Emotion-Focused Compare And Contrast Folkman And Emotion-Focused Coping

This is one of the right contest in which coping strategies have to concern a full rehabilitation (including physical, psychological and social spheres). The adaptation to the disease depends on external and internal support systems. The external ones involve relationship with family, friends, work, medical interventions and counseling groups. The internal ones are based on the coping strategies that the subject would use to face multiple sclerosis’ problems.

Lazarus and Folkman (in 1984) identify two processes “cognitive appraisal and coping, as critical mediators of stressful person - environment relations and their immediate and long - range outcomes”. In the cognitive appraisal the person estimates subjectively what is happening. Coping instead “is defined as the person’s constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the person’s resources” (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). The coping process is characterized of two phases: programming and cognitive planning of the strategies to use to resolve the problem.
Coping has two main dimensions: emotion - focused coping (EFC) and problem - focused coping (PFC). The emotion –focused coping refers to emotional response aimed at reducing the emotive issue on stressful situations. The
(1997) studied some patients with Sclerosis Multiple. To cope situations with disease-related stressors, the majority of patients used emotion – focused coping. These are considered dysfunctional strategies, in fact high levels of psychological distress were positively correlated with the utilization of these coping strategies. There was an independence between distress and patients who utilized problem – focused coping. So, emotional strategies are emphasized by anxious or depressed subjects when the situation looks threatening; problem – focused coping is used when the situation appears controlled and susceptible to