessment and then provide reports of their stress, coping, and other daily
experiences for five or more days. Such studies tend to replicate the findings from cross-sectional
and longitudinal research, but also make clear that individuals differ in how rapidly they appraise
38
stressful events, how often they use coping responses, and how necessary coping seem to be for
maintaining positive emotion and well-being over time.
For instance, in a study of (mostly female) university students' stress, coping, and appraisal
of stressor controllability, individual differences were found in the temporal patterns of
controllability appraisals and coping (Park et al., 2004). Some individuals matched their appraisals
to coping by using problem-solving coping strategies when events were appraised as controllable
and using emotion-focused coping strategies when events were appraised as uncontrollable.
However, others did not match appraisals and coping to the same degree. Although matching
problem-focused coping to controllable situations was associated with better adjustment, matching
emotion-focused strategies to stressors appraised as uncontrollable was only associated with better
adjustment for a subset of participants. Moreover, the personality characteristic of neuroticism
explained some of the individual differences in associations of controllability and coping with
negative and positive mood across the 28 days of the diaries. In children, diary studies have also
revealed the ways that coping and coping efficacy are associated with symptoms of mental and
physical health problems over short periods of time. In particular, passive coping has been
associated with more functional impairment, elevated depressive symptoms, and more somatization
over a 5-day diary, whereas reports of coping efficacy have been associated with reduced symptoms
of mental health problems, including fewer depressive symptoms and less somatization (Walker et
al., 2007).
Summary of transactional research. Transactional research, which links reliance on
different ways of coping (or emotion regulation) to different indicators of adjustment and
psychopathology, is typical of the inter-individual difference focus of most coping research with
children and adolescents (as well as with adults). Also consistent across age groups is the pattern of
39
findings suggesting that certain kinds of coping are positively linked to adaptive functioning and
negatively to problems and disorders. These include active approach or engagement strategies like
problem-solving, positive reappraisal, constructive expression of emotions, and acceptance. In
contrast, other ways of coping seem to show the reverse pattern of associations, that is, they are
correlated positively to indicators of psychological problems and disorders and negatively to
adjustment. These include avoidance and disengagement strategies like cognitive and behavioral
escape, rumination, helplessness, suppression, social withdrawal, wishful thinking, emotional
discharge, resigned acceptance, and self- and other-blame.
Several kinds of appraisals and causal attributions also show consistent links with
competent functioning and psychopathology through their effects on approach and avoidance
coping. Appraisals of challenge, controllability, and attributions of stressful events to internal and
controllable causes generally predict higher levels of approach coping and lower levels of
helplessness, and through these, higher levels of competent functioning and lower levels of
depression and externalizing behaviors. Appraisals of threat, uncontrollability, and attributions of
negative events to internal, stable, and global causes generally predict higher levels of avoidance,
self-blame, and ruminative coping, which in turn typically are connected with higher levels of
disorder and lower levels of competence. Particularly important seem to be appraisals of “coping
efficacy” or individuals’ confidence that they can deal successfully with the problems, setbacks,
and negative emotions entailed in stressful experiences.
The study of subjective and objective estimates of the controllability of stressful situations
have demonstrated that it is the match between situational demands and ways of coping that both
characterize competent functioning and predict effective outcomes. As depicted in the serenity
prayer, individuals need “the courage to change the things I can” because active approach “primary
40
control” ways of coping are a good fit for stressors (or aspects of stressors) that are controllable
(like schoolwork); as well as “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change” because
accommodative, positive reappraisal, acceptance, and distraction coping are a better match for
stressors (or aspects of stressors) that are not under an individual’s personal control (like interparental conflict). Although not studied as often, this pattern of findings also implies that
individuals must develop “the wisdom to know the difference,” and suggests that children and
adolescents would benefit from having parents who are aware of the fine distinctions and
differences and can assist them in learning to make these distinctions.
Particular combinations or sequences of coping have proven to be associated with
competent functioning: for uncontrollable events, cognitive reinterpretation accompanied by
acceptance; and for controllable events, cognitive reinterpretation along with active forms of
coping. These combinations seem to blend ways of dealing with distressing emotion with ways of
guiding productive behavior, perhaps even sequencing them so that distress does not interfere with
constructive action. Other combinations suggest that it is the balance between adaptive and
maladaptive forms of coping that are typical of more positive functioning under negative
conditions: The deleterious effects of coping strategies such as isolation or emotional discharge can
be buffered by the use of problem-focused or engagement coping; and high levels of social support
may help compensate for low levels of low personal control. Taken together, these findings suggest
that it may be most useful to examine inter-connected patterns of situational demands, appraisals,
and profiles of coping in order to better understand social and emotional adjustment following
stressful events in both the short- and the long-term.
Multiple complex conceptual models have been proposed to account for the role of coping
in the connections between exposure to stress, risk, or adversity, on the one hand, and the
41
development of psychopathology, competence, or resilience, on the other hand. Coping has been
posited to act as a moderator, mediator, mechanism, and reciprocal partner in these connections.
Evidence has been found for all these roles, but not consistently. Constructive coping, especially
problem-focused coping, does seem to be especially crucial when stress is high (i.e., it seems to act
as a moderator) but other forms of coping, such as those captured in typical emotion-focused
amalgams, seem to be harmful under most circumstances. Avoidance coping, especially behavioral
avoidance, seems to be a key pathway (i.e., mediator), in that high levels of stress and adversity
elicit more avoidance and social withdrawal, which in turn is likely to create problems for
psychological adjustment and functioning. However, some studies suggest that approach coping
may both mediate the effects of stress and exert direct effects, irrespective of stress levels. Coping
also seems to be a particularly important mechanism through which a variety of personal and social
resources (such as mastery or sense of control, optimism, self-esteem, and social support), which
have been found to act as protective factors under conditions of adversity, have been found to exert
their beneficial effects on competent functioning and to buffer children and adolescents from
symptoms of psychopathology.
Some of the strongest support for complex models comes from accumulating evidence that
coping and psychopathology are reciprocally linked. Although not often investigated in the same
studies, research increasingly documents the operation of each direction or pathway of influence. In
terms of the effects of psychopathology on coping, studies show that emotion dysregulation and
poor coping are hallmarks of many kinds of psychological disorders, and, in terms of the effects of
coping on psychopathology, longitudinal, experimental, and intervention research show that when
children and adolescents display these out-of-control emotions and maladaptive coping responses,
they generate stress for themselves and their families, and so initiate or exacerbate psychological
42
problems. When taken together, most findings suggest that associations between stress, coping, and
psychopathology are often reciprocal, unfolding in positive and negative developmental cascades
across situations and over time.
Critique of Individual Differences Research on Coping and Psychopathology
Over the last several decades, tens of thousands of studies have examined the connections
between a variety of ways of coping and a variety of indicators of psychological adjustment and
disorder. Studies in this cast have multiple problems, but they can be optimized through the
improvement of measurement and design strategies. In terms of measurement, overlap among
indicators of stress, coping, and maladjustment continues to be problematic. Maladaptive ways of
coping seem so closely connected to expressions of distress and indicators of psychopathology that
researchers continue to question whether coping assessments tap symptoms rather than predictors
of disorder (Compas et al., 2001). As a result, in measurement work, researchers will need to
continue to carefully scrutinize and remove items from coping inventories that overlap with
measures of stress, emotional distress, and internalizing and externalizing behaviors (Ayers et al.,
1996; Connor-Smith et al., 2000; Treynor et al., 2003).
A second set of problems is presented by typical study designs. The vast majority of
individual differences research looks at links between coping and psychopathology at a single time
point. As a result, as underscored by Compas et al. (2001) in their review of this work, it is not
possible to determine a specific direction of effects from these associations:
Although it is tempting to infer that the use of engagement or problem-focused
coping leads to more successful adaptation to stress, this interpretation is
tautological to a certain extent. That is, these findings may simply indicate that
children and adolescents that are more socially competent, who are less anxious and
depressed, and who exhibit fewer conduct and disruptive behavior problems are
better able to generate solutions to problems and to maintain a positive outlook when
faced with stress. (p. 118)
43
This situation can be improved by the use of designs that include multiple times of measurement-either short-term like daily diary time series studies, or long-term like longitudinal studies. These
kinds of designs are essential to allow researchers to examine reciprocal effects.
The optimal study designs that allow causal inferences (in either direction) continue to be
experimental or intervention studies, in which researchers foster more constructive coping and then
examine the effects of these improved coping strategies on subsequent psychological symptoms.
Researchers are more limited in their ability to experimentally study the reverse direction. That is,
researchers are not ethically able to induce psychopathology, but they can induce dysphoria or
negative mood and then examine these effects on how people cope with challenges and setbacks.
Most persuasive are programs of research that utilize both experimental and naturalistic
longitudinal designs to examine both directions of effects (e.g., Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, &
Lyubomirsky, 2008).
Despite the many contributions of transactional studies of individual differences in coping
processes and psychopathology, even the best of this research suffers from an intractable problem:
Any individual differences approach is inherently incomplete with respect to an understanding of
psychopathology, which (at least from the perspective of the interdisciplinary field of
developmental psychopathology, Cicchetti & Toth, 2009) is by nature a developmental process.
This means that key questions can never be completely answered by looking at snapshots of the
relations between coping and psychopathology at single time points or even at multiple points in
time. Coping, like psychopathology, competence, and resilience, is inherently and reciprocally
developmental: Developmental level decisively enables and constrains each of the processes
depicted in transactional theories of coping: appraisals, personal and social resources, ways of
coping, outcomes, and all the feedforward and feedback loops that connect them. At the same time,
44
episodes of coping contribute to development: Through the repeated process of dealing with
problems and difficulties, children and adolescents generate resources and liabilities for dealing
with subsequent stressful encounters. To fully realize the value of transactional perspectives and to
fully recognize the role of coping in the onset and progression of mental disorder, mental health, or
the growth of resilience, the creation and use of developmental conceptualizations of coping are an
important next step.
Normative Developmental Perspectives:
Coping as a Set of Basic Adaptive Processes that are Reorganized with Age
Normative developmental frameworks are grounded in the proposition that coping is a
fundamental adaptive process that has evolutionary value in allowing people to detect, mange, and
learn from potentially dangerous encounters (White, 1974). From this perspective, it becomes clear
that coping has its roots in many functional systems designed to deal with threats and dangers, and
because all these subsystems are likely to be activated by stress, developmental conceptualizations
posit that coping refers to how all of them are coordinated and sequenced during stressful
encounters. Hence, in the field of coping during childhood and adolescence, coping has come to be
defined as “regulation under stress” (Compas et al., 2014; Eisenberg et al., 1997; Rossman, 1992;
Sandler, Wolchik, MacKinnon, Ayers, & Roosa, 1997; Skinner & Wellborn, 1994; Skinner &
Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007, 2009).
When coping is seen as the coordination of adaptive processes designed to detect and
respond to challenges and threats (see Figure 3) or as “reactivity and regulation under stress”, it
becomes clear that the coping system needs to accomplish four tasks: (1) to detect and interpret
information about internal and external demands (threat detection and appraisal); (2) to prepare a
response based on internal and external guides and capacities (action readiness); and (3) to execute
45
a response by coordinating action tendencies with internal and external demands and resources
(action regulation). Moreover, in order to develop, the coping system also needs (4) to recover and
learn from stressful encounters.
---------------------------------Insert Figure 3 about here
---------------------------------From this perspective, it becomes clear that coping represents a complex multi-level system
(see Figure 4), which extends from (1) the neurophysiological level, including psychobiological
sub-systems involved in detection and reactions to stress and the regulation of stress reactivity,
most centrally the hypothalamic-pituitary axis (HPA), the sympathetic-adrenal medullary (SAM)
axis, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex (PFC), especially the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC);
(2) the psychological level, including processes involved in stress reactivity and regulation,
especially the attentional, emotional, and motivational subsystems; (3) the level of action, including
subsystems that jointly generate action tendencies and that integrate and regulate them, especially
the behavioral, cognitive, and meta-cognitive subsystems; (4) the social level, including
participation in coping by social partners as well as interpersonal relationships (such as with
caregivers, other family members, teachers, friends, and peers) that scaffold the development of
coping’s many subsystems; and (5) the societal level, including the stressors that impinge on and
the resources that are available to children and adolescents themselves as well as the societal
stressors and supports that influence their social partners.
---------------------------------Insert Figure 4 about here
----------------------------------
46
After considering these five levels, the reciprocal connections between coping and
development become more apparent. On the one hand, development shapes coping: (1) by exerting
extensive effects on the bottom-up processes that are coordinated and integrated during stressful
transactions, including neurophysiological and psychological (i.e., attentional, emotional,
motivational, behavioral, and cognitive) features of reactivity and action tendencies, as well as (2)
exerting extensive effects on the top-down regulatory processes used to coordinate and integrate
them. Higher-order developmental organizations contribute to coping by determining the nature of
the tools children and adolescents have at their disposal to detect, respond to, and learn from threats
at different ages as well as the socio-cultural scaffolds that they can count on to protect them (or
leave them vulnerable) while their own coping capacities are developing.
On the other hand, coping also contributes to development: The actual moment-to-moment
transactions between individuals and stressful events can be considered “proximal processes” that
act as engines of development (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). These episodes, in which
individuals are trying to optimize the fit between environmental and intrapsychic demands (stress)
and their internal and external resources and responses (coping), can be seen as creating a “zone of
proximal development,” in which strategies for dealing with stress and negotiating emotions can be
discovered, practiced, and consolidated (or overwhelmed and discarded). Hence, cumulatively, such
transactions can contribute to the development of capacities and resources for improved coping,
regulation, and resilience (Carver, 1998; Carver & Scheier, 1998; Luthar, 2006; Tedeschi, Park, &
Calhoun, 1998).
A view of coping as a basic adaptive process suggests that, at the most global level, one way
of outlining the age-graded progression of coping, as well as its qualitative shifts, is to consider
several broad developmental phases that are characterized by different mechanisms of detection,
47
appraisal, reactivity, regulation, and learning as well as different kinds of participation by social
partners. As we outlined in our earlier work:
Infancy would begin with stress reactions governed by reflexes, soon to be
supplemented by coordinated action schema; during this period, caregivers would
carry out coping actions based on the expressed intentions of their infants
(interpersonal co-regulation). During toddlerhood and preschool age, coping would
increasingly be carried out using direct actions, including those to enlist the
participation of social partners; this would be the age at which voluntary coping
actions would first appear (intrapersonal self-regulation). During middle childhood,
coping through cognitive means would solidify, as described in work on distraction,
delay, and problem-solving; children would be increasingly able to coordinate their
coping efforts with those of others. By adolescence, coping through meta-cognitive
means would be added, in which adolescents are capable of regulating their coping
actions based on future concerns, including long-term goals and effects on others
(Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007, p. 128).
Age graded shifts in the basic tasks of coping (i.e., detection and appraisal, action
tendencies and regulation, and learning) are shaped, on the one hand, by the development of
neurophysiological subsystems, and on the other hand, by changes in the demands and resources
provided by social partners, and especially caregivers. In this section, we use research on the
development of coping itself and of other regulatory subsystems (including attentional, emotional,
and behavioral regulation), to trace the course of age-related changes in how these subsystems are
triggered and coordinated in the face of stress. Because social partners are so critical to the
development of all these subsystems, we also detail the role of caregivers (and later, other social
partners) in the emergence and consolidation of these regulatory resources and capacities. We focus
especially on how the caregiver’s role in coping changes over development, from one in which they
are doing most of the coping for newborns based on their infants’ expressed preferences, to one of
direct participation, then cooperation, and finally acting as a resource and back-up system to the
relatively independent coping of which adolescents are capable by the time they reach emerging
adulthood. (For more details on the normative development of coping, please see Skinner &
48
Zimmer-Gembeck, in press.)
Normative Development of Coping during Infancy: Implicit Coping
Because systems to detect and deal with threats are essential to survival, newborns come
equipped with pre-adapted responses to carry out these tasks. Sensory, perceptual, and attentional
subsystems aid in threat detection; emotional and motivational subsystems aid in threat appraisal
and action readiness; and the motor system carries out actions to express distress or respond to
danger. The initial systems that coordinate newborns’ threat detection and responses are based on
reflexes and other automatic processes triggered by the neurophysiological stress reactivity
subsystems, including the SAM, the HPA axis, and subcortical neurological subsystems, like the
amygdala (Izard, Hembree, & Huebner, 1987; Ohman & Mineka, 2001).
Attachment and “external coping.” At the level of action, these physiological subsystems
initially trigger automatic motor behaviors, such as startling, huddling, crying, and diffuse whole
body reactions to physical discomfort, novelty, constraint, and other sources of psychological
displeasure or distress. These expressions of distress are not initially intended as communications,
but they can be read and interpreted by sensitive caregivers, and so can initiate cycles of contingent
and responsive caregiving. As described by decades of work on the attachment system (Ainsworth,
1979; Bowlby 1969/1973; Carlson & Sroufe, 1995; Kobak, Cassidy, Lyons-Ruth, & Zir, 2006),
these call-and-response cycles are part of species-general evolutionarily adaptive mechanisms, in
which caregivers are predisposed to respond to newborn’s distress by engaging with and soothing
the infant, and by figuring out what is wrong and taking action to change the stressful situation,
guided by the infant’s needs and expressed preferences.
