Concept at a glance
- Definition: Lazarus’s account of psychological stress as a relationship between person and environment that is mediated by two cognitive processes: appraisal (primary — what is at stake; secondary — what coping options exist) and coping (problem-focused and emotion-focused). Stress is not in the stimulus or the person but in the transaction between them, and appraisal and coping influence each other continuously rather than in a fixed sequence.
- Also called: cognitive-phenomenological theory of stress, Lazarus transactional model, primary and secondary appraisal, stress appraisal
Connections
- Related concepts: Cognitive appraisal (of emotion), Coping (problem-focused vs emotion-focused), Allostasis, Sense of should
- Key studies: Folkman & Lazarus (1980)
- Debates: Are appraisals causes of emotion, or descriptions of it?
Richard Lazarus’s framework, stated first-hand in the wiki through Folkman & Lazarus (1980). Psychological stress is “transactional in that the person and the environment are seen in an ongoing relationship of reciprocal action, each affecting and in turn being affected by the other.” Stress is located neither in the environmental demand nor in the person’s disposition but in the relationship between them — which is why the same event stresses one person and not another, and why coping is more variable than consistent across a person’s encounters (see Coping (problem-focused vs emotion-focused)).
The two mediating processes
Appraisal — the evaluation that establishes the stressfulness of an encounter:
- Primary appraisal — what is at stake. Three kinds of stressful appraisal: harm/loss (damage already done), threat (anticipated harm or loss), challenge (anticipated opportunity for mastery or gain).
- Secondary appraisal — what coping resources and options are available.
Coping — the efforts made in response to appraisal, in two functions: problem-focused and emotion-focused (see Coping (problem-focused vs emotion-focused)).
The reciprocal clause
The model’s distinctive commitment — and the reason it resists being read as a simple stimulus → evaluation → response machine — is that appraisal and coping “continuously influence each other throughout an encounter.” Lazarus is explicit that “the identification of appraisal as a determinant of coping, or coping as a determinant of appraisal, is thus provisional depending upon where one interrupts the ongoing, dynamic relationship between the two.” An appraisal of threat stimulates coping; coping that changes the situation leads to reappraisal, which engenders further coping, and so on.
This reciprocal framing is why the causal-appraisal tradition’s founder cannot be cleanly assigned the serial ordering that Barrett (2017) attacks in “classical appraisal theory.” The point is developed on Are appraisals causes of emotion, or descriptions of it?: Lazarus, first-hand, already holds a continuous-loop model rather than a stimulus-first sequence — a second instance (after Scherer) of a causal-appraisal theorist whose actual position is more reciprocal than the constructionist critique of the tradition allows.
Where it sits in the wiki
The transactional model is the direct intellectual ancestor of two things the wiki holds elsewhere. Its allostatic descendants — Allostasis, Sense of should, the constructed-emotion family’s account of affect as the readout of a predictive body-budget — inherit the transaction-not-stimulus idea and recast appraisal as prediction. And its coping side feeds the clinical and contemplative literature on emotion regulation. The model itself is pre-predictive-coding and non-computational; the wiki holds it as the historical and conceptual root, not as a mechanistic rival to the inference accounts.