Book Description

This Research Topic is the second volume of the Research Topic "Coping With Life Stress". Please see the first volume here. Existing studies on coping with stress and life difficulties are very contradictory. Traditional approaches, while identifying cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects of coping, often confuse the modality of the strategy with its functionality and outcome. This conceptual drawback presents quite a few challenges to the study of efficient and inefficient strategies. Perception of the incongruence between modalities (cognitive, emotional, or behavioral) of a particular strategy and its functionality or organizational efforts (efficient vs. inefficient) hinders the development of an integrated methodology for a generalized coping with life stress process. The absence of general principles for classification of efficient and inefficient coping poses methodological as well as practical difficulties in their diagnostics and differentiation, thereby causing additional obstacles in the systematic study of this important phenomenon. The Coping with Life Stress approach is focused on research based on the translation of scientific knowledge regarding problem solving processes into practical applications geared toward improvement of individual life learning, or coping, skills.