Such soothing and comforting, along with actually meeting newborns’ expressed needs, can
be considered forms of “external coping” in which the caregiver, using information provided by the
49
infant, appraises the stressor, analyzes the “problem,” and responds with emotion regulation or
constructive coping actions. For the infant, such interactions cumulatively create the experience of a
safe and trustworthy environment, which may be an important foundation for the infant’s ability to
modulate physiological stress responses (Fuertes, Dos Santos, Beeghly, & Tronick, 2006;
Nachmias, Gunnar, Mangelsdorf, Parritz, & Buss, 1996). From the first days of life, infants are also
learning from stressful encounters, using mechanisms described by operant and associative
conditioning (Harman, Rothbart, & Posner, 1997), in which habitual responses through their
repeated use become embedded in implicit memory.
These mechanisms soon modify infants’ stress responses from those of reflexes to those of
action schema or habits (Rothbart & Posner, 2006), perhaps regulated by subcortical structures,
such as the amygdala, that rely on cumulative experience and learning about the nature of the
environment and its relation to the actions of the individual (Lewis & Todd, 2007). Based on
repeated experiences in a secure relationship with a sensitive caregiver, these cumulative patterns of
learning, perhaps stored in the amygdala as “hot” information, may continuously down-regulate the
HPA axis and the SAM. This may be one of the mechanisms through which infants’ stress
reactivity subsystems become tuned to their environments (Spangler & Grossmann, 1993; Spangler,
Schieche, Ilg, Maier, & Ackerman, 1994). When infants develop in the context of a secure
attachment relationship, these neurophysiological systems (especially the HPA axis) go into a
period of hyporesponsivity by about 3 months of age (Gunnar & Donzella, 2002; Gunnar &
Quevedo, 2007), resulting in a calmer and less stress reactive state for the infant after the first few
months of life (Lewis & Todd, 2007).
Proximity-seeking as an omnibus coping strategy. As described by attachment theory
(Kobak et al., 2006; Sroufe, 1996; Sroufe & Waters, 1977), a secure relationship with the caregiver
50
is also accompanied by the development of an omnibus coping strategy over the first few months of
life, namely, “proximity seeking.” This response, to which human infants are biologically
predisposed, relies on biobehavioral systems that are visible first in reflexes and crying, and then,
based at least partly on sensitive caregiving, in intentional communications and focused actions,
such as looking, reaching, and distinctive vocalic patterns and differentiated crying. By the end of
the first three months of life, infants have developed, from a diffuse set of undirected expressions of
distress and reflexive reactions, a differentiated set of appreciations and action tendencies that are
integrated with caregivers’ responses to infants’ signals, including caregivers’ strategies for repair
and comfort (Barrett & Campos, 1991; Holodynski & Friedlmeier, 2006; Kopp, 1989). When this is
accomplished, coping shifts from what has largely been “external coping” to emotion regulation
and problem-solving that is coordinated between the active infant and the sensitive caregiver, and
so can be more properly labeled as “interpersonal coping.”
Internal working models and coping appraisals. Infants also construct generalized
expectations, which have been referred to as “internal working models” of relationships, and they
are considered to be the rudimentary beginnings of successively more complex and differentiated
self-systems (Connell & Wellborn, 1990; Deci & Ryan, 1985; Laible & Thompson, 1998). Such
self-systems include generalized expectancies of safety and security, or that loving care is available
when one is distressed (Lewis, 1997), generalized expectancies for contingency and dependability
and a sense of mastery or efficacy in the face of environmental challenges (Watson & Ramey,
1972), and generalized expectancies that one’s preferences will be attended to and respected (Deci
& Ryan, 1985). These kinds of generalized expectancies likely continue to down-regulate stress
reactivity by broadcasting benign (implicit) appraisals of potentially stressful environmental
encounters.
51
Development of regulation and rudimentary coping. Infants and toddlers make
momentous early advances in their capacity for regulation, which parallel the maturation of the
prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is involved in the processing, intensity, and regulation of emotion
during the first years of life (Grimm et al., 2006). At this time, infants exhibit nascent cognitive
control and they can manage working memory and inhibitory control tasks (Diamond, Prevor,
Callender, & Druin, 1997). They also develop rudimentary skills that they can use to regulate their
emotional displays (Fox & Calkins, 2003; Rothbart, Derryberry, & Posner, 1994; Ruff & Rothbart,
1996), and are better able to direct their attention towards or away from environmental events in
order to regulate emotion and action (Kopp, 2002).
By about 18 months, toddlers can engage in effortful self-regulation primarily through selfdirected attention and voluntary control of action (Feldman, 2009; Harman, Rothbart, & Posner,
1997; Kochanska, Philibert, & Barry, 2009; Ruff & Rothbart, 1996). Such attentional orienting can
serve as a way to guide thinking, feeling, and behaving, and the increasing efficiency of skills in
each area builds the capacity of the entire system. Emotion regulation strategies are also improved
by the end of the 2nd year of life. All of these improvements parallel what is known about the
maturation of the PFC in these early years (Diamond, 2002), and are also facilitated by changes in
vagal tone (Feldman, 2009). Overall, by the 2nd year of life, there are marked improvements in
focused attention, response inhibition, effortful control, and emotion regulation; all of which aid in
generating adaptive responses to the novel and discomforting events often encountered by infants.
The capacities to inhibit and to attend are adaptive for many reasons, providing a foundation for the
capacity to respond to others and to comply with parental requests or other environmental demands.
Goal-directed action and early “problem-focused coping.” In challenging but not
overwhelming interactions with social and physical contexts, infants also develop the capacity for
52
“problem-focused coping” as they flexibly deploy and focus attention on their goal-directed actions
(Braungart-Rieker & Stifter, 1996; Bridges & Grolnick, 1995; McCarty, Clifton, & Collard, 1999).
Especially interesting are interactions in which infants cannot fully realize their intentions; these
can trigger rudimentary “coping” actions, for example, infants may increase their exertions toward
the goal, become more energized, and later may try out different action strategies (DeLoache,
Sugarman, & Brown, 1985; McCarty et al., 1999). If goals are blocked, infants may direct energy
toward removing the obstacle, or they may withdraw their efforts and switch to another goal.
These coping interactions are developmentally useful: The goals created by the stress of not
being able to immediately realize their intentions spontaneously coordinates infants’ biobehavioral
systems, both within the associated neurological subsystems (Lewis & Todd, 2007) and between
the neurophysiological subsystems and infants’ action subsystems. Such interactions not only
exercise or consolidate existing connections, but also stretch infants’ actions into a zone of
proximal development, where new strategies and combinations are generated. In fact, a shifting role
of social partners is to maintain a set of conditions for infants under which they can develop
increasing regulatory resources and capacities. In the most general terms, this involves helping
infants maintain a state of biological integrity and stability while nudging interactions toward the
zone of “just manageable challenge,” that is, providing opportunities for exploration and focused
interaction with intrinsically interesting objects and people, combined with the availability of
supports on an “as-needed” basis.
Social referencing, and the emergence of “interpersonal coping.” Infants also begin to
tune their appraisals of novel or ambiguous events more to their caregivers’ signals of distress or
interest, in a process known as “social referencing,” which allows infants to consult their
caregiver’s “radar” over some distance in order to make decisions about the potential dangers
53
present in new situations and the extent to which they should engage or withdraw from specific
encounters (Fonagy, Gergely, & Target, 2007; Lewis & Ramsay, 1999). At the same time, infants
become more capable of “indirect coping” (Barrett & Campos, 1991) in which they “delegate”
coping actions to caregivers through the use of intentional communications designed to elicit
desired outcomes, such as pointing at a desired object.
Caregivers’ sensitive responsiveness can be considered a kind of “co-regulation” in which
babies and caregivers are in good communication about how to deal with challenging, and
potentially threatening, encounters (Diamond & Aspinwall, 2003; Hornik, Risenhoover, & Gunnar,
1987; Lewis & Ramsay, 1999; Sorce, Emde, Campos, & Klinnert, 1985). These interactions form
kinds of “coping packages,” which the infant can initiate using increasingly differentiated
intentionally communicated signals of their distress, internal states, preferences, and goals. Such
episodes, repeated thousands of times, begin to synchronize infants’ internal experiences of distress
with their external expressions, acknowledged and mirrored by caregivers through attunement; and
these appreciations, or appraisals, are in turn coordinated with caregivers’ external actions to relieve
distress, and infants’ subsequent internal experiences of relief from discomfort and satisfaction of
goals.
As these packages are differentiated, based on the underlying problem (cause) and its
emotional markers, two new developments emerge: (1) infants construct sets of distress appraisals
and expressions that are actual representations of their genuine underlying physiological states,
emotions, and motives; and (2) they build up a repertoire of constructive interpersonal coping
strategies that are targeted at the actual problem and are effective in dealing with the stressor and in
bringing comfort, relief, and motive satisfaction (Calkins & Hill, 2007). Using their emerging
representational capacities, infants can also begin to form subjective representations of the
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contingencies between these elements, allowing the packages to be stored in implicit memory for
later use, when triggered by similar problems or emotional markers of distress.
Normative Development of Coping during Early Childhood: Voluntary Coping
Early childhood is sometimes referred to as a period of “emotional action regulation,”
because emotional systems seem to be coordinating toddlers’ appreciations and action readiness in
stressful situations (Holodynski & Friedlmeier, 2006; Kopp, 2009). Detection and responses to
challenges and threats are largely carried out by the emotional and intrinsic motivational systems,
which generate “approach” or engagement reactions to objects, people, or events that young
children find attractive, and “avoidance” or withdrawal reactions to ones they find unattractive,
frightening, or repulsive (Barrett & Campos, 1991). Based on a history of experiences with
sensitive interpersonal coping and the construction of secure internal working models, toddlers
become able to tolerate increasingly higher levels of stress, showing equanimity and patience,
perhaps based on benign implicit appraisals of stressful situations and expectations that episodes
will be resolved favorably. They are also able to clearly communicate their genuine emotions and
desires, and are generally ready and willing to cooperate with caregivers in regulating emotions and
dealing effectively with action problems.
At this age, caregivers participate directly in toddlers' appraisals and coping, as described by
Gottman, Katz, and Hooven (1996, 1997) in their depiction of “emotion-coaching” parenting (see
also Calkins & Hill, 2007; Keenan, 2000; Kliewer, Fearnow, & Miller, 1996; Power, 2004; Sroufe,
1996). Caring adults help children identify and discuss differentiated emotions, as well as their
causes, and jointly examine strategies for tolerating or alleviating them (aka strategies for emotion
regulation or emotion-focused coping) (Dunn, Bretherton, & Munn, 1987; Kopp, 1989; Miller &
Sperry, 1987). Such emotion coaching allows children to integrate their genuine internal
55
experiences of distress with a differentiated vocabulary to accurately recognize and represent a
variety of emotions (Denham, 1998; Malatesta, Culver, Tesman, & Shephard, 1989; Saarni, 1997),
thus affording children access to the full range of their emotional experience, which provides
crucial information when they are appraising the meaning of a potentially stressful event and when
they are coping.
Representational capacities and coping, and the development of extrinsic motivation.
The development of representational capacities, which were seen in early forms in generalized
expectations and action schemes, produces a major shift in emotion regulation and coping with
stress during early childhood (Denham, 1998; Derryberry & Tucker, 2006). They make it possible
for toddlers to maintain goals over longer periods of time, to “plan” successively more complex
action strategies before carrying them out, and to communicate in more differentiated and accurate
ways about their goals, desires, and emotions. The joint representation of internal states and
preferences along with external affordances and conditions allow these elements to be more
effectively coordinated and, with practice, to become linked; this leads to more coherent and goaldirected interactions with social and physical partners, even under conditions of greater challenge
and demand (Fonagy et al., 2007).
At the same time, the growth of representational capacities and working memory also shape
the development of the emotional system, which comes to include the “other-conscious,” or
socially-communicated, emotions of pride, shame, and guilt. These new self-conscious emotions,
coupled with close relationships and the desire to please attachment figures, ushers in the
development of the “extrinsic” motivation system, which allows toddlers to comply to requests
from caregivers to inhibit the expression of pre-potent behaviors and emotions or to show behaviors
or emotions which they do not spontaneously wish to perform (Kochanska, Coy, & Murray, 2001).
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The pre-potent bottom-up emotional action tendencies generated locally by the intrinsic motivation
system and marked by emotions can now begin to defer to top-down cognitively-represented goals
from the extrinsic motivational system, for which no action readiness is spontaneously available.
Toddlers’ capacities to comply seem to depend, not only on the quality of the relationship with the
caregiver, but also on the strength and direction of the pre-potent action tendencies that are
generated (Kopp, 2009).
Caregiving and the development of self-regulation in coping. To support this transition,
caregivers encourage young children’s use of language to express their distress and requests (“use
your words”), even under increasingly stressful conditions, and begin to regulate young children’s
action, based not only on children’s desires, but also on cultural norms and moral principles for
appropriate behavior (Power, 2004; Tolan & Grant, 2009). The shift from heteronomous regulation
(or compliance, guided by caregivers) toward autonomous regulation (or self-regulation, guided by
the young child’s core self), not only allows the child to begin to become the agent of his or her
own coping but also requires the child to more actively and intentionally coordinate his or her
coping efforts with the needs and desires of social partners (Eisenberg, Fabes, & Murphy 1996;
Eisenberg, Valiente, & Sulik, 2009). This shift has been studied most thoroughly in research on the
development of compliance, which focuses on parental demands and norms (Kopp, 2009) and the
development of conscience (Kochanska, Forman, Aksan, & Dunbar, 2005), which folds moral
principles and priorities into coping.
The kinds of scaffolding that seem to be most effective in promoting compliance, the
internalization of conscience, and autonomous regulation more generally, include several elements
that create “coping episodes” for young children (Kopp, 2009). First, parents provide consistent
demands for appropriate behavior, focusing almost exclusively on insistence about only a very
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small number of “true moral rules,” such as honesty, treating the self and others with kindness and
respect, and taking responsibility for one’s mistakes and messes. Violations of these principles
create “interpersonal problems” for young children with their parents, preschool teachers, or peers.
In helping the child solve these problems, one key is warm and caring structure provided by trusted
adults, who offer alternative appropriate means, both verbal and nonverbal, for children to express
their true feelings and desires. Especially important, in promoting both compliance and eventual
internalization, are induction strategies that support autonomy by acknowledging children’s
genuine goals and feelings, combined with explanations of the relevance and importance of prosocial actions to children’s own goals (Hoffman, 1994). Such inductions allow children to
internalize alternative means of expressing feelings and regulating actions under stressful
conditions.
Executive functions, problem solving, and coping. The study of conscious control, or
executive functioning, suggests that the emergence of such voluntary self-regulation is the product
of neurological and cognitive developments that increasingly allow children to create and resolve
conflicts in action regulation (Diamond, 2013; Zelazo, Muller, Frye, & Marcovitch, 2003).
Previously, potential conflicts were resolved automatically by prioritizing pre-potent habitual
responses generated by the intrinsic motivation and emotion subsystems. With increases in working
memory and attention, and improved awareness of one’s goals and intentions, children are able to
represent conflicting sources of regulation—such as two rules for behavior, a bottom-up urge and a
top-down goal, or a habit and a current alternative intention (Nigg, 2006; Pennington & Ozonoff,
1996). Executive functions allow young children to internally mediate these conflicts, for example,
to begin to inhibit pre-potent responses and to show alternative non-dominant responses, or to shift
the guides for their action regulation from one set of rules or tasks to another (Best & Miller, 2010;
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Diamond, 2013; Nigg, 2006).
The internalization of pro-social strategies, concern for others, and moral rules for use in
regulating action are combined with the continued development of the capacity to search for
effective means to reach desired goals, or problem-solving. Although it has its origins in
contingency detection and tertiary circular reactions during infancy, intentional problem-solving as
a cognitive and social process comes into its own during early childhood (Keen, 2011). If handled
sensitively, “stressful” transactions with uncooperative peers and materials (likes blocks, games,
sports, or artwork) can become laboratories for developing problem-solving skills—allowing young
children, with the help of adults and peers, to identify and generate ideas for new means or
strategies, imagine their consequences, select from alternatives, try them out, and note their actual
effectiveness (Berg & Strough, 2010).
Individual coping as a supplement to interpersonal coping. One of the most important
reorganizations of the coping system takes place with the emergence of volitional action regulation
during early childhood. By lifting regulation off of emotions and integrating emotions with volition,
coping becomes less reactive, that is, less a product of local conditions and implicit motives, and
more flexible - it becomes more open to top-down influences from both social partners and internal
sources. The primary shift during this developmental period is from interpersonal to intrapersonal
coping in that the coping packages (with their appraisals differentiated by causes and emotions, and
their action repertoires for satisfying motives and soothing distress) that were co-produced by the
child and the caregiver are now increasingly handed over to the child, and “independent” coping
becomes the young child’s developmental task, while scaffolding from adults (e.g., caregivers and
preschool teachers) creates a “zone of proximal development.” For some theorists, who define
coping as comprising only conscious and volitional efforts (e.g., Compas et al., 2001), the
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development of voluntary action regulation marks the beginning of coping proper.
