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.

2015 Reprint of 1958 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations" pioneered the modern field of social cognition. A giant of social psychology, Heider had few students, but his book on social perception had many readers, and its impact continues into the 21st Century, having been cited over 13,000 times. In "The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations," Heider argued that social perception follows many of the same rules of physical object perception, and that the organization found in object perception is also found in social perception. Because biases in object perception sometimes lead to errors (e.g., optical illusions), one might expect to find that biases in social perception likewise lead to errors (e.g., underestimating the role social factors and overestimating the effect of personality and attitudes on behavior). Heider also argued that perceptual organization follows the rule of psychological balance. Although tedious to spell out in completeness, the idea is that positive and negative sentiments need to be represented in ways that minimize ambivalence and maximize a simple, straightforward affective representation of the person. He writes "To conceive of a person as having positive and negative traits requires a more sophisticated view; it requires a differentiation of the representation of the person into subparts that are of unlike value (1958, p. 182)." But the most influential idea in "The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations" is the notion of how people see the causes of behavior, and the explanations they make for it-what Heider called "attributions". Contents: Introduction -- Perceiving the other person -- The other person as perceiver -- The naive analysis of action -- Desire and pleasure -- Environmental effects -- Sentiment -- Ought and value -- Request and command -- Benefit and harm -- Reaction to the lot of the other person -- Conclusion -- Appendix: A notation for representing interpersonal relations.