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.

This book is an intellectual and personal history of Richard Lazarus, a psychologist whose pioneering research and theories in stress, coping, and emotion continue to have a worldwide influence. The author interweaves the account of his personal life and career with the developments of psychology as an academic discipline during the past five decades. His reminiscences offer glimpses of academic life, university politics, and also his growing contacts with the European and Japanese colleagues who invited him to lecture. The book concludes with his thoughts about aging, retirement, and issues of life and death.