Such a shift requires the child to re-route the interpersonal appeals that they previously
directed to caregivers (with their emotional expressions of problems and desires), so that they are
directed intrapersonally for satisfaction, that is, at their own newly emerging sense of self; and to
use the information contained in emotions and language that was formerly used to guide the actions
of caregivers toward meeting the child’s needs, so that it is now employed to guide their own
actions in meeting their own needs (Holodynski & Friedlmeier, 2007). Hence, the coping repertoire
that was previously enacted between the child and the caregiver, eventually comes to be
reconstructed in the domain of the child’s own voluntary actions.
It is important to make clear, however, that intrapersonal or individual coping does not
replace interpersonal coping; it supplements it. Young children still have access to interpersonal
strategies, which they can initiate through support-, proximity-, or help-seeking, and they are likely
to fall back on these strategies when the stressor is severe or the child is highly distressed, tired, or
otherwise impaired (Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2011). At the same time, parents begin to dole
out their direct participation, judging for themselves whether children are capable of coping on their
own with the particular stressor in the current condition (Eisenberg et al., 2009). Caregivers may
encourage a few bouts of independent coping, and if they see that the child is intimidated or
overwhelmed, may add resources or participate in a round of interpersonal coping to see whether
they can tip the child back from a sense of threat and toward the experience of manageable
challenge.
At this age, caregivers continue to shape emotion and coping by protecting young children
from events that are potentially overwhelming, by coaching via direct instruction, and by more
general discussions of problems and emotions (Fabes, Eisenberg, & Bernzweig, 1990; Morales &
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Bridges, 1996; Thompson, 1990; Valiente, Fabes, Eisenberg, & Spinrad, 2004). It seems likely that
the development of all of the constructive ways of coping emerge from interpersonal scaffolding—
not only of pro-social ways of coping (like accommodation and negotiation), but also ones that are
not so obviously social, like strategizing and self-soothing, which may emerge from joint problemsolving and the coaching of emotion regulation.
Normative Development of Coping during Middle Childhood: Reflective Coping
A major reorganization in the coping system takes place sometime during the “5-to-7 shift”
(Sameroff & Haith, 1996), when children begin to internalize the mental means of regulation and
slowly become able to regulate their actions using “reflective consciousness.” As noted by many
coping theorists (e.g., Aldwin, 2007, Aldwin, Skinner, Zimmer-Gembeck, & Taylor, 2011; Compas
et al, 2001; Murphy & Moriarity, 1976; Skinner & Edge, 1998a; Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck,
2007, 2009), this “cognitive revolution” ushers in a widely expanded repertoire of coping because it
allows children to reconstruct and deploy mental forms of all the ways of coping that they have
previously used on the plane of direct action. For example, instrumental action is supplemented by
cognitive problem-solving, behavioral distraction by mental distraction, physical escape by mental
withdrawal, physical soothing by cognitive emotion regulation, and so on.
Regulatory development and coping, and construction from intrapersonal coping. The
capacity for voluntary coping that emerged in toddlerhood and improves up until school entry
coincides with advances and increasing efficiencies in attentional skills and shifting of attention, the
capacity to inhibit responses, effortful control, and emotion regulation (Fan, Fossella, Sommer, Wu
& Posner, 2003; Rueda & Rothbart, 2009). Children also exhibit great improvements in working
memory by age 4 and this continues to improve up until age 7 (Luciana & Nelson, 1998). Children
become able to delay gratification for longer and display decreases in impulsivity (Jones, Rothbart,
61
& Posner, 2003; Prencipe & Zelazo, 2005). Children who are better at response inhibition by the
age of 4 are better able to focus and shift their attention, and are less impulsive and prone to
frustration (Gerardi, Rothbart, Posner, & Kelper, 1996; Zelazo, Reznick, & Pinon, 1995). All of
these capacities serve them well when coping with stress.
Thus, children show major advances in coping and self-regulation between the ages of 3 and
6, and all of these advances seem to be occurring at the same time as maturation is progressing in
the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) network (Geidd et al., 2004; Gogtay et al., 2004).
Moreover, the average volume of brain activation is reduced in adults compared to children (Casey,
Jones, & Somerville, 2011), which suggests that brain areas involved in executive functions are
becoming more focal and efficient, at the same time as children increasingly recruit more
sophisticated prefrontal systems of the brain for self-regulation (Casey et al., 2011; Luna et al.,
2001; Luna & Sweeney, 2004; Rubia et al., 2000).
The brain seems to be moving toward specialization and reduction in the time needed to
process information and respond. Some researchers refer to this as “fractionating” to reflect the
differentiated and distributed functioning seen in the adult brain (Baddeley, 1998; Tsujimoto,
2008). Therefore, development may mean an increasing fractionation of brain function from early
childhood to early adulthood in which multiple higher level brain processes draw on common areas
of functioning and covary with each other before the age of about 7, but these same processes
become fractionated beginning at about age 7 or 8. This change is also apparent in neural
organization, in that functions move from diffuse to more focal and fine-tuned for performance
(Casey, Tottenham, Liston, & Durston, 2005; Durston et al., 2006).
The reconstruction of the coping repertoire on the mental plane is accomplished through a
long process of internalization and transformation of the previously enacted coping system. This
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process is made easier if earlier bottom-up action tendencies are coherent and genuinely
informative about children’s authentic feelings, motives, and neurophysiological stress reactions;
and developing top-down self-systems for regulating action tendencies are sturdy and constructive,
that is, undergirded by high levels of trust (and so are socially cooperative), mastery (and so are
optimistic), and self-determination (and so are agentic).
Because coping, by definition, involves actions in potentially threatening situations of
personal relevance, the system of direct coping actions is likely reconstructed on the
representational plane as emotion-laden “hot” cognition. The most obvious features to be
internalized are language components: of stress reactions (e.g., distress labels), appraisals (e.g.,
emotion and problem labels), and responses (e.g., sequences of actions). Emotionally expressive
signs and emotion experiences are also internalized, which then become capable of triggering
emotional reactions in the absence of direct physiological stimulation (Holodynski & Friedlmeier,
2006). Also internalized are attention and motivation—in which children come to represent the
priorities and goals that matter to them (Derryberry, Reed, & Pilkenton-Taylor, 2003; Rueda &
Rothbart, 2009), which can then serve to direct focused attention as well as to energize engagement
and withdrawal action tendencies (Block & Block, 1980; Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999).
Advantages of mental means of coping. The internalization of the coping action system
allows the child to reconstruct in his or her imagination, sequences of potential coping responses,
and to play out, not only their likely success in accomplishing the child’s goals during stressful
transactions, but also their likely motivational, emotional, and social costs and benefits. The
capacity to conduct such mental coping exercises confers many advantages: Children can conserve
energetic resources that would be expended (and avoid the risks that would be incurred) if they
were to try out these options on the plane of action. Mental constructions also allow for a
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qualitative shift in flexibility, as a wider variety of possibilities can be considered, including novel
sequences that have not yet been directly enacted on the ground.
From the perspective of action regulation, the biggest improvement during this
developmental period is the capacity to coordinate all the features of coping on the same level,
namely, the cognitive level (see Derryberry & Tucker, 2006 for a similar description of selfregulation and self-organization). Reconstructions of bottom-up physiological reactions, emotions,
attentional priorities, and intrinsic motivations, along with top-down recommendations from
extrinsic motivations, relationship considerations, cultural and social norms, and moral principles—
can now all be brought together to the same “table” of hot cognitive representations, to be
coordinated through active and reflective mental “discussion,” making explicit the conflicts and
trade-offs that were previously dealt with through competing action tendencies or regulation by
others. These conflicts, which both create stress and are exacerbated by stress, can be consciously
recognized and thoughtfully negotiated.
“Mental” participation of social partners. Such internal negotiations are made easier by
caregivers who are sympathetic to the dilemmas children face in stressful situations and are willing
to continue coaching and cooperating with their attempts to work them out (Denham, 1998;
Eisenberg et al., 1998; Gross & Thompson, 2007; Kliewer et al., 1996; Neitzel & Stright, 2003).
Adults’ direct participation in coping episodes slowly recedes across middle childhood, as their
active participation is successively replaced with “mental participation” through cognitivelymediated reflective means, such as discussions, reminders, encouragement, suggestions, and
structures (e.g., routines, rules, and rituals).
If parents are able to continue providing high levels of warmth and caring, structure, and
autonomy support as children practice dealing with conflicts, dilemmas, obstacles, and problems,
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out of these stressful situations can emerge the autonomous regulation of action, in which children
internalize and integrate moral rules and socio-cultural demands with their true selves (Mesquita &
Albert, 2007; Ryan, 1992), and so become able to use these guides to organize their action even in
the absence of external monitors. It is important to note that, even though children are potentially
capable of autonomous self-regulation, it can still be difficult to enact under stressful conditions, for
example, in conditions of “temptation,” when strong pre-potent conflicting action tendencies are
activated (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999).
Role of coping attempts and failures. The capacity to mentally coordinate and integrate
information from all coping subsystems represents a major shift in the operation of the coping
system itself. And it is through repeated attempts to accomplish this mental coordination, with the
cooperation of social partners, that these skills emerge, are practiced and consolidated, and
eventually can be reliably executed under conditions of increasing stress, that is, under conditions
of increasing internal distress and external pressure. Continuing to be extremely important during
this phase are the reactions of adults (e.g., parents, teachers, coaches) to children’s failures and
breakdowns, which are key experiences in the development of resilient “mindsets” (Dweck, 2006).
Children need practice with mistakes and failures in order to learn how to tolerate and benefit from
the negative emotions mistakes generate, to view failures constructively, to engage fruitfully
despite anxiety, frustration, or shame, to take responsibility for mistakes and repair them, and to
figure out how to help negative emotions dissipate.
Mental means supplement the coping repertoire and sturdy coping systems. These new
mental means of emotion regulation and problem-solving, although built on direct coping actions,
do not replace them. Children still have access to previous behavioral forms of coping, which they
are likely to fall back on when stress or distress is high, and when mental means are too difficult to
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execute or are not as effective as action means. During middle childhood, the child’s mental coping
repertoire is not only expanded and differentiated, but also coordinated and integrated with the
previous repertoire of action, interpersonal, and automatic strategies. Hence, a major developmental
task during middle childhood is to learn how to flexibly deploy this repertoire over the course of a
coping episode-- based on the severity of the stressor, the changing internal conditions of the child,
and the actual effectiveness of the previous sequence of strategies in dealing with the stressor and
its emotional concomitants (for reviews see Decker, 2006; Eisenberg et al., 1997; Fields & Prinz,
1997; Losoya et al., 1998; Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2011).
Middle childhood, with its pragmatic cognition and well-developed self-systems, is a
developmental phase during which coping is often described as “sturdy,” especially if coping
systems are built on constructive action tendencies, guided by (1) a sense of control and
competence that are calibrated to actual performance in different domains and that encourage
challenge appraisals and mastery responses to problems and obstacles; (2) feelings of security and
relatedness that are calibrated to the pro-social actions of the self and the actual trustworthiness of
different social partners—these internal working models encourage both self-reliance in action and
emotion regulation along with appropriate support-seeking as needed to re-stabilize independent
coping; and (3) feelings of self-determination and autonomy that are calibrated to the true self, and
that encourage both accommodation to reasonable demands and self-assertive cooperative
negotiation when one’s own needs are not met by current conditions. This “sturdy” coping system
may be one reason why middle childhood is seen as a particularly resilient period—during which
children can withstand and sometimes even flourish under conditions of adversity (Masten, 2001).
Normative Development of Coping during Adolescence: Pro-Active Coping
66
By adolescence, much of the brain structure and circuitry that allow for accurate stress
appraisals and sophisticated coping responses are in place, but there are developmental changes in
both the bottom-up and top-down processes that shape stress and coping during this age period. The
hormones of puberty seem to re-open the underlying stress reactivity systems governed by the SAM
and HPA axis so that they may become increasingly susceptible to influence from external
stressors. The period of hypo-responsivity of these systems, which started in infancy, comes to an
end, and a period of more intense emotional and motivational activation of the “bottom-up”
amygdala-regulated reactivity systems commences (Dahl, 2004; Gunnar & Quevado, 2007; Lewis
& Todd, 2007; Spear, 2003).
Some theorists characterize this phase as one of imbalance between strong bottom-up
emotionally charged impulses and the still developing prefrontal cortex which cannot yet
effectively regulate these urges (e.g., Casey et al., 2011; Steinberg et al., 2006), making emotion
regulation and the focusing of cognition and attention when affect is high quite challenging for
youth until later in adolescence or even into the mid-20s. This imbalance may also make
adolescents vulnerable, especially under stressful conditions, to the short- and long-term
consequences of highly attractive but highly risky behavior in a variety of domains (Fischhoff,
2005; Michel, Kropp, Eyre, & Halpern-Felsher, 2005; Reyna & Farley, 2006; Steinberg & Morris,
2001; Zimmer-Gembeck & Helfand, 2008; Zimmer-Gembeck, Siebenbruner, & Collins, 2004). In
terms of coping, this provides one explanation for trends suggesting that, after improvements in
most ways of coping across early and middle childhood, during early adolescence, some youth
seem to use more of a variety of maladaptive coping strategies (e.g., aggression, Pelligrini &
Bartini, 2001) and become reluctant to seek help from adults (Newman, Murray, & Lussier, 2001).
Regulatory developments and coping. At the same time, increasingly stronger top-down
67
regulatory capacities are slowly added, as can be seen in the growing efficiency of adolescents’
executive functioning, involved in skills such as inhibitory control, problem-solving, planning,
logic, reasoning ability, and understanding consequences (Best & Miller, 2010; Reyna & Farley,
2006) along with other neurological developments (Spear, 2003). The PFC and the dorsal system of
the brain, including parts of the ACC, have a prolonged course of development continuing into
adolescence, which is consistent with research showing improvements in executive control and
inhibitory skill during this time (Dennis, 2010; Luna, Padmanabhan, & O’Hearn, 2010).
Inhibitory control is relevant for stress and coping because it is critical for inhibiting both
responses to threatening events and negative emotions. By about 13-17 years of age, many
adolescents show adult-like performance on inhibitory control tasks, although their performance
continues to require more effort than from adults (Flair et al., 2007; Luna et al., 2010). Similar to
inhibitory skill, the development of emotional control seems to shows a prolonged pattern of
development, but it has not yet been examined as thoroughly as cognitive control and executive
functioning. Hence, it is not known, for example, whether it is the generation of emotion that
changes with age or the capacity to control or manage it. In the same vein, working memory, a
central component of executive function, operates quite well early in life but also improves
substantially all throughout adolescence (Luna & Sweeney, 2004).
Nevertheless, adolescents’ cognitive capacities have not yet fully matured. Studies of
cognitive control using fMRI have generally identified two critical differences between adolescents
and adults: Adolescents have more difficulties with response inhibition and their working memory
performance may not yet be as fully developed (Luna et al., 2010). Because voluntary planned
behavior depends on advanced cognitive skills, such as retaining goals online via working memory,
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preparing and planning responses, and suppressing task irrelevant responses (response inhibition), it
seems clear that these types of tasks challenge adolescents' coping responses more than adults.
Although development and participation of the PFC may be partial explanations for these
improvements in cognitive control and the increasing efficiency of response inhibition and working
memory, all of these advances in functioning also are supported by the increasing integration of
diverse brain systems outside the PFC, as children get older (Luna et al., 2010). As Luna et al.
(2010) describe,
“Overall results imply that an important part of development is the process of
specializing and segregating circuitries that support task ability, response state, and
default processing. The ability to utilize cognitive control to perform a response, the
ability to retain a response state, and to suppress internal thoughts improves with
development, as the circuits supporting these distinct processes become independent.
These suggest age-related improvements in white matter connectivity but also
functional integration as seen in spontaneous waves of synchronized activity (Fair et
al., 2008; Uhlhaas et al., 2009). (p. 109)
Meta-cognition and coping. These developing executive functions and the cognitive
abilities of formal operations should result in a major reorganization of the coping system, brought
about by the emergence during adolescence of meta-cognitive capacities, that is, the capacity to
think about one’s own thinking and cognitive activities (see Compas et al., 2001 for a review; also
see Frydenberg, 1997; Kuhn & Franklin, 2006; Seiffge-Krenke, 1995). Meta-cognitive capacities
supplement the mental system of coping that was internalized during middle childhood, by
integrating it with the adolescents’ capacity to reflect on, evaluate, critique, and improve their own
coping.
This opens the way for increasing and intentional self-regulation of all the coping families,
such as problem-solving (as seen, for example, in increasingly self-regulated learning), reflective
emotion regulation, and the exercise of volition through identified self-regulation (Band & Weisz,
1990). All of these capacities combine to enable more pro-active coping (Aspinwall & Taylor,
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1997), in which regulation under stress comes to include, not only a concern for current internal
action tendencies and external opportunities, but also future, long-term considerations. Coping
responses that seem attractive in the short-term, come to be informed by graphic imaginations of
the future, such as the possibility of being physically or psychologically hurt, of getting caught, of
losing valued outcomes, relationships, and even one’s own self-evaluations.
