Concept at a glance
- Definition: Lazarus and Folkman’s distinction between the two functions coping serves: problem-focused coping manages or alters the person-environment relationship that is the source of stress, while emotion-focused coping regulates the stressful emotions themselves. The empirical claim attached to it is that virtually every stressful encounter recruits both functions, so coping cannot be reduced to either problem-solving or emotional defence.
- Also called: problem-focused coping, emotion-focused coping, dual functions of coping, Ways of Coping distinction
Connections
- Related concepts: Cognitive appraisal (of emotion), Transactional (cognitive-phenomenological) model of stress, Allostasis
- Key studies: Folkman & Lazarus (1980)
- Debates: Are appraisals causes of emotion, or descriptions of it?
Coping, in Lazarus’s transactional framework, is “the cognitive and behavioral efforts made to master, tolerate, or reduce external and internal demands and conflicts.” Folkman & Lazarus (1980) split it by function into two kinds:
- Problem-focused coping — efforts directed at managing or altering the person-environment relationship that is the source of stress: making a plan and following it, gathering information, taking direct action, standing one’s ground. (On the Ways of Coping checklist: 24 items after item analysis.)
- Emotion-focused coping — efforts directed at regulating the stressful emotions rather than the situation: looking for the “silver lining,” seeking sympathy, distancing, humour, trying to forget the whole thing, blaming self or others. (40 items.)
The load-bearing empirical claim
The distinction is not just a taxonomy; its point in Folkman & Lazarus (1980) is a finding: both functions are used in ~98% of real stressful episodes. Coping conceptualised as either a defence system (tension-reduction) or problem-solving is therefore “incomplete — both functions are usually involved.” This is why the paper rejects the older framings of coping as a hierarchy of ego-defences (Haan, Vaillant) or as a stable personality trait: those pictures treat coping as one kind of thing, and the data show it is two, deployed together.
What determines the mix
Which function dominates a given episode is governed mainly by appraisal and context, not by the person:
- Situations appraised as “could do something constructive” → more problem-focused coping.
- Situations appraised as having to be accepted or requiring the person to hold back → more emotion-focused coping.
- Work contexts → more problem-focused; health contexts → more emotion-focused.
- Within-person consistency across episodes is low (mean .265): the same person shifts the mix by situation far more than they repeat a signature. Coping is transactional, not dispositional.
Cautions the wiki should keep
- The primary evidence is a self-report checklist answered about a recalled episode; it records reported coping, not observed behaviour, and the P/E item classification was still being revised in 1980.
- The distinction says nothing about which coping works — Folkman & Lazarus (1980) deliberately did not relate coping to adaptational outcome. Problem-focused is not “good coping” and emotion-focused is not “bad coping”; emotion-focused coping is adaptive precisely where a situation cannot be changed.
- The pairing is a distant, loose ancestor of several later distinctions the wiki meets — sensory-vs-elaborative processing (Farb et al. (2007)), approach-vs-avoidance in Interoceptive exposure, acceptance-vs-control in contemplative regulation. The resemblance is real but should not be overdrawn: emotion-focused coping in Lazarus’s sense spans everything from reappraisal to denial, and does not map cleanly onto any single one of those axes.