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Coping styles describe how we consciously deal with stress. Do you make a plan to fix the problem? Blame yourself? Hide by drinking or using drugs? Just ignore it and hope it will go away?
(Find your coping style with this survey)
The answer can provide insight into your actions and also tell you if you are at higher risk for developing things like alcoholism. The answer often depends on the type of stress you're dealing with, too. For example, people with PTSD tend to try to avoid the stressors that cause their problems.
There are many ways coping styles are described and organized. This list of eight is a good summary that gets to the heart of our behavior when faced with a stressful situation.
- Confrontive Coping describes taking aggressive efforts to change the situation to the point of being risky and antagonistic.
- Distancing is where you detach yourself from the situation and try to minimize its significance.
- Self-Controlling is where you try to control your own feelings in response to the stress.
- Seeking Social Support means you look to friends for emotional or other types of support.
- Accepting Responsibility shows you acknowledge your role in the problem and you want to make it better.
- Escape-Avoidance is what you do when you're trying to avoid dealing with the problem.
- Planful Problem Solving is coping through analysis and planning to resolve the situation.
- Positive Reappraisal means you try to grow from the experience of dealing with the stress. It may have a religious component.
Some of these strategies, like Escape-Avoidance, are maladaptive since they don't help to deal with the stress longer term. Others, like Planful Problem Solving, are useful for heading off future stressors and therefore are more proactive coping styles.
Want to know what your style is? Take this survey to find out (it takes about 5 minutes to complete).
This survey is part of new research we are conducting in my lab on how your coping style comes through on Twitter. Research has shown that the way we write can give insights into our coping styles. As an example, [1] showed that using words that expressed positive emotions and cognitive processing were indicators of an adaptive coping style. We want to know if analyzing Twitter will show us how people cope. That could be useful in understanding other ways people interact online and offline.
References
[1] Monin, Joan K., et al. "Linguistic markers of emotion regulation and cardiovascular reactivity among older caregiving spouses." Psychology and aging 27.4 (2012): 903.