As with mental means of regulation, these newly developing meta-cognitive capacities
allow the adolescent to differentiate and consider any aspect of the coping system, including
appraisals, emotions, desires, action tendencies, and regulatory strategies. For example, metacognition allows adolescents to reflect on their interpretations of complex emotional states, their
strategies for regulating them, and their potential to enact alternative strategies that might be more
constructive. Moreover, “meta-emotions” allow adolescents to have emotional reactions to their
emotional reactions, for example, feeling embarrassed about being afraid. Adolescents’ increasing
capacities for reflection, although generally positive, may also help to explain the increases seen
during this age and in ways of coping focused on self-criticism and rumination and in reluctance to
seek support (Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2011): The same capacities that allow adolescents to
reflect on their emotions, allow them to criticize their emotions; the same capacities that allow
adolescents to plan for the future, make them more vulnerable to worrying about the future; and the
same capacities that allow adolescents to recognize they need help, can also trigger concern that
others may lose respect for them if they seek help.
Identity development and coping. Adolescent meta-cognitive capacities may also exert an
influence on the nature of the self that is participating in regulation, as suggested by the fact that a
major task of adolescence and young adulthood is identity development (Kroger, 2007; Meeus,
2011). The facets of the self that were differentiated by domain and calibrated to actual
70
performance during middle childhood can now be thought of as parts of a whole that can be
compared to each other and to the criteria of social norms and demands, with evaluative
consequences for the self. To the extent that, in the process of identity construction, these disparate
parts can successfully be integrated with each other, with the genuine self, and with the reflected
regard of trusted others, a positive and coherent sense of self and identity can be achieved (Harter,
2012), that allows identified and autonomous self-regulation to become the dominant mode of
coordinating bottom-up action tendencies and top-down considerations, even under increasingly
higher levels of temptation and stress.
Coping flexibility, attunement and the importance of social partners. These emerging
meta-cognitive capacities may also help to explain the increases in coping flexibility that are seen
during this developmental phase (Babb, Levine, & Arseneault, 2010), which is perhaps most
noticeable in adolescent support-seeking (Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2011). Adolescents
become more differentiated and flexible about the kinds of support they request and the person to
whom they turn for these social resources, seeking out parents, friends, teachers, or other adults or
peers, and asking for comfort, distraction, advice, or instrumental help, depending on the local
conditions: the domain and specific problem, the social partner’s authority over the situation, and
the kind of supports they need. With this new level of representation, it seems that the entire
repertoire of previous forms of interpersonal coping can be integrated into the intrapersonal
repertoire of “support seeking,” eventually enabling youth to initiate, access, and guide the
deployment of available social resources, while coordinating them with the adolescent’s own selfreliance and independent coping.
This same pattern, in which coping strategies become more differentiated and more
selectively applied and coordinated with local internal and external conditions, can also be seen in
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other families of coping—even in those more focused on independent or cognitive coping. For
example, youth are increasingly likely to use problem-solving in response to stressors which they
perceive as controllable (e.g., academic problems) whereas they are more likely to use
accommodation or distraction strategies when dealing with problems that are uncontrollable (e.g.,
medical issues or parental problems) (Compas et al., 1991; Zimmer-Gembeck et al., 2011). This
suggests that, although the repertoire of coping strategies is still expanding at this age, coping can
also become less flexible in its execution during adolescence as youth discern the most effective
strategies for dealing with common problems, and begin to deploy them more efficiently and with
less effort.
Throughout adolescence, social partners continue to be crucial to the development of
adaptive coping systems. Close and caring parental, family, and peer relationships along with
meaningful cultural roles and activities (e.g., after-school programs, sports teams, youth groups)
provide the external regulatory structures needed to keep adolescents safe during this risky period
while their own coping capacities are still developing. Judicious support from caring adults
(parents, teachers, extended family, etc.) is central, in which these grown-ups carefully monitor
adolescents’ “adventures in coping” (even when adolescents are not keen on having their activities
monitored), while remaining sympathetically available to be called on as a back-up system for
whatever advice and comfort might be requested. Since adolescents’ willingness to reveal their
problems and failures to adults is a sensitive proposition at this age, the past dyadic history of
communication, comfort, and joint interpersonal coping is critical in determining whether an
adolescent will bring their current coping concerns to an adult when the adolescent is feeling
overwhelmed.
Reflection and reappraisal. The adolescent’s growing capacity to reflect on the entire
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coping system expands their potential to view and utilize coping episodes, whether they are
“successes” or “failures,” as increasingly valuable opportunities for learning. Reappraisal processes
following mistakes and failures, which were practiced in cooperation with adults during middle
childhood, now become highly inferential and can be re-constructed on the plane of the
adolescent’s own reflective coping system, providing internal meta-regulatory and metamotivational “commentary” during each phase. Supportive adults, through caring, coaching, and
modeling, can help youth cultivate compassion for the fallibility of the self and others in stressful
circumstances, while also holding the self and others accountable for their actions, thus allowing
adolescents to increasingly take ownership for the ways they deal with challenges and setbacks, that
is, for their own coping. These experiences can lead adolescents to supplement their coping
repertoires with “pro-active” or “antecedent” regulation or coping (Aspinwall & Taylor, 1997;
Gross, 1998; Gross & Thompson, 2007), in which they make intentional decisions about the states
or situations they let themselves get into, to make sure that their regulatory and coping capacities
allow them to create the outcomes that they desire.
Conclusion
At each level, ways of coping are supplemented with new means of reactivity and
regulation. Strategies that were initially neurophysiological and external at birth, become
interpersonal during infancy and toddlerhood, then individual or intrapersonal during early
childhood, eventually to be reconstructed at the reflective level during middle childhood, and
finally transformed into meta-cognitive proactive strategies during adolescence and emerging
adulthood. At each age, previous means of coping are differentiated and integrated with new
modes, supplementing them and providing a wider repertoire that can be deployed more
intentionally and flexibly, in concert with changing internal and external conditions and resources.
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Taken together, these developmental shifts can be seen as creating a system that gets better
and better at detecting and responding to threats and problems, eventually realizing its full
developmental potential. As we tried to make clear in our earlier work (Skinner & ZimmerGembeck, 2007),
These developmental potentials depict a system that can increasingly monitor and
appropriately appraise more (current and future) demands using its own and other’s
“radar;” maintain composure under higher levels of appraised threat with more
capacity to withstand multiple demands and better “fallbacks”; respond increasingly
in measured socially competent ways that reflect integration of ongoing emotional,
attentional, and motivational reactions; more flexibly adjust actions to meet
changing environmental demands without losing sight of genuine priorities; recover
more quickly from setbacks; and at the same time take more away from stressful
encounters, learning how to prevent and deal with future challenges and how to
deploy coping in line with future goals (p. 136).
Normative Development of Coping and Developmental Psychopathology
An understanding of the normative re-organizations of the coping system is helpful to
researchers interested in developmental psychopathology for multiple inter-related reasons
(Cicchetti & Toth, 2009; Egeland, 2007; Rutter, 2005; Sroufe, 2007). Most importantly, it allows
researchers and interventionists to fully appreciate the complexity of the coping system and the
many essential elements orchestrated and consolidated within it. From a developmental perspective,
appraisals are not simply fleeting perceptions and ways of coping are not simply lists of strategies;
appraisals reflect “apparent reality” (Fridja, 1987) and ways of coping reflect basic configurations
that infants, children, and adolescents have adopted as they organize their actions to deal with
demands in the environments in which they are developing (Bowlby, 1969/1973; Garmezy &
Rutter, 1983; White, 1974).
A normative description provides a basic yardstick for determining whether children and
adolescents of all different ages are “on-track” in the development of their coping resources and
strategies, that is, whether they seem to be accomplishing the age-graded developmental tasks that
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would serve the dual purpose of allowing them to deal effectively with current demands and
stressors as well as providing a foundation that prepares them to deal with subsequent challenges
successfully. It also allows interventionists to calibrate their prevention and remediation efforts to
target the attitudes and skills that are most central to children at their current developmental levels,
as well as those they will need to be successful at subsequent ages.
Explanatory theories and research depict the many factors that allow the healthy
development of the coping system to proceed, and so allow researchers and interventionists to
identify positive pathways through which children and adolescents can obtain robust tools for
dealing constructively with stress. They also allow researchers to identify children and adolescents
who may benefit most from interventions, because a range of problems in the subsystems that
underlie or scaffold coping may put children at risk for the development of psychological and
behavioral difficulties. Prevention and remediation efforts could rely on explanatory research to
help locate likely intervention levers that would allow the systems that support the healthy
development of coping to be repaired or optimized.
At the broadest level, developmental conceptualizations have created much overlap between
the study of coping and the study of the development of psychopathology and resilience.
Approaches that frame coping as part of multi-level integrative systems designed to detect and
respond to threats and challenges have identified subsystems that extend from neurophysiology to
social context and culture. Such perspectives on the development of coping create broad conceptual
overlap with the approaches that have guided the study of developmental psychopathology
(Cicchetti & Toth, 2009) and resilience (Compas, 2004; Masten, 2007) over the last five decades
(Luthar, 2006). All these traditions consider their phenomena to extend from the biological
(genetic, neurophysiological) through the behavioral to the psychological, social, and cultural levels
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of analysis (Cicchetti & Curtis, 2007). Definitions of coping as “reactivity and regulation under
stress” link coping to the burgeoning research on regulation of the many processes (e.g., emotion,
attention, behavior, motivation) that are activated during stressful encounters, and that have been
found to be implicated in the development of psychopathology (Cicchetti & Toth, 2009).
To understand coping-- and especially its development-- it is necessary to understand the
multiple systems that give rise to it and how they work together over time. This is a central tenet of
an integrative multi-level approach. The assertion that coping actions are diagnostic of the state of
the entire “coping system,” which includes psychological and social stressors, demands, resources,
and their underlying neurophysiological and over-arching social contexts, suggests that during
transactions with stress children and adolescents can and do move through successive (re)appraisals
of challenge, threat, and loss as well as through a repertoire of adaptive and maladaptive ways of
coping. Hence, when current developmental researchers refer to the “coping system,” they typically
view coping actions as outward manifestations of an orchestra of biopsychosocial forces, very
similar to the ways resilience researchers refer to their phenomena, mutatis mutandis. In other
words, coping is part of an open and dynamic system, and as such, can be considered part of the
same set of (sub)systems that contribute to (and are reciprocally shaped by) developing
psychopathology and resilience (Marshall, 2013).
Developmental Systems Perspectives:
Coping as Part of Developmental Cascades toward Psychopathology and Resilience
A description of normative age-graded reorganizations of the coping system provides an
outline of a set of broad and healthy pathways that lead toward constructive and cooperative
repertoires for detecting, dealing with, and learning from challenges, threats, and losses. The
identification of the many subsystems that work together to give rise to coping actions, as depicted
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in Figure 4, makes it clear that optimal development and the avoidance of psychopathology entail a
large number of essential ingredients, which typically serve as reciprocally “self-righting,” in that
they work together to assist the organism towards pathways that channel growth in positive
directions. For example, the newborn’s intact neurophysiological and communication subsystems,
the caregiver’s sensitive responsiveness, and their emerging joint secure attachment, co-create a
calmer and more stable infant stress reactivity subsystem that is easier to soothe and also provides
clearer communication to the caregiver, which in turn informs and sustains sensitive responsive
caregiving and lays down implicit infant learning that supports benign appraisals of ambiguous
interactions and triggers constructive coping through focused exploration and proximity seeking.
At the same time, if any of these essential ingredients is missing or incapacitated, it can pose
a risk for children and adolescents, nudging them toward maladaptive coping and psychopathology.
In principle, problems can arise from any of the components described in the previous section on
normative development, but we focus on three factors that play crucial roles in shaping the
architecture of the coping system: (1) differences in the stress and regulatory neurophysiology that
underlie coping, especially as captured in work on temperament; (2) differential histories of
caregiving relationships involved in scaffolding action tendencies and regulatory processes under
stress, especially as examined in work on attachment and parenting; and (3) differential exposure to
stressful life events (especially those that originate in the family) that can undermine or overwhelm
developing coping systems.
To integrate and extend research that has documented links between these factors,
maladaptive coping, and psychopathology, we use several key principles from dynamics systems
perspectives, which have been clearly articulated in approaches to developmental psychopathology
(Cicchetti & Toth, 2009; Masten, 2007; Sroufe, 2009). First, building out from previous research,
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we assume that the connections between coping and psychopathology are bidirectional and cascade
over time. Second, we explore the idea that one way in which risk factors can exert their effects on
psychopathology is by creating perturbations in (neurophysiological, interpersonal, individual,
reflective, or proactive) coping systems. These perturbations should create lasting effects to the
extent that they not only interfere with the concurrent functioning of the coping system, but also
damage the foundations that are under construction and upon which subsequent developments of
the coping system will be built.
Third, we think it unlikely that any one factor (e.g., difficult temperament or avoidant
attachment) would be sufficient by itself to eventuate in a non-normative pathway of maladaptive
coping. In cases where a single factor is “a little off,” protective and compensatory processes can
(and typically do) re-direct divergent pathways back toward healthy development. Instead, risk
accrues when the functioning of one factor is very seriously compromised or is part of a pattern of
cumulative impairment or stress, because these conditions may combine to initiate self-amplifying
patterns of maladaptive (neurophysiological, interpersonal, and individual) coping. Fourth, there are
likely to be multiple pathways from coping to psychopathology, and different families of coping,
rather than being considered global indicators of “good news” or “bad news,” might suggest
different markers of and routes toward different disorders. Finally, episodes of maladaptive coping
may be expected to routinely participate in a wide range of “developmental cascades” (Masten &
Cicchetti, 2010), both signaling and igniting problems in multiple domains-- problems in individual
functioning and in relationships--that cumulatively put children and adolescents at risk for the
development of psychopathology.
In this section, we select illustrations of how extremes in the functioning of each of these
three subsystems (i.e., temperament, attachment and parenting, and family stress) can act as risk
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factors for both coping and psychopathology, and, whenever possible, we focus especially on
longitudinal studies that directly explore this possibility (for more detailed analyses, see Skinner &
Zimmer-Gembeck, in press). In every case, the research base is inconsistent and cannot confirm all
the connections that we posit. In fact, consistent with previous descriptions of the coping literature
as dominated by correlational studies of individual differences in ways of coping, much of the
research connecting coping to temperament, attachment and parenting, and family stress is cast in
this mold, making it challenging to connect the developmental dots.
At the same time, however, when the findings are considered as a whole, we think they are
encouraging and together suggest that it may be useful to further explore the ideas presented in this
section. Specifically, we argue that coping is always a part of the developmental cascades that lead
to psychopathology: The neurophysiological, psychological, and social factors that predispose
children to the eventual development of psychopathology typically result in maladaptive forms of
stress reactivity and coping, and these forms of stress responses in turn set successive chains of
negative events in motion, including the formation of habits, action tendencies, implicit and explicit
self-systems, and (perhaps especially) reactions from social partners that are likely to further
exacerbate behavioral problems and cumulatively potentiate the onset or escalation of disorders.
These ideas are depicted graphically in Figure 5, which shows the cascades that start with
temperament and attachment, are embedded in family stress, and along with parenting, lead to
different forms of psychopathology or resilience.
---------------------------------Insert Figure 5 about here
---------------------------------Temperament, Differential Pathways of Maladaptive Coping, and Psychopathology
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Researchers have suggested multiple ways in which temperament and personality factors
contribute both directly and indirectly to the development of problem behaviors and
psychopathology (e.g., Calkins, 1994; Carver & Connor-Smith, 2010; Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner,
2003; Connor-Smith & Flachsbart, 2007; Derryberry et al. 2003; Mezulis, Hyde, & Abramson,
2006; Nigg, 2006; Rothbart, 2011, Table 10.1; Rueda & Rothbart, 2009; Watson, Kotov, & Gamez,
2006). For example, research indicates that children who have an easy temperament are less prone
to develop both internalizing (e.g., depression and anxiety) and externalizing problems (e.g.,
behavioural problems; Jaffee, Caspi, Moffitt, Polo-Tom, & Taylor, 2007), and children with
temperaments characterized as high in negative reactivity or as very inhibited may be at risk for
anxiety and other disorders (Belsky & Pluess, 2009; Eisenberg et al., 1997; McClure & Pine, 2006).
This body of research is substantial and complex, and has been very useful for identifying
individual differences in the kinds of physiologically-based temperamental characteristics that may
tip a child toward or away from developmental pathways marked by maladaptation or health and
resilience. Yet, it may also be useful to supplement this growing body of research, by explicitly
considering the differential patterns of stress reactivity and coping that stem from such
temperamental predispositions, in order to understand when, how, and why temperament provokes
risk or provides protection from psychopathology.
Temperamental patterns as differentially-tuned primitive coping systems. In principle,
the coping systems of all newborns are built on their own individual temperaments, which refer to
heritably-based neurophysiological processes that predispose them to patterns of responding to
environmental challenges and stressors (Rothbart, 2011). Most interesting from a coping
perspective are temperamental classifications that focus on reactivity and regulation (Derryberry et
al., 2003; Rothbart, 2011; Rueda & Rothbart, 2009; Shannon, Beauchaine, Brenner, Neuhaus, &
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Gatzke-Kopp, 2007). In this context, “reactivity” is closely connected to stress reactivity, in that it
refers to how easily the appetitive/approach and the defensive/ inhibitory systems can be triggered
by external and internal stimuli; and “regulation” has close ties to action regulation, in that it refers
to how effective the executive attention system is in facilitating volitional control of emotional,
motor, and attentional reactivity (Rueda & Rothbart, 2009).
