The Role of Dyadic Coping on the Marital and Emotional Adjustment of Couples With Infertility

Infertility is a challenging experience, affecting individual and couples’ adjustment. However, the way the members of the couple support each other may affect the experience of infertility and their adjustment. This study aimed to investigate the role of dyadic coping by oneself and by the partner in the association between the impact of infertility and dyadic and emotional adjustment (anxiety and depression) to infertility. In this cross‐sectional study, a total of 134 participants (67 couples with infertility) completed self‐report questionnaires assessing infertility‐related stress, dyadic coping, dyadic adjustment, and depression and anxiety symptoms. A path analysis examined the direct and indirect effects between the impact of infertility in one's life and dyadic and emotional adjustment. There is an indirect effect of the impact of infertility in one's life on dyadic adjustment through men's perceived dyadic coping efforts employed by the self (dyadic coping by oneself) and women's perceived dyadic coping efforts of the partner (dyadic coping by the partner). Regarding the emotional adjustment of infertile couples, infertility stress impact had an indirect effect only on depressive symptoms through men's dyadic coping by oneself. The results highlight the importance of men's dyadic coping strategies for the marital adjustment of couples as well as for men's emotional adjustment. Findings emphasize the importance of involving men in the fertility treatment process, reinforcing the dyadic nature of infertility processes.     

Adjustment to multiple sclerosis: application of a stress and coping model.

This study examined the use of a stress and coping model of adjustment to multiple sclerosis (MS). A total of 122 MS patients were interviewed and completed self-administered scales at Time 1 and 12 months later, Time 2 (n = 96). Predictors included stressful life events, illness (duration, severity, and disability), social support, appraisal (threat and control/challenge), and coping (problem focused and emotion [wishful thinking, self-blame, and avoidance] focused). Adjustment outcomes were Time 2 depression, global distress, social adjustment, and subjective health status. Results from hierarchical regression analyses indicated that after controlling for the effects of Time-1 adjustment, better Time-2 adjustment was related to less disability, greater reliance on problem-focused coping, and less reliance on emotion-focused coping. There was limited support for the stress buffering effects of coping and social support. Findings offer some support for the use of a stress and coping model of adaptation to MS.     

The Meaning and Impact of Partner's Accompaniment on Women's Adjustment to Abortion1

The present study examined the meaning of accompaniment to an abortion clinic by a male partner and explored the effects of accompaniment on women's immediate and three-week post-abortion psychological distress. A comparison of accompanied and unaccompanied women revealed few differences in demographic or psychological characteristics, although accompanied women perceived greater levels of social support from their partners and reported that they were in more committed relationships. The effects of accompaniment on women's post-abortion distress were neither universally positive nor universally negative, but depended on the personal characteristics of the women involved. Consistent with Conservation of Resources Theory (Hobfoll, 1988), accompaniment was more beneficial for women who were high in personal coping resources than for women low in these resources.     

Counselling psychologists in academia: Life satisfaction and work and family role commitments

We examined the life satisfaction of men and women counselling psychology faculty who were Division 17 (Society of Counseling Psychology) members of APA (American Psychological Association). Self-efficacy for multiple role management, coping style, and work-family role orientation were considered as predictors of life satisfaction. Results indicated that men scored significantly higher on employee role and self role self-efficacy as compared to women, and that women as compared to men scored higher on seeking social support coping. No significant sex difference was found for role orientation or life satisfaction. Findings revealed that spouse/partner self-efficacy and problem-solving coping emerged as significant predictors of men and women's life satisfaction and accounted for 31% of the total variance.     

