Stress and coping theory provides a framework that is useful for formulating and testing hypotheses about the stress process and its relation to physical and mental health. The framework emphasizes the importance of two processes, appraisal and coping, as mediators of the ongoing relationship between the person and the environment. Stress and coping theory is relevant to the stress process as it is experienced in the ordinary events of daily life, major life events, and chronic stressful conditions that stretch out over years.Appraisal refers to the individual’s continuous evaluation of how things are going in relation to his or her personal goals, values, and beliefs. Primary appraisal asks “Am I okay?” Secondary appraisal asks “What can I do?” Situations that signal harm or potential harm that is personally significant and in which there are few options for controlling what happens are appraised as stressful. Stress appraisals include harm or loss, which refer to damage already done; appraisals of threat, which refer to the judgment that something bad might happen; and appraisals of challenge, which refer to something that may happen that offers the opportunity for mastery or gain as well as some risk of an unwelcome outcome. Situations that are appraised as high in personal significance and low in controllability, for example, are usually appraised as threats, and situations that are high in personal significance and high in controllability are more likely to be appraised as challenges.

In this work, Richard Lazarus offers a treatment of the psychology of emotion, its role in adaptation, and the issues that must be addressed to understand it. The work provides a complete theory of emotional processes, explaining how different emotions are elicited and expressed, and how the emotional range of individuals develops over their lifetime. The author's approach puts emotion in a central role as a complex, patterned, organic reaction to both daily events and long-term efforts on the part of the individual to survive, flourish, and achieve. In his view, emotions cannot be divorced from other functions--whether biological, social, or cognitive--and express the intimate, personal meaning of what individuals experience. As coping and adapting processes, they are seen as part of the ongoing effort to monitor changes, stimuli, and stresses arising from the environment. After defining emotion and discussing issues of classification and measurement, Lazarus turns to the topics of motivation, cognition, and causality as key concepts in this theory. Next he looks at individual emotions, both negative and positive, and examines their development in terms of social influences and individual events. Finally, he considers the long-term consequences of emotion on physical health and well-being, and the treatment and prevention of emotional dysfunction. --From publisher's description.

Examines the experience of aging from the standpoint of the individual, rather than merely as a collection of statistics and charts. This title looks at aging, emotion and coping, and stability and change in both environment and personality. It is useful for scholars and also accessible to the lay audience.