As pointed out by Derryberry et al., “the appetitive and defensive systems can be viewed as
relatively primitive ‘coping’ systems. The defensive system is designed to help the person cope
with dangerous situations where it is crucial to recognize the threat, inhibit inappropriate responses,
and find a source of safety. In contrast, the appetitive system is designed to help the person attain
positive outcomes in appetitive contexts, where it is crucial to avoid or overcome obstacles in order
to obtain the reward” (2003, p. 1052). Individual differences in newborns’ stress responses and
regulation (i.e., coping) are shaped by the balance among these three neurophysiological systems,
namely, the appetitive, defensive, and executive attention systems. The appetitive and defensive
systems are generally antagonistic in their functioning, so that over-activation of one system can be
modulated by the activation of the other. Moreover, over- or under-activation of the appetitive or
defensive systems can be compensated for by the executive attention system, which, if capable
enough, can modulate the effects of the other two systems.
Research on temperament and coping. A growing body of research has focused on direct
associations between coping and temperament or personality during childhood and adolescence by
examining whether particular coping responses are more or less common in children and
adolescents with particular temperamental characteristics or personality traits, such as negative
emotionality, neuroticism, effortful control, or introversion (Markovic, Rose-Krasnor, & Coplan,
2013). Several of these studies show, for example, that an “easy” temperament is associated with
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constructive ways of coping like problem-solving and support seeking (Zimmer-Gembeck et al.,
2011) and with resilience (Luthar, 2006; Werner, 1993). Taken together with research on the links
between temperament and psychopathology, such studies provide hints about how temperament
might shape coping under conditions of stress.
Most interesting are studies that have begun to more directly investigate these processes by
focusing on whether coping serves as a moderator or mediator in the connections between
temperament and psychopathology. Moderation has been found in studies testing whether
temperamental traits are more relevant to the development of symptoms of depression or anxiety
(or other forms of psychopathology) depending on the presence or absence of certain coping
responses (Seiffge-Krenke, 2011; Sugimura, Rudolph, & Agoston, 2013). In general, these studies
focus almost exclusively on the more risk-producing temperamental traits, such as negative
emotionality, and yield patterns of findings suggesting that adaptive forms of coping (such as
reliance on primary control strategies when stressors are controllable, and on secondary control or
accommodative coping when they are not), can reduce the elevated or increasing levels of
internalizing and externalizing symptoms that children or adolescents with these temperamental
characteristics would otherwise be likely to experience over time. Mediation has been found in
studies testing models in which coping acted as a conduit of the impact of particular temperament
or personality traits on symptoms or healthy outcomes (Compas, Connor-Smith, & Jaser, 2004;
Mezulis, Simonson, McCauley, & Vander Stoep, 2011; Miller et al., 2009; Van De Ven & Engels,
2011). For example, in one longitudinal study of preadolescents, avoidant coping mediated the
impact of temperamental impulsivity on heightened internalizing problems. Thus, preadolescents
who were more impulsive used more avoidant coping, which in turn was related to their increasing
internalizing symptoms over 1-year (Thompson et al., 2014). Some studies have examined both
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moderation and mediation, showing that they are not mutually exclusive; they can co-occur even
when the same coping constructs, temperamental traits, and adjustment outcomes are examined
(Miller et al., 2009).
“Easy” and “difficult temperaments. When the research on temperament is filtered
through the lens of developmental perspectives on coping, it suggests that temperamental
characteristics of newborns can be thought of as neurophysiological “set-points” for the
development of their coping systems, and so provide early foundations that start to channel infants’
coping down differential pathways. The healthy development of coping should be facilitated by an
“easy” temperament, which involves moderate responsiveness of the appetitive and defensive
systems along with the capacity to flexibly modulate emotion and action using attentional and
behavioral processes (Rothbart, 2011). Moderate stress reactivity comprises a threat detection
system that is calibrated appropriately to external demands and conditions, both in approach and
defense, along with the capacity to flexibly modulate reactions when conditions improve, allowing
rapid recovery from stress. From the first days of life, this kind of temperament should make it
easier for newborns to participate in effective interpersonal coping: Distress signals are moderate
and informative, and so more easily converted into directed distress communications, and infants
are more easily satisfied and soothed by caregivers’ coping efforts on their behalf (Rothbart, 2011).
More “difficult” temperaments, which involve high reactivity and poor regulation, should
be a liability in the healthy development of the coping system (see Rothbart, 2011; Rothbart,
Posner, & Kieras, 2006). The kinds of problems presented to the developing coping system and
their likely effects on subsequent patterns of coping should differ depending on whether overreactivity originates in the defensive/inhibitory or in the appetitive/approach system. In either case,
a temperamental profile would be more “extreme” to the extent that one of the systems is set very
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high, while at the same time the other sub-systems that would typically balance it out (namely, the
opposing subsystem and the executive attention system) are set very low. Such extreme
temperaments create challenges for both infant and caregiver in establishing a calm well-calibrated
and modulated neurophysiological coping system as well as co-constructing a positive interpersonal
coping system. Based on their low levels of effortful control, such temperamental patterns may also
interfere with the shift toward voluntary self-regulated coping and the subsequent systems that
build on this (i.e., the reflective and pro-active coping systems).
Inhibited “fearful” temperaments, the differential development of maladaptive coping,
and internalizing psychopathology. Most research attention has been paid to infants with
inhibited fearful temperaments that likely reflect an over-reactive defensive/inhibitory system (Fox,
Henderson, Marshall, Nichols, & Ghera, 2005; Kagan, 1997; Kemen & Block, 1998). By
definition, newborns high in neurophysiological stress reactivity consistently “over-react” to
external demands and internal states. In response to novel stimulation, they typically show high and
escalating emotional distress, in which attention is captured by the eliciting event (e.g., a noise or
sudden movement). It is as if one of the key underlying systems upon which subsequent coping is
going to be built has a “hair-trigger” that keeps tripping the “alarm” of threat detection constantly
and unnecessarily, making infants’ harsh distress signals less discriminating and therefore harder
for caregivers to read and interpret. Moreover, weak executive attention (or effortful control) makes
it more difficult for infant or caregiver to “turn off” the alarm, through soothing, distraction, or
other means of interpersonal coping. Attention is not easily freed from the distressing stimulus, and
recovery from distress is slow and fragile, with increased risk of triggering additional distressed
emotional reactions.
High levels of stress reactivity combined with low levels of effortful control may put
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inhibited/fearful infants and young children at risk for the development of poor coping. An overreactive defensive/inhibitory system provides a more challenging stress neurophysiology, at the
same time that it makes sensitive responsive caregiving more difficult, thus interfering with the
kind of secure attachment most needed to contribute to the development of a calmer hyporesponsive neurophysiological system (Nachmias et al., 1996). If neither infant nor caregiver is
successful in helping re-calibrate an over-reactive stress neurophysiology, infants and then young
children will have repeated experiences of being overwhelmed by internal and external events.
Such experiences may in turn lead to over-reliance on maladaptive forms of coping, in
which children either try to avoid contact with stressors and/or with their overpowering emotional
and physiological reactions to them, or simply become resigned and submit to overwhelming stress.
Such coping episodes can cumulatively lead young children to construct internal working models
that consolidate the “message” of the over-reactive defensive system, namely, that the world is a
highly dangerous and uncontrollable place with which the self cannot hope to cope effectively.
Over time, such a pattern of maladaptive appraisals and ways of coping might mark one step along
the pathway to social avoidance, learned helplessness, rumination, and subsequent internalizing
problems of depression and anxiety (Derryberry et al., 2003; Keiley, Lofthouse, Bates, Dodge, &
Pettit, 2003; Lengua, Sandler, West, Wolchik, & Curran, 1999; Rothbart, 2011).
Impulsive “fearless” temperaments, the differential development of maladaptive
coping, and externalizing psychopathology. Although exuberance and “surgency” are typically
seen as parts of an “easy” temperament, in some cases, a high appetitive motivational system,
unchecked by the defensive system or by effortful control, can still be considered a risk factor for
the development of maladaptive coping (Derryberry et al., 2003). An “over-active” appetitive
system can lead to forceful and impulsive actions, in which infants and young children fearlessly go
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after whatever it is they want without attending to dangers or to caregiver attempts to redirect their
efforts. Such infants should show a pattern of strong approach tendencies, determined attempts to
overcome whatever they perceive as obstacles, persistence in the face of attempts to distract or redirect them, and high levels of frustration and protest if they are thwarted.
It is easy for caregivers to see these children, whose every goal becomes a fervent demand,
as “strong-willed” or “stubborn,” and they can be difficult social partners with whom to construct
adaptive interpersonal coping systems because compromise, accommodation, or distraction are not
natural action tendencies for them. The lack of discriminating signals about the infant’s priorities
can make it difficult for caregivers to remain sensitively responsive, and exhausted caregivers can
easily decide to just give in and allow the infant to have whatever they want, or become frustrated
by the infant’s demands and refuse to cooperate. Both of these reactions, however, create a less than
optimal interpersonal coping system. When caregivers simply give in, this reinforces children for
their dogged persistence, making them even more tenacious. However, arbitrarily terminating goal
pursuit can also trigger the highly reactive appetitive system, which is focused on overcoming
obstacles, thereby escalating protest, frustration, and externalizing problems (Bates, Pettit, Dodge,
& Ridge, 1998; Shaw et al., 1998).
Both of these caregiver reactions may also contribute to experiences that reinforce implicit
appraisals of the world as one that requires strong and unyielding opposition on the part of the
infant if it is to reach its goals. Such generalized expectancies can, in the face of even mild
stressors, such as being asked to wait or settle for another goal, cumulatively strengthen pre-potent
bottom up action tendencies of explosive reactance or resistance. These may then become
increasingly difficult for caregivers to modulate in interpersonal coping episodes, and can become
very problematic for toddlers and young children to manage with their emerging executive
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functioning skills, as they encounter the developmental task of self-regulation, a task that is a
prerequisite for the construction of the intra-personal coping system. Without these personal and
interpersonal buffers, such an impulsive and strong-willed temperament may contribute to the
development of maladaptive forms of coping, like opposition or perseveration, that are precursors
or markers of emerging externalizing disorders such as aggression (Eisenberg et al., 1996, 2001;
Rothbart et al., 1994).
Temperament and differential pathways of coping and psychopathology. Although
research on the role of coping in the connection between temperamental characteristics and the
development of psychopathology is just beginning, it does seem to suggest at least three important
working hypotheses that could be tested in future studies. First, it seems likely that extreme
neurophysiological temperamental patterns (which combine high levels of reactivity in the
defensive or appetitive subsystem with low levels in both the opposing subsystem and executive
attention) should predispose infants and young children to corresponding differential patterns of
stress reactivity and coping, and such patterns are likely to be exacerbated by experiences of stress.
Second, it seems possible that these strong reactions to stress could be overwhelming to infants and
their caregivers, and that if caregivers cannot gently curb and compensate for them during infancy,
an integrated base of neurophysiological, implicit learning, and relationship problems, as manifest
in patterns of maladaptive coping, may emerge as a result. Third, it also seems possible (based on
studies with older children) that adaptive ways of coping, first laid down in interpersonal
relationships with caregivers, could be one set of strategies that eventually allow young people to
adapt and constructively manage the demands created by their own temperaments. By learning to
“listen” compassionately to one’s own neurophysiological messages about stress reactivity, and to
respond to them with caring suggestions about how to “keep calm and carry on,” infants and their
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caregivers may be able to strengthen the (interpersonal and then intrapersonal) coping and
regulatory systems that can complement and compensate for the potential neurophysiological
liabilities implied by temperamental risk.
Attachment, Differential Pathways of Maladaptive Coping, and Psychopathology
Although most attachment theorists agree that patterns of caregiver-infant interactions and
attachment relationships formed in the earliest years of life will set in motion differential patterns of
coping with stress, empirical research has been slow to directly substantiate these claims. Very few
studies have directly examined secure and insecure attachment relationship classifications as
correlates of coping responses, and those that do tend to focus on older children. For example,
several studies have shown that parental warmth and support, or attachment quality (as measured,
for example, by the Parent and Peer Attachment measure; Armsden & Greenberg, 1987), are
associated with more adaptive coping, such as active problem-solving or support seeking, in
children and adolescents (e.g., Dusek & Danko, 1994; Gaylord-Harden, Taylor, Campbell,
Kesselring, & Grant, 2009; Kliewer et al., 1996). Moreover, in one study of coping and emotion
regulation in 87 children aged 10 to 12, attachment security was associated with less difficulty
recognizing emotions, but it was not associated with more adaptive coping (Brumariu et al., 2012).
Instead, it was disorganized attachment, and not anxious or avoidant attachment, that was
associated with less active coping and more catastrophizing, suggesting that children who have
experienced some of the most significant caregiver-infant relationship failures will register the
greatest impact on their coping (Kobak et al., 2006).
Attachment and the differential development of coping. When viewed through the lens
described in the previous section on the normative development of constructive coping, however, it
becomes clear that the healthy growth of the coping system is predicated upon sensitive responsive
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caregiving and a secure caregiver-infant attachment relationship. Initially, sensitive responsiveness
provides “external” coping on the newborn’s behalf and, cumulatively, it shapes interactions that
allow the caregiver to co-construct a cooperative interpersonal coping system with the infant
(Contreras & Kerns, 2000; Raby et al., 2012; Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, & Collins, 2005). If the
infant’s coping system has to operate without the scaffold of this sensitivity, and insecure
attachment relationships form, infants are required to adapt to caregiving that does not always
protect them or help to soothe them effectively, and to social interactions that are not tuned to their
signals, are not responsive to their expressed needs, and may even add to their distress (Cassidy &
Berlin, 1994; Mikulincer & Florian, 2003; Thompson & Meyer, 2007). It is as if, when infants’
systems are calibrated to insecure or disorganized attachment relationships, the coping system has
received the message that the world is stressful and dangerous, or at least cannot be relied upon to
provide consistent help or comfort when stress and distress occurs (Kobak, Little, Race, & Acosta,
2001).
For infants with highly reactive temperaments, such experiences seem to result in continued
stress reactivity, instead of the more normative establishment of equanimity and hypo-responsivity
seen in infants who are part of secure attachment relationships (Nachmias et al., 1996). When
infants adapt their behavior and coping to these experiences of “maladaptive interpersonal coping”
over the first year, nascent problems can be observed in their physiological and emotional
reactivity, communication, and action tendencies, presaging the development of maladaptive
patterns of coping with stress (Bosquet & Egeland, 2006; Cicchetti & Rogosch, 2009; Diamond &
Aspinwall, 2003; Mikulincer & Florian, 2003). The particular form that problems with coping will
take likely depends on the kinds of responsiveness that is provided, as depicted in different kinds of
insecure or disorganized attachments.
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Anxious-resistant attachment relationships. When the early caregiving environment is
behaviorally inconsistent and emotionally unreliable-- where caregivers are sometimes
forthcoming, but mostly are unresponsive to expressed needs, and where they can be at times
neglectful and at other times intrusive and over-stimulating -- these experiences tend to yield
insecure attachment relationships that are referred to as anxious and/or resistant. When considering
the effects of a history of these experiences on coping, it is as if infants must adapt their systems to
compensate for the lack of a reliable coping partner by trying to amplify their own part in the
exchange, essentially, ramping up the volume—leading to greater emotional reactivity, louder and
more unrestrained signaling of distress that is harder to “turn off,” more indiscriminate proximityseeking, and more wary monitoring of the caregiver’s whereabouts (Nolte, Guiney, Fonagy, Mayes,
& Luyten, 2011).
Moreover, when coping develops within such a shaky interpersonal scaffold, secondary
attachment patterns, called hyperactivating regulatory strategies (Mikulincer & Florian, 2003; Wei,
Heppner, & Mallinckrodt, 2003), may form and emerge as anxious preoccupation about the
availability of support. Thus, the developing organism ends up with little opportunity and energy to
devote to learning constructive strategies for exploring the world or dealing with negative emotions
or problems. Hence, infants (and later toddlers) are likely to over-rely on proximity seeking (which
can become dependency), but since the relief that proximity is supposed to provide is available only
intermittently, their coping is also laced with irritation, frustration, and opposition, directed toward
the caregiver. Because of the lack of contingency between their actions and caregivers’ responses,
they should also increasingly show coping that is fragile, helpless, and easily derailed. Just as with
the over-reactive physiologies characteristic of certain temperaments, this history of caregiving
would be another pathway to stress reactivity that is so high that it becomes challenging (for
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anyone) to successfully (co)regulate it.
Insecure avoidant attachment relationships. A different pattern of coping would be likely
to result from avoidant attachment relationships, in which infants must adapt their coping to
caregivers who reject their expressions of distress, who show some hostility in response to signals
indicating discomfort, and generally appear to resent infants’ bids for attention and help. In these
relationships, infants basically discover that, if they want to maintain proximity with their
caregivers, they must learn to over-regulate (Martins, Soares, Martins, Tereno, & Osorio, 2012):
Their expressions of distress fall away when it becomes clear that they can elicit negative reactions;
they restrain their appeals to the caregiver for regulating their emotions or for instrumental help;
over time, even when they are in situations that elicit physiological stress reactions, they do not
seem to be calmed by the caregiver’s presence.
Infants who experience a history of rejecting or unavailable caregiving must construct a
coping system without the usual reliance on the interpersonal matrix needed to learn adaptive
strategies, and so they remain reliant on the primitive actions they can carry out for themselves. The
development of such secondary attachment patterns, referred to as deactivating patterns (Mikulincer
& Florian, 2003; Wei et al., 2003), results in a coping system that develops within an intrapersonal
bubble, unconnected to the wider world of interpersonal resources that could nurture and protect the
infant locally, and that could guide it to more constructive ways of dealing with problems and
emotional distress. As a result, toddlers, young children and adolescents with an avoidant working
model of attachment figures may come to rely on social isolation, and have difficulty coordinating
their coping with other social partners in the future. Such children would be less likely to express
(or understand) their distress, less likely to turn to others when they are upset or in trouble, less able
to benefit from support offered by others, and less able to cooperate when others try to participate
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in their coping efforts. Cumulatively, these experiences would be one pathway toward over-reliance
on maladaptive coping strategies, such as avoidance, escape, and social isolation.
Disorganized attachment relationships. The third, and more recently identified pattern of
insecure attachment has been referred to as disorganized; this form of an attachment relationship is
more likely to emerge from a history of maltreatment or other multi-problem family circumstances.
In the case of child abuse, caregivers not only fail to protect their infants from danger, they actually
augment infants’ exposure to stress by neglecting to take care of their basic needs or through
abusive interactions (Cicchetti & Rogosch, 2009). Hence, the coping systems of these infants,
which must try to adapt to a dangerous and maladaptive interpersonal coping system, can become
confused, exhausted, and chaotic, in other words disorganized-- marked by a fundamental
dysregulation of emotion combined with chaotic attempts to regulate it (DeOliveira, Bailey, Moran,
& Pederson, 2004); to denote the riskiness inherent in these kinds of attachments, they are
sometimes referred to as “catastrophizing” (Brumariu, Kerns, & Seibert, 2012).
Insecure attachments and stress reactivity. Over time, stress-inducing interactions with
caregivers can have a negative effect on the normative development of both neurological and
emotional functioning (Cicchetti & Rogosch, 2009; Herbert et al., 2006; McEwen, 1998; 2004;
Sapolsky, 1999). Overall, children in dyads with insecure attachment relationships of any kind, but
particularly the disorganized form, show greater risk of atypical cortisol responses to threat (Ahnert,
Gunnar, Lamb, & Barthel, 2004; Nachmias et al., 1996; Spangler & Schieche, 1998). Although
cortisol reactivity to stress is adaptive in the short term, chronic activation of the HPA axis (the
systems involved in rapid threat appraisal and response, including parts of the prefrontal cortex) has
been associated with physical and psychological impairment and neuronal death, resulting in a
system primed for stress and unable to regulate (recover from) the stress response once it is
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activated (Gunnar & Cheatham, 2003; Gunnar & Vasquez, 2006).
Additionally, cortisol level has been associated with affective responses and regulation.
Children have greater cortisol responses when they have less knowledge of emotion control
(Gunnar, Marvinney, Isensee, & Fisch, 1989) and when social support resources are not available
(Gunnar, Larson, Hertsgaard, Harris, & Brodersen, 1992). These findings suggest that cortisol is
higher when individuals perceive they are unable cope or have few response options when
confronted with threat or challenge (Dawson, Hessel, & Frey, 1994; Stansbury & Gunnar, 1994),
and this is more likely given an insecure attachment history.
Cumulatively, chronic stress reactivity can result in disruptions to the typical pattern of
cortisol over a day; in humans, glucocorticoids demonstrate a circadian rhythm with the highest
levels in the morning on awakening and the lowest levels in the evening prior to onset of sleep
(Sapolsky, 1992). A departure from this typical pattern has been found among children neglected or
otherwise maltreated by their caregivers. Children with such a history tend to show low levels of
cortisol in the early morning and blunted adrenocorticotropic hormone and cortisol responses to
stressors (referred to as hypocortisolism). Children placed in foster care because of maltreatment
also have atypical cortisol diurnal rhythms compared to children without such histories (Loman &
Gunnar, 2010).
Secondary attachment strategies and coping. Connections between attachment status and
ways of coping have been investigated most thoroughly by researchers who have proposed upward
theoretical extensions of attachment theory beyond childhood, focusing on attachment as an affect
regulation system during adolescence (e.g., Allen & Manning, 2007; Allen & Miga, 2010; Cassidy
& Berlin, 1994; Compas, Worsham, & Ey, 1991) or adulthood (Mikulincer & Florian, 2003; Shaver
& Mikulincer, 2002). More specifically, current theoretical views highlight the notion of
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“secondary attachment strategies,” which depict configurations of emotion regulatory strategies
used by older children, adolescents, and adults when dealing with, managing, or confronting
stressful life events.
According to this perspective, attachment relationships early in life, sometimes included as
one aspect of the overall emotional climate of the family (Morris, Silk, Steinberg, Myers, &
Robinson., 2007), result in different patterns of emotion recognition and expression, and differential
utilization of strategies for dealing with stress that emphasize reliance on others versus self-reliance
or social isolation. A few researchers have extended the range of secondary attachment strategies
under investigation to consider how attachment could be associated with all the core families of
coping-- from support seeking and active problem-solving to emotion expression, avoidance,
distraction, and withdrawal during infancy (Roque, Verissimo, Fernandes, & Rebelo, 2013),
adolescence (Gaylord-Harden, Taylor, Campbell, Kesselring, & Grant, 2009), and adulthood
(Holmberg, Lomore, Takacs, & Price, 2010; Wei et al., 2003).
It may be the case that attachment emerges as a stronger correlate of coping after
interpersonal and intrapersonal forms of coping have been fully internalized, which we argue takes
place by early adolescence. This may help to explain why studies of adolescents and adults,
compared to studies of children, typically find more consistent associations between attachment
categories and patterns of coping. For example, in one study of adults, the two types of insecure
attachments (avoidant and anxious) were differentially associated with theoretically-specified ways
of coping: Attachment avoidance, but not attachment anxiety, was associated with less use of social
support; and attachment anxiety, but not attachment avoidance, was associated with more use of
emotion-focused coping (Holmberg et al., 2010).
Attachment and coping with interpersonal stressors. Patterns of findings linking
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attachment to coping during adolescence suggest that the effects of attachment history may be more
pronounced when individuals are dealing with interpersonal stressors. For example, two studies
have shown that secure attachment is related to more active coping with the interpersonal stressors
of conflict and relationship dissolution (Creasey & Hesson-McInnis, 2001; Davis, Shaver, &
Vernon, 2003). Moreover, one of the few longitudinal studies of these connections from
adolescence to early adulthood also found clearer patterns when examining changes in coping with
relationship stressors (Seiffge-Krenke, 2006). Researchers followed 64 girls and 48 boys for 7 years
through 5 waves of data, collected at ages 14, 15, 16, 17, and 21 years. Associations between
perceptions of the severity of relationship problems (parent, peer, partners) and three kinds of
coping (active coping, which combined problem-solving and support seeking, internal coping, and
withdrawal) were examined as correlates of attachment classification (secure, dismissing, or
preoccupied, as measured via the AAI at age 21).
As expected, the secure group stood out as utilizing increasingly more active coping
responses over time when dealing with stressors in both the parent and peer domains. They were
more active than the dismissing group in responding to parent stress, more active than the
preoccupied group when responding to peer stress, and used less withdrawal in response to all
stressors when compared to the preoccupied group. Although not directly examined in this study,
the pattern of results for the insecure groups suggests that it is not the level of a particular coping
response that may signal problems but rather the combination of different responses. For example,
the preoccupied group had an “ambivalent” style of coping that involved high levels of both active
coping and withdrawal, and the dismissing group used internal coping at a level that did not differ
from the secure group but, compared to the secure group, also used less problem-solving and
support seeking (i.e., active coping).
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Such patterning may also be important in detecting differences based on attachment status
when coping sequences are examined. Although not yet investigated in children and adolescents, a
study of 75 adults revealed that attachment classification was related to the point in the coping
sequence at which participants reported using specific ways of coping, such as social support,
distancing, and emotion-focused coping (Holmberg et al., 2010). When coping with major events,
those classified as avoidant-dismissing (via the Experiences in Close Relationship-Revised; Fraley,
Waller, & Brennan, 2000) reported using distancing to cope earlier in the stressful encounter and
resorted to seeking support from a partner only later in the coping episode. In contrast, those
classified as anxious-preoccupied reported the use of emotion-focused coping earlier in the coping
sequence.
Coping as a mediator of the effects of attachment on psychopathology. Many
researchers have suggested that coping could be a mediator that links attachment to
psychopathology, given evidence that both coping and insecure attachment, particularly
disorganized attachment, are associated with the development of multiple forms of
psychopathology (Kobak et al., 2006). In piecing this literature together, some longitudinal research
has shown that the form of insecure attachment classification (or continuous measures of
attachment anxiety and avoidance) partially accounts for different forms of emotion dysregulation,
consistent with theory, and emotional dysregulation has been found to mediate associations
between attachment and psychopathology (e.g., Kullik & Peterman, 2013; Wei et al., 2003).
However, little research has examined these pathways directly. In one of the few such
studies, children’s constructive coping was found to mediate the association between maternal
attachment and peer competence (Contreras, Kerns, Weimer, Gentzler, & Tomich, 2000). In a
second study, 515 undergraduate students completed measures of attachment anxiety, attachment
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avoidance, a range of symptoms of psychopathology, and perceived ineffective coping, modeled as
a latent variable marked by three ways of coping, namely, (1) low levels of problem-solving, (2)
low levels of a reflective style involving planning and systematic responses to stress, and (3) high
levels of a suppressive style involving denial and avoidance. Using structural equation modeling,
researchers discovered that attachment anxiety and avoidance were each uniquely associated with
higher levels of perceived ineffective coping, and perceived ineffective coping and attachment
avoidance (but not attachment anxiety) both showed unique concurrent associations with
heightened psychological distress. Thus, as had been argued, ineffective coping did mediate, at least
partially, the associations between insecure attachment and psychopathology symptoms (see Lopez,
Mauricio, Gormley, Simko, & Berger, 2001, for similar findings with attachment orientations and
distress in college students).
Although few studies targeting attachment assess the full range of responses that can be
used to cope with stressful events, it is possible to draw on research that assesses a narrower set of
emotion regulation strategies in order to discover why or how different forms of attachment, even
during infancy and toddlerhood, have implications for the ways individuals react to and cope with
stress. For example, in one longitudinal study of very young children (Gilliom, Shaw, Beck,
Schonberg, & Lukon, 2002), infant boys classified as securely attachment (at age 1.5 years) were
shown to possess more effective anger regulation skills (i.e., emotion-focused coping) at three years
of age.
In a second (cross-sectional) study, all three attachment classifications during infancy
(assessed via the Strange Situation) were shown to correspond concurrently to the differential use
of theoretically-predicted sets of emotion regulation strategies, including positive and negative
social engagement, object use, and self-comforting (Crugnola et al., 2011). As would be expected,
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infants classified as secure, compared to those who were anxious-resistant or avoidant, used more
positive social engagement to regulate their distress. Also consistent with theory, anxious-resistant
infants displayed more negative social engagement and less object use to comfort themselves
compared to the other two attachment groups. Finally, infants classified as avoidant displayed less
use of social engagement strategies (combined positive and negative) compared to both other
attachment groups, and relied more on use of objects to regulate emotion than did infants in the
anxious-resistant group (see also Smith et al., 2006 for another study of infant attachment and
emotion regulation).
Perhaps most importantly, upward extensions of attachment theory provide a foundation for
proposing that individuals with different types of insecure attachments are likely to use different
predominant models for regulating emotions (Brenning & Braet, 2013; Ein-Dor, Mikulincer, &
Shaver, 2011; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2007). In particular, individuals with an insecure-anxious
attachment relationship history have been found to rely predominantly on hyperactivating
strategies, which entail heightened negative emotions in times of stress combined with overly
dependent or energetic reliance on promixity and support from others. In contrast, individuals with
an insecure-avoidant relationship attachment history seem to use as their predominant approach the
deactivation or suppression of social needs and emotions, and the inhibition of proximity seeking.
Similar ideas have been proposed in Self-Determination Theory, which identifies emotion
dysregulation and suppression as two primary contrasting styles of emotion regulation (Ryan, Deci,
Grolnick, & La Guardia, 2006).
The literature remains quite limited, but emerging (mostly cross-sectional) evidence
supports theoretical ideas regarding the differences in emotional regulatory approaches that would
be expected between those classified as insecure-anxious compared to those classified as insecure-
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avoidant (see e.g., Cassidy & Berlin, 1994; Thompson & Meyer, 2007). In a series of two crosssectional studies of Belgian adolescents, youth with insecure-anxious attachments showed greater
dysregulation of emotion, whereas youth with insecure-avoidant attachment showed more
suppression of emotion (Brenning, Soenens, Braet, & Bosmans, 2012). In a second series of two
studies, the type of emotion mattered (Brenning & Braet, 2013): Youth with anxious attachments
showed greater dysregulation of sadness and anger, whereas youth with avoidant attachments
showed more suppression of sadness but more dysregulation of anger. The authors argued that the
type of emotion should shape how it is regulated by insecure avoidant youth-- because expressions
of sadness elicit support from others whereas expressions of anger warn others to back off. Thus, it
makes sense that insecure-avoidant adolescents, who wish to be left alone, should deactivate
sadness but amplify anger.
Attachment and differential pathways of coping and psychopathology. Taken together,
this work suggests that early attachment relationships may set a template for current interpersonal
and subsequent intrapersonal strategies for coping and emotion regulation. Research supports the
notion that individuals’ emotional and behavioral expressions in response to stress, which include
emotion regulatory as well as coping responses, are grounded in their attachment relationship
history—and so should differ markedly between individuals with a history of secure versus
insecure attachment relationships, as well as between individuals with the two different insecure
types of relationships. This research also suggests three hypotheses that warrant further
investigation. First, insecure forms of attachment, which originate in infancy and toddlerhood,
likely have quite specific relations with emotional reactions, and relate to different coping
responses and emotion regulatory processes. These may be adaptive for managing stress in the
short term but may limit optimal development and put infants at risk for the development of
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psychopathology in the longer term. Second, coping seems to be one important mediator of the
association between attachment relationships and later resilience or symptoms of psychopathology.
Third, it is possible that many of the sequelae of early attachment relationships for the whole range
of coping strategies do not emerge until adolescence or later when the capacities for intrapersonal
and reflective coping are fully integrated. Before this, infants, toddlers, and young children have a
more limited range of coping responses (which are often assessed and studied as emotion regulatory
strategies) that are carefully scaffolded (and so may be proscribed) by concurrent interpersonal
relationships (Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2011). Although still in its infancy, research findings
point to the role that coping should play in future studies focused on attachment relationships and
their links to the development of psychopathology and resilience.
Parenting, Differential Pathways of Maladaptive Coping, and Psychopathology
Reviewers of research on coping and emotion regulation have identified a wide variety of
pathways through which parents can shape how their offspring interpret and deal with stressful
events (Bradley, 2007, Table 2; Kliewer, Sandler, & Wolchik, 1994; Power, 2004, Tables 1, 2, and
3; as well as Calkins & Hill, 2007; Grant et al., 2006; Kochanska & Kim, 2013; Morris et al., 2007;
Schwarz, Stutz, & Ledermann, 2012; Skinner & Edge, 2002a; Thompson & Meyer, 2007). In fact,
when examined through the lens of normative development described in the previous section, it
becomes clear that the participation of responsive adults, in successively age-graded roles, is
essential to every step in the development of children’s own adaptive coping. Hence, one way to
consider the role that parenting plays in the differential development of maladaptive pathways of
coping is to scrutinize each of these parental practices and to focus on their specific negative
contribution, considering a wide spectrum of parenting behavior -- which might range from
allowing children to be exposed to overwhelming stress, to modeling self-blame, to suggesting
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coping strategies that are ineffective (see Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck, in press, for a more detailed
analysis).
A second strategy, more consistent with developmental systems perspectives and upward
extensions of attachment theory, would be to consider the interpersonal support systems provided
by parents as a whole, and to try to consider, when these systems are not adequate, what happens to
children’s own coping systems when they must adapt to these non-optimal contexts. Particularly
useful in such an endeavor are theories of parenting that identify a relatively small set of umbrella
dimensions that describe the basic functions of parenting in meeting children’s psychological needs
(Bradley, 2007, Table 1; Connell & Wellborn, 1990; Deci & Ryan, 1985; Grolnick, 2002; Skinner,
Johnson, & Snyder, 2005). The dimensions that theories converge upon, depicted in Table 2,
include parental provision of warmth, structure, and autonomy support. By the same token, parental
interactions that undermine children’s basic needs, also presented in Table 2, include rejection,
chaos, and coercion. Although they are referred to using a variety of labels, the study of each of
these dimensions has a long history in work on parenting (see Skinner et al., 2005, for a review
over the last five decades).
------------------------------Insert Table 2 about here
------------------------------From this broad perspective, there are two primary ways in which parents can undermine
the development of healthy coping: through errors of omission, that is, by not creating an adaptive
interpersonal coping system within which children’s coping can develop; and through errors of
commission, that is, by dealing with their offspring in times of stress in ways that are actively
unproductive or harmful. These pathways, as described in more detail in the remainder of this
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section, can potentially provide a rudimentary map to a line of next studies that would add to the
growing literature on the role of parents in children’s coping (Bradley, 2007; Power, 2004), perhaps
extending its investigation to consider children’s maladaptive coping as a mediator between risky
parenting and the development of psychopathology and resilience (Barber & Harmon, 2002;
Compas, et al., 2010; Cummings & Davies, 1999; Kobak et al., 2006; Repetti, Taylor, & Seeman,
2002; Rutter, 2013).
These dimensions of parenting behavior can be seen as interpersonal resources and
pressures that parents can either add or subtract during stressful interactions (Skinner & Edge,
2002a) and that create interpersonal coping systems to which children’s own coping must adapt
(Grant et al., 2006; McCarthy, Lambert, & Seraphine, 2004; Seiffge-Krenke, 2011; Skinner &
Edge, 2002a; Valiente, Lemery-Chalfant, & Reiser, 2007). Negative dimensions of parenting
permeate the development of coping systems because they increase objective demands, intensify
the experience of threat, escalate distress, interfere with the detection and identification of the
actual nature and source of negative emotions and action problems, trigger action tendencies that
are compelling yet destructive, divert personal regulatory resources, lead to over- or underregulation of emotion and action, undermine constructive action regulation, and interfere with
learning.
For example, when a child is dealing with a demanding situation, parental rejection, such as
negative responses to emotional displays (Eisenberg, Fabes, Carlo, & Karbon, 1992; Jones,
Eisenberg, Fabes, & Mackinnon, 2002) or harsh discipline (Grant et al., 2006), generally makes
things worse: It adds the stress of parental disapproval and criticism; it communicates that the
parental relationship may be at stake, increasing distress and the probability of threat appraisals; it
can trigger action tendencies that propel the child away from the parent (e.g., social withdrawal or
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escape), shutting down communication of feelings and concerns and thus making it more difficult
for the parent to diagnose the problem and be supportive (further subtracting social resources);
because the child must also regulate his or her distress about the parent’s reaction, it reduces the
regulatory resources available for dealing with the stressful situation, making maladaptive coping
strategies more likely; and it focuses the child on the conditionality of parental regard rather than on
what can be learned from the stressful episode (Assor, Roth, & Deci, 2004).
Over time, the interpersonal coping systems created by the general absence of parental
warmth, structure, or autonomy support as well as the presence of rejection, chaos, or coercion can
be problematic, even when such bouts of parenting are intermittent but especially when they are
more chronic, pervasive, and severe, as in cases of parental child abuse and neglect (Cicchetti &
Rogosch, 2009; Maughan & Cichetti, 2002; Shipman et al., 2007). They are likely to exert a
downward pressure on children’s own functioning, cumulatively leading to increasingly
consolidated appraisals of implicit threat, maladaptive action tendencies, and poor regulation
(Eisenberg et al., 1998; Valiente et al., 2007). The effects of children’s attempts to adapt to the
interpersonal coping systems created by negative interactions with parents should be visible in their
own developing coping systems, as expressed through high emotional reactivity and distress,
powerful but ultimately unconstructive action tendencies of different stripes (e.g., reactions to
parental coercion that are submissive or oppositional), non-autonomous systems for action
regulation that may be weak or rigidly over-controlled, and a profile of coping that is low in
adaptive and high in maladaptive strategies, including a noxious admixture of ways of coping from
the families of helplessness, escape, social isolation, delegation, submission, and opposition.
Cumulatively, these experiences (along with social partners’ widespread negative reactions
to such maladaptive coping actions) should contribute to children’s construction of self-systems
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that confirm a negative view of the self (as unlovable, incompetent, or inauthentic) or the world (as
untrustworthy, uncontrollable, or coercive). These stressful parent-child interactions are also likely
to further undermine the quality of the dyadic relationship, and so contribute to the development of
both personal and interpersonal vulnerabilities for coping. Such maladaptive patterns of appraising
and dealing with stress, along with the reactions they provoke from social partners (not just from
parents, but also from other family members, teachers, and peers), should put children at risk for
escalating cycles of stress and ineffectual coping, not only in the family but also in school and with
their age mates, perhaps cumulatively contributing to forms of internalizing and externalizing
psychopathologies.
Family Stress, Differential Pathways of Maladaptive Coping, and Psychopathology
The family represents a primary source of comfort and support and can serve as a basis for
protection during times of stress. For this reason, stressors that occur in the family, and which
threaten its connectedness, can have detrimental effects on health and reduce the likelihood of
resilient outcomes (Lynch & Cicchetti, 1998; Repetti et al., 2002; Schwarz et al., 2012).
Researchers have identified a long list of family-level factors that put children at risk for the
development of behavior problems; these include marital discord, conflict or violence, divorce,
family turmoil, death of a parent or sibling, parental problems (substance abuse, physical or mental
illness, incarceration), high rates of mobility, crowding and noise, and generally living in conditions
of poverty and oppression, in dangerous neighborhood, or in communities exposed to
environmental pollution, war, or natural disasters. These can all be considered “developmentally
challenging circumstances” because of their effects on children: They “pose direct harm, have the
potential to seriously undermine emotional security, dislodge productive coping strategies, and
impede the use of existing assets or the formation of new ones” (Bradley, 2007, p. 102).
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At the same time, these situations are challenging to parents: To offset the potential harm
posed by these circumstances, children require more from their parents, while at the same time,
because these conditions have an impact on everyone in the family, parents have fewer resources to
employ in the service of supportive parenting. Hence, researchers who study the ways that children
cope with family stressors point out that events like divorce or death of a parent or sibling are
doubly dangerous to children, because they stress children directly (creating neurophysiological,
psychological, and social problems), and because they stress parents-- and so disrupt the family
system just when children need its support the most (Sandler, Tein, Mehta, Wolchik, & Ayers,
2000).
Although full coverage of this topic is beyond the scope of this review, researchers also
point out that these developmentally challenging circumstances are not randomly distributed
throughout the population (Luther, 2006). Instead, they represent profiles of “cumulative risk”
(Sameroff, 2010) that are common to particular societal niches, such as those created by poverty
and oppression, which disproportionately contain environmental risk and dangers, and lack
supportive resources (Evans, 2004; Evans & Kim, 2012). Hence, parents with potentially limited
caregiving resources, such as adolescent single parents, are often asked to parent in conditions that
are high in demands (e.g., multiple young high needs children) and stressors (e.g., poverty, violent
relationships, dangerous neighborhood), and low in supports (e.g., neglectful extended family,
limited social services, few high quality childcare facilities).
These niches can be considered high in cumulative risk or in “allostatic load,” which is a
term that refers to the total concentration or aggregate of stressors to which a person (or dyad or
family unit) is subjected or exposed (McEwen, 2010). These concepts draw researchers’ attention to
the larger context of stressors and supports within which children and their families function, and
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can help to explain the vulnerabilities in family systems created by living in niches that attract a
high allostatic load (Blair & Raver, 2012; Seeman, Epel, Gruenewald, Karlamangla, & McEwen,
2010; Tolan & Grant, 2009). Perhaps most important, as outlined in models of how contexts shape
stress and coping responses (Tolan & Grant, 2009) and in models of how coping and coping
resources influence psychopathology and health (Taylor & Stanton, 2007), these kinds of stressful
contexts are one source of the kinds of stressors children experience, the resources that are available
to cope with stress, the coping patterns that emerge, and the development of psychopathology or
resilience in the face of adversity.
Higher-order contexts, such as culture, neighborhood, or society, will contribute to parentchild coping episodes that, over time, enhance or reduce both personal and social regulatory
resources. The accumulation of these episodes should play a significant role in the development of
self-system processes that consolidate negative views of each other, and prevent both parties from
learning how to deal constructively and cooperatively with problems and obstacles. In that sense,
family stress can cumulatively contribute to the development of adaptive or maladaptive coping in
both children and their parents, which are some of the core foundations for the development of
resilience and psychopathology (Cicchetti & Rogosch, 2009; Tolan & Grant, 2009).
Future Research and Translation of Research into Action
Consistent with many researchers who study risk and resilience, we view the factors
discussed in this chapter as part of “developmental cascades” (Curtis & Cicchetti, 2003; Masten &
Cicchetti, 2010), in which early conditions (both neurophysiological and social) contribute to
subsequent difficulties. These difficulties then snowball through the accumulation of risk factors, to
eventually potentiate behavioral problems and psychological disorders. According to this
perspective, each of the factors discussed in this chapter can be seen as a series of steps along
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pathways that become more difficult to reverse the longer they are followed.
For example, when infants have temperaments that are high in stress reactivity, it is more
difficult for caregivers to be sensitive and responsive to them; as a result, parents and children are
more likely to form insecure or disorganized attachment relationships. The parent-infant
interactions characteristic of these kinds of attachment patterns shape the developing
neurophysiological processes underlying reactivity, sensitizing infants and young children to the
effects of stress, perhaps even at the epigenetic level (Blair & Raver, 2012). Moreover, when
combined with children’s stress reactivity, it can become increasingly difficult for parents to remain
warm, involved, structured, and autonomy supportive, and so early patterns contribute to (or are the
beginnings of) more general styles of problematic parenting. The discordant parent-child
interactions characteristic of these styles of parenting contribute to an atmosphere of tension and
turmoil in the larger family system. This higher-order family stress permeates caregiving and has its
biggest effects on children who are biologically more susceptible to environmental effects
(Cicchetti &Curtis, 2006; Cicchetti & Rogosch, 2009; Ellis, Boyce, Belsky, BakermansKranenburg, & Van IJzendoorn, 2011).
The Role of Coping in Developmental Cascades toward Psychopathology and Resilience
These general dynamics have been noted by researchers from many areas, and in fact,
temperament, attachment, parenting, and family stress can be considered “the usual suspects” in
creating developmental cascades that lead to almost any kind of problem behavior or form of
psychopathology (e.g., Dodge, Greenberg, & Malone, 2008). What this chapter has to add to such
discussions is the idea that, during infancy, childhood, and adolescence, patterns of maladaptive
stress reactivity and coping are important parts of these cascades -- both as symptoms and as
players. For example, temperamental vulnerabilities, almost by definition, are most apparent under
107
conditions of stress and are typically held to be vulnerabilities precisely because they trigger
maladaptive reactions to external stressors (such as changes, novelty, and social or attentional
demands). One of the primary things that makes children with “difficult temperaments” so difficult
is their poor coping—their over-reactions and their difficulties in accommodating to demands and
recovering from stress.
By the same token, poor coping is a key marker of insecure, especially disorganized,
caregiver-child attachments—the term “coping” could be used to describe the outward behaviors of
infants and young children under the stress of separation and especially during recovery from that
stress. For young children with a history of insecure attachments, these patterns of emotional
reactivity and maladaptive coping, as carried forward into preschool, are one of the main reasons
they find it more difficult to form optimally safe, supportive, and stable relationships with other
adults (e.g., teachers) and peers (e.g., Contreras et al., 2000; Kobak et al., 2006). The same point
can be made for problematic parenting and family stress: These conditions are risk factors for
developmental outcomes for many reasons (Repetti et al., 2002), and an important set of them focus
on their deleterious effects on children’s and adolescents’ coping, including their
neurophysiological and psychological stress reactivity and the development of their regulatory
capacities for dealing constructively with stress (Bradley 2007).
In future studies, researchers who specialize in either coping or psychopathology may wish
to examine these processes explicitly, by focusing on the multiple ways that maladaptive coping
directly participates in these kinds of developmental cascades. Investigations can explore whether
the emotional reactivity and action tendencies underlying maladaptive coping (e.g., opposition,
submission, delegation, helplessness, escape, social isolation) can get children and adolescents in
trouble in social contexts that expect mature forms of coping, whether those contexts be organized
108
by teachers, peers, coaches, or friends’ families. It is possible that children’s maladaptive coping
can have the direct effect of repelling positive supports, generating stress, or provoking reactions
that are intrusive, retaliatory, or rejecting (Conway et al., 2012; Liu, 2013). Difficult temperaments,
high stress reactivity, and insecure attachments all shape development—and these effects may
accrue partly because the poor coping they engender itself elicits negative reactions from adult and
peer interaction partners.
Researchers who study profiles or patterns of coping may also wish to consider whether
maladaptive coping participates in developmental cascades through the downward pressure it exerts
on adaptive functioning. Chronically-activated threat appraisals and poor coping may interfere with
children’s access to their own better natures and competencies, such as their compassion and
regulatory resources, making it more difficult for them to enact adaptive strategies and potentially
leading them to feel powerless in the face of their own urges. Moreover, the emotional and action
impulses characteristic of maladaptive coping may be so compelling that they lead children and
adolescents to feel that their negative behaviors are fully justified to defend against immanent threat
(Lansford, Malone, Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 2010). As a whole, the recursive components of
maladaptive coping systems, with their high stress reactivity, threat appraisals colored by fear or
resentment, experiences of ineffectiveness in dealing with problems and emotions, and the negative
social reactions they elicit, together may create an integrated biopsychosocial “apparent reality” that
should intensify actual and subjective stress, and cumulatively channel development toward
heightened reactivity, regulatory vulnerabilities, behavior problems, and psychopathology.
A comprehensive picture of the developmental cascades that lead to maladaptive coping,
and through maladaptive coping to psychopathology, will clearly include more contexts and social
partners than we have been able to describe here. Like all other developmental cascades depicted
109
thus far, they will undoubtedly travel through the worlds of school and peers, where children’s and
adolescents’ maladaptive coping will likely put them at risk for academic disaffection and
underperformance, peer rejection and membership in deviant peer groups, evasion of supervision
by competent adults, and eventual participation in a host of risky activities during adolescence, like
truancy, delinquency, substance abuse, and unprotected sexual activity, that further constrict life
paths during emerging adulthood.
The researchers who study these phenomena do not label them all as “coping” nor consider
the problems they depict as partly the result of “maladaptive coping” (c.f., Spencer, 2006).
Nevertheless, coping researchers can profit from what has been learned about the functioning of
temperament, attachment, academic progress, peer relationships, teaching, and parenting under
stress. And work on coping may also be useful to researchers from these largely disparate traditions
by providing some common ground where they can meet to figure out how all these components
work together during stressful encounters to shape children’s short-term coping and their long-term
development, including pathways toward competence and disorder.
Translation of Basic Research on Coping into Action
If indeed, as we have argued, coping is both a key marker and a central player in the
development of psychopathology and resilience, it follows that work on coping and its development
has the potential to provide a platform for building out preventative interventions designed to avert
the onset of mental health (or other) problems as well as for creating targeted interventions
designed to promote the construction of coping resources, strategies, and efficacy once problems
have been identified. Evidence for the utility of coping as an intervention lever can be found in the
substantial portion of the larger stress and coping research agenda that has been dedicated to
translating such research into direct action-- by developing and evaluating prevention programs
110
implemented in locations with almost universal access to families and/or children (e.g., the
schools). Such interventions often rely on psychoeducation to teach coping strategies with the aim
of preventing the development of a range of internalizing and externalizing symptoms or of
reducing the likelihood of symptom escalation (e.g., Barrett, Lock, & Farrell, 2005; Eassau,
Conradt, Sasgawa, & Ollendick, 2012; Fox et al., 2012; Ginsburg, 2009; Frydenberg & Lewis,
2000). Other applied stress/coping research has tested programs designed to improve coping
resources and reduce distress and symptoms of mental health disorders among select groups who
are at risk due to major life stressors, such as parental divorce or serious illness (e.g., Compas et al.,
2010; Conrod, Castellanos-Ryan, & Strang, 2010; Sansom-Daly, Peate, Wakefield, Bryant, &
Cohn, 2012; Soper, Wolchik, Tein, & Sandler, 2010; Vélez, Wolchik, Tein, & Sandler, 2011).
As a whole, these studies have demonstrated the feasibility and efficacy of providing
children and adolescents with guided practice in using coping resources or emotion regulation
strategies that can be effective in dealing with many stressors or helpful in alleviating distress
(Compas et al., 2009, 2010, 2014; Fresco, Mennin, Heimberg, & Ritter, 2013; Kovacs et al., 2006;
Tein, Sandler, Ayers, & Wolchik, 2006; Suveg, Sood, Comer, & Kendall, 2009; Weisz, Thurber,
Sweeney, Proffitt, LeGagnoux, 1997; Weisz, Hawley, & Jensen Doss, 2004). Other interventions
have shown success in increasing coping efficacy (Gonzales et al., 2012; Wolchik et al., 2000).
Some of the most interesting studies have examined coping as a mediator between treatment and
outcome, documenting that improvement in coping capacity as a result of interventions is an
important factor that accounts for whether children will show reduced symptoms of mental health
disorders (or other adjustment problems) following treatment (e.g., Compas et al., 2010; Essau,
Conradt, Sasgawa, & Ollendick, 2012; Tein, Sandler, MacKinnon, & Wolchik, 2004).
Yet, despite the growing body of research that examines efforts to directly intervene to
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improve coping or coping resources or that examines coping as an outcome or as a part of the
recovery process, it is surprising to discover just how few studies of this kind have been conducted
and that most of them have been completed quite recently. What is equally noteworthy in this
literature, however, is the number of studies that have been carried out to examine the efficacy or
effectiveness of implementing enhancement programs for youth that include the aim of improving
coping, but never actually assess it. Nevertheless, these commonly used clinical treatments
spotlight the possibility that minimizing the use of maladaptive coping strategies and identifying
new adaptive strategies to use instead, either through therapeutic conversation, psychoeducation,
role play, direct practice, or other techniques, may be effective components of such programs.
Programs implementing these methods have been shown to reduce symptoms of mental health
disorders, whether the program is directed toward youth who are experiencing family problems
(Garber et al., 2009; Silverman, Kurtines, Jaccard, & Pina, 2009), chronic physical or health
conditions (Sansom-Daly et al., 2011), or general and other forms of anxiety and fear (Barrett et al.,
2005; Barrett, Farrell, Ollendick, & Dadds, 2006; Fox et al., 2012).
When these efforts are examined in light of research and theory on the development of
coping, however, three primary ways are revealed that the current research agenda on child and
adolescent stress and coping could be broadened in order to better integrate basic research with
application to clinical and educational practice. First, as can be imagined from our overall emphasis
on the development of coping, we would argue that the entire agenda could benefit from more
careful and systematic attention to child age as a marker of developmental level. Second, a greater
consideration of the roles of child temperament and family relationship history in contributing to
coping strengths and vulnerabilities might allow researchers to design more successful intervention
strategies by tailoring approaches to match children’s specific underlying issues. Third, there could
112
be better integration of measures of coping in translational research, both to identify children and
youth who could benefit from interventions and to assess the mechanisms of effects in interventions
–via typical questionnaires and via in-the-moment techniques.
Child age and developmental level. As described in the current chapter, the coping system
and the multiple individual and interpersonal subsystems that support and influence it show
developmental patterns that are linked with age and experience. This fact is recognized implicitly or
explicitly in much of the basic research on stress and coping in children and adolescents, as can be
seen in age-graded choices about the coping strategies selected for study or, more rarely, in
decisions to examine age directly (Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2011). Such developmental
changes can be viewed as obstacles and challenges to treatment research, as well, and most
interventions have not yet been tested to determine whether they are effective across the age ranges
of children who receive the services (Eyberg, Schumann, & Rey, 1998).
At the same time, we now have an increasingly rich body of developmental ideas about
coping, which have yet to be fully incorporated into the design of prevention and intervention
programs to enhance children’s coping resources, capacity, and efficacy, to reduce the fall-out from
stressful experiences, or to otherwise optimize children’s functioning in the face of adversity. This
is partly because reviews of basic research (and basic research itself) have not often directly
addressed the development of coping with an eye towards guiding intervention. We also suspect
that this is partly because few studies that focus on enhancing coping explicitly attend to age either
by examining whether age matters to program effectiveness or by using theory and research to
intentionally adapt the program to better serve different age groups (and reporting these
modifications) (see Barrett et al., 2005 for an exception; Eyberg et al., 1998). In one recent study
(Farrell, Waters, & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2012), when researchers did examine age differences in the
113
cognitive beliefs theoretically linked with anxiety symptoms, such beliefs were found only among
adolescents (age 12-17 years) and not among children (age 7-11 years), consistent with
developmental research that reveals age-graded changes in the ability to consider inner thoughts
and beliefs during early adolescence, and the greater use of cognitive coping responses in
adolescents compared to children (see also Essau et al., 2012).
Moreover, basic researchers can help interventionists more thoroughly integrate
developmental dimensions in their programs if they themselves attend more closely to
developmental theory when designing studies of coping. They should more closely align their
selection of age groups with the stressors and coping responses that should be most relevant. For
example, enhancing active coping (problem solving or positive cognitive reappraisal) may not be
appropriate for all ages or situations. The kind of accommodative coping that is most effective
when dealing with uncontrollable stressors likely differs with age—only during later childhood and
early adolescence do cognitive reappraisal strategies become accessible and even then they may
require practice if they are to become durable enough to utilize under stress; during middle
childhood distraction may be more effective, and behavioral distraction may be the only option for
younger children, who may also need to rely on support and active distraction by others. Similarly,
the kinds of coping that is effective with controllable stressors may also require different
intervention responses at different ages.
Research scrutinizing the kinds of interpersonal relationships that provide developmentallygraded support as children begin to enact more self-reliant forms of coping with stress would be
helpful for planning interventions directed to children between ages 5 and 7. Research examining
how children use different forms of social support, how they balance this with individual efforts,
and how this balancing act changes from early to middle childhood would be particularly useful for
114
identifying entry points for ameliorating deficits and bolstering strengths at these ages. And studies
focusing on how the range and flexibility of adolescents’ strategy use changes as they get older
would also be useful for guiding practical work to help young people more intentionally match their
coping efforts to situational demands during these age periods.
Finally, research using cluster analysis or person-centered approaches (Boxer et al., 2012;
Tolan et al., 2002) also suggests that patterns of coping or patterns of other regulatory responses
and coping need to be considered as targets for interventions. We know about the "complex ways
that coping strategies are interrelated" (Gaylord-Harden et al., 2010, p. 852), and we are beginning
to find out that these interrelations may change with age (Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2011). As
research progresses towards identifying optimal profiles of ways of coping for different
developmental periods and the type of stress under consideration (Skinner & Wellborn, 1997), this
information would be invaluable for informing practice. If carefully designed with clinical
implications in mind, future developmental research findings should be much more easily translated
into the creation of practical supports, and treatment or prevention programs for young people of all
ages. Perhaps coping researchers will be more motivated to explore important developmental
issues, such as what kinds of coping are and are not adaptive in particular situations and at
particular ages, if they see how important such findings could be to the creation of more effective
prevention and intervention practices (see also Tolan et al, 2002; Gaylord-Harden et al., 2010 for
further discussions of these issues).
Coping, temperament, and family relationship history. Universal intervention to assist
children when dealing with stress can be beneficial by teaching a range of cognitive or behavioral
strategies to put in place and practice before stress occurs (Barrett et al., 2006). Nevertheless,
selected approaches have the advantage of tailoring intervention techniques-- with the goals of
115
compensating for deficits and building on strengths among individual or groups of children
identified for inclusion in programs based on history (e.g., parental divorce or maternal depression;
Compas et al., 2009, 2010; Soper et al., 2010; Vélez et al., 2011) or personal symptoms, such as
anxiety disorders (Kovacs et al., 2006; Waters, Donaldson, & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2008).
Such focused tailoring could be guided even more explicitly by studies documenting the
different patterns of maladaptive appraisals, stress reactions, and coping strategies children are
likely to exhibit given developmental differences in temperamental status, attachment history, and
parenting experiences. This knowledge might also be useful in assisting children to cope more
effectively and compassionately with their own temperamental tendencies and to modify their own
behaviors with the goal of reducing “dependent” stress events, which are stressful experiences that
are partly self-generated (Conway et al., 2012; Liu, 2013). The study of children’s differential
histories could also be useful in order to identify potential appraisal biases that will prompt
inappropriate coping responses (Kochenderfer-Ladd & Skinner, 2002; Zimmer-Gembeck et al.,
2013; Zimmer-Gembeck & Nesdale, 2013), including reliance on coping strategies that are not
well-matched to the situation. Not only could such studies guide interventions as they directly
tackle biased appraisals and maladaptive coping, but they could also identify the kinds of promotive
opportunities children are likely to have missed given their temperamental and attachment histories;
some children may never have participated in constructive interpersonal coping or experienced
practical success in coping, suggesting that interventions could be enriched by providing new
opportunities for such children to acquire these skills as well as to build feelings of trust,
cooperation, efficacy, and agency (Larson, 2011), which might all feedback into increasingly more
beneficial coping patterns over time.
Integrating coping measures more fully into prevention and intervention research.
116
Better translation of basic coping research into practice also depends on expanding present
intervention research to more frequently consider ways of coping, as well as closely related
regulatory processes, as "active ingredients in the prevention [or escalation] of mental health
problems in children and adolescents" (Compas et al., 2010, p. 623). Coping measures can serve as
screening devices to identify children and youth who could benefit from services, and coping
represents a valid and important measure of the goals, aims, and outcomes of treatment (or other
types of prevention/intervention programs) for young people, and should be assessed more
routinely.
Given the challenges of measuring coping, this will require careful thinking on
interventionists’ parts. Current multidimensional measures of coping (e.g., Ayers et al., 1996;
Connor-Smith et al., 2000), as reported by both children, youth, and their adults, provide a valuable
menu from which researchers can select the range of ways of coping that are most appropriate to
the developmental level of their target population (Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2011) and best
suited to the situation and treatment approach (Eyberg et al., 1998). Measurement development
work is needed in order to assess coping in a way that is sensitive to developmental age, situation,
and prior history, but is also sensitive enough to detect changes when comparing assessments at
pre- and post-treatment or later. Perhaps daily diary assessments of distress and coping (e.g.,
Walker et al., 2007) will turn out to be especially useful for these purposes. As assessment becomes
more sophisticated, such translational research incorporating coping measures will help to locate
the particular components of interventions that yield positive and lasting treatment outcomes
(Kazdin, 2008).
Summary and Conclusion
We hope that some of the ideas outlined in this chapter (such as those summarized in Table
117
1) may provide grist for thought about how future research can productively combine research on
the development of coping with work on the development of psychopathology. These are two rich
empirical traditions that attempt to understand how adversity and stressful events in the lives of
children and adolescents can shape their developmental pathways, for better and for worse. We
have suggested that coping—with its strategies, resources, and efficacy—should always be
considered a part of these developmental cascades and also a part of intervention and prevention
efforts to optimize them. Both developmental psychopathology and the development of coping
have much to contribute to our understanding of how children and adolescents, when faced with
stressful life events, whether they be woven into lives of privilege or derived from chronic adverse
circumstances, can (with or without our help) nevertheless create pathways that lead to the
development of enduring competence and resilience.
118
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172
Table 1.
Three Perspectives on How the Study of the Development of Coping Can Contribute to
Research on Developmental Psychopathology and Resilience
Transactional Perspectives: Coping as Individual Differences in Stress Reactivity and
Responses
1. Coping is a moderator. Ways of coping represent families of adaptive and maladaptive
responses to stress, and so fundamentally buffer or exacerbate the effects of stress and adversity
on psychopathology and resilience.
2. Coping is a mediator. Adaptive and maladaptive coping are parts of the pathways through
which exposure to stress contributes to psychopathology and resilience.
3. Individual ways of coping are part of a profile of reactions and responses during the course of
stressful encounters. Coping can supplement the study of individual ways of coping implicated
in psychopathology (such as rumination or social isolation) by considering them in relation to
the repertoire, combination, or sequence of other ways of coping that children and adolescents
enact over the arc of multiple coping episodes.
4. Coping is a critical mechanism through which a variety of assets and liabilities, such as selfefficacy, pessimism, and social support, which have long been implicated in psychopathology
and resilience, exert their effects.
Normative Developmental Perspectives: Coping as a Fundamental Adaptive Process
1. Developmentally-friendly conceptualizations, which define coping as “regulation under stress,”
integrate research on the development of both stress reactivity and the many kinds of regulation
(emotional, attentional, motivational, behavioral, etc.) that are activated by stressful encounters.
2. Because core families of coping represent fundamental adaptive and maladaptive processes,
they are tightly linked to other sub-systems that serve to detect and deal with threats and danger,
such as processes of temperament, attachment, mastery, and self-determination.
3. Coping influences everyday resilience and marks a site of developmental potential. Coping
shapes how children and youth bounce back from daily stressors and such episodes can be
opportunities for the development of regulatory capacities and coping efficacy, if stressors are
manageable, personal and interpersonal resources are sufficient, and parents (and other adults)
help children channel setbacks and failures adaptively—by learning and growing from them.
Developmental Systems Perspectives: Coping as Part of Developmental Cascades
1. The stresses of adversity can undermine the healthy development of coping—based on its effects
on the neurophysiological, psychological, and social underpinnings of coping. The
development of adaptive coping requires years of deep developmentally-attuned interpersonal
support for dealing with just-manageable demands, and so stressful overarching social
conditions such as poverty, oppression, discrimination, harsh families and parenting,
maltreatment, and neglect pose serious risks to the healthy development of coping.
173
2. Coping is reciprocally related to psychopathology and resilience. Psychopathology interferes
with constructive coping and triggers maladaptive stress reactions. Hence, coping is a key
marker and player in the developmental cascades from which psychopathology emerges.
3. Coping can be a powerful intervention lever in preventing deleterious short- and long-term
consequences of stress, risk, and adversity. Upstream interventions that focus on strengthening
relationships and promoting core coping resources and coping efficacy should have the biggest
impact on the construction of appraisals and coping processes that foster resilience.
174
Table 2
Six Dimensions of Parenting
1. Warmth: Through caring and affectionate interactions, parents communicate their emotional
availability, unconditional love, and positive regard for the child.
2. Structure: Through dependable, reliable, and contingent interactions and routines, parents
create a sturdy durable context that children can count on as being organized, predictable,
responsive, and available to provide instrumental help when it is required or requested.
3. Autonomy support: Through interactions that are attuned to the child’s own genuine desires
and best interests, parents express respect, encouragement, deference, and trust in the child’s
authentic self.
4. Rejection: Parents overtly or covertly express their aversion, repugnance, or dislike for the
child, through interactions that are hostile, dismissive, derisive, sarcastic, callous, uncaring, or
cruel.
5. Chaos: Parents create a context that is unstable, disorganized, and tumultuous, through
interactions that are erratic, unpredictable, inconsistent, and non-contingent.
6. Coercion: Parents behave in ways that are controlling, pressuring, and disrespectful, either
through intimidation, force, demands for obedience, and threats of punishment, or through guiltinducing criticism and threats of love withdrawal.
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Figure Captions
Figure 1. Coping depicted as a transactional process of appraising and dealing with demands.
Figure 2. Four models of the role of coping in the processes that connect stress to
psychopathology, as a (1) moderator; (2) mediator; (3) mechanism; and (4) reciprocal
process.
Figure 3. A depiction of the coping system as a set of fundamental adaptive processes used to
detect, respond to, and learn from encounters with potential challenges, threats, and
dangers.
Figure 4. An integrative multi-level conceptualization of coping as a set of inter-related processes
that functions on the (1) neurophysiological; (2) psychological; (3) action; (4)
interpersonal; and (5) societal levels.
Figure 5. Underlying neurophysiological factors and overarching socialization factors that
contribute to the differential development of maladaptive coping and increase the risk of
behavior problems and psychopathology.
176
Personal Resources!
STRESS!
APPRAISAL!
COPING!
Social Resources!
OUTCOME!
Stress
Risk
Adversity
2. Coping as a
MEDIATOR.
Personal
Protective Factors
1. Coping as a
MODERATOR.
Social
Protective Factors
Competence
Psychopathology
Resilience
3. Coping as a
MECHANISM.
Personal Resources
Personal Resources
Personal Resources
OUTCOME
STRESS
PersonalAPPRAISAL
Resources COPING
APPRAISAL
OUTCOME
STRESS
Personal
ResourcesCOPING
APPRAISAL
OUTCOME
STRESS
Personal
ResourcesCOPING
APPRAISAL
OUTCOME
COPING
STRESS
APPRAISAL
OUTCOME
COPING
STRESS
APPRAISAL
OUTCOME
Social
Resources
COPING
STRESS
Social Resources
Social Resources
Social Resources
Social Resources
Social Resources
4. Coping as
RECIPROCAL.
Coping Episodes
178
Personal and Social Resources
DETECT
COPING
Demands
Appraisals
Action
Tendencies
Resolution
Post-Coping
Assessment
Action
Regulation
RESPOND
Learning
and
Development
PROGRESS
CAREGIVER
SCAFFOLD
5. Societal
Societal, Social & Personal Stressors and Resources
Adaptive
DEMANDS
CAREGIVER
COPING
Caregiver
APPRAISAL
SUPPORTS
Maladaptive
4. Inter-Personal
3. Ac on
DEMANDS
CHILD
APPRAISAL
Adaptive
Adaptive
Adaptive
Adaptive
COPING
Action
Action
Tendencies Regulation
SUPPORTS
Other Stressors and Resources
Maladaptive
Maladaptive
2. Psychological Maladaptive
Maladaptive
A en on
Behavior
(Meta-)
Cogni on
Mo va on
1. Neurophysiological
Emo on
SAM
HPA
PFC
ACC
Amygdala
Temperament
CHILD COPING
FAMILY STRESS
TEMPERAMENT
FAMILY STRESS
Moderate APPROACH
Moderate INHIBITORY
HIGH EFFORTFUL CONTROL
HIGH APPROACH
Low Inhibitory
Low Effortful Control
HIGH INHIBITORY
Low Approach
Low Effortful Control
ATTACHMENT
Insecure
DISORGANIZED
PARENTING
SECURE
Insecure
AVOIDANT
Insecure
RESISTANT
Involvement
Structure
Autonomy Support
Rejection
Chaos
Coercion
Insecure
DISORGANIZED
Rejection
Chaos
Coercion
ADAPTIVE
COPING
Problem
Solve
MALADAPTIVE
COPING
Escape
Seek
Info
COPING
Seek
Support
Negotiate
Regulate
Distress
Isolate
Accommodate
MALADAPTIVE
COPING
Helpless
OPPOSE
Delegate
SUBMIT
RESILIENCE
EXTERNALIZING
INTERNALIZING