Women's Reactions to Miscarriage: The Role of Attributions,Coping Styles,and Knowledge1

This study examined 72 women's retrospectively reported reactions to miscarriage, including depression, stress, and anxiety. The buffering role of women's attributional explanations for the event, the significance of the loss of the baby, coping strategies, and women's knowledge of miscarriage were also assessed. Correlational analyses revealed that women's attributions were tied to their reactions, in that the more women blamed their own character or doctor, the more severely they reacted. Coping strategies accounted for a large portion of the variance (64%), whereby women who used cognitive restructuring as a strategy suffered less adverse reactions than did those who used social withdrawal or wishrul thinking. Women's knowledge before miscarriage, rather than after, accounted for 6% of the variance in their reactions. Examining the interrelations of these variables revealed that the amount of women's knowledge before miscarriage was related to less wishful thinking, and their knowledge after the event was related to less problem avoidance. Women's attributions were also related to their coping strategies: Blaming one's character, behavior, or doctor were positively related to self-criticism and social withdrawal, and negatively related to support from doctors and significant others. The implications of these findings for interventions to facilitate adjustment to miscarriage and future research are discussed.     

Employee adjustment to stress: The role of coping resources, situational factors, and coping responses

Abstract The present study was designed to examine further the stress-adjustment relationship in employees. Specifically, the relations among employees' coping resources (self-esteem, generalized control beliefs, neuroticism, and social support), their appraisals of a recent stressful event experienced at work (appraised stress, self-efficacy, and situational control beliefs), the coping strategies (problem- and emotion-focused coping) used to deal with the event, and levels of employee adjustment (psychological well-being and job satisfaction) were examined. Data were collected from 153 male and female employees in a public sector department, employed in a range of middle-management administrative activities. The data provided support for a modified version of a model that proposed that both situational appraisals and coping strategies are mediating processes in the stress-adjustment relationship. There was evidence that employees' coping responses to the recent stressful event experienced at work were related to concurrent levels of adjustment. As predicted, the use of problem-focused coping, in general, had positive relationships with the measures of adjustment, whereas the effects of emotion-focused coping were generally negative (there was, however, some evidence that the effects of coping were dependent on event controllability). There was also evidence that coping resources had both direct and indirect effects (via coping and via situational appraisals) on employee adjustment. The latter effects were most marked for generalized control beliefs and self-esteem. Situational appraisals (in particular, efficacy expectancies) also had indirect effects on employee adjustment, through their effects on coping responses.     

The Role of Women's Relationships With Their Partners in Their Adjustment Following Prenatal Genetic Testing1

This study explored how aspects of the couple relationship contributed to the adjustment of 95 women who underwent prenatal diagnostic (PND) testing because of advanced maternal age (AMA). Participants completed self‐report measures prior to genetic counseling (T1), during the waiting period for PND test results (T2), and after normal results were received (T3). At T2, distress was predicted by the degree to which women approached the PND decision jointly with their partners, and marital adjustment was predicted by women's satisfaction with the support received from their partners. Marital adjustment at T3 was predicted by earlier levels of partner agreement about PND‐related issues. Results suggest that the couple relationship has the potential to facilitate or hinder women's experience of PND testing.     

Optimism and coping as determinants of psychosocial adjustment to rheumatoid arthritis

Psychosocial adjustment in 66 patients with chronic rheumatoid arthritis, with a mean duration of 12 years with the disease, were evaluated in a prospective design, with 62% of the sample followed up 16 months later. It was predicted that dispositional optimism would predict adjustment over time and that perceived support and perceived control would be related to psychosocial adjustment at the time of concurrent measurement. At Time 1, psychosocial adjustment was associated with greater optimism and perceived support and less disability. Optimism at Time 1 was the only significant predictor of changes in adjustment at Time 2 controlling for Time 1 adjustment and Time 2 disability. It was found that optimism temporally precedes increases in psychosocial adjustment. In terms of coping strategies, wishful thinking was related to poorer social adjustment, whereas problem-focused coping was marginally related to positive adjustment. Neither coping strategy predicted adjustment across time. Optimism at Time 1 did predict problem-focused coping at Time 2. Perceived social support regarding a specific circumstance at a given point in time enables one to persist in solving a task. Interventions to enhance the quality of life of individuals coping with progressive deteriorative disease must look at the influence of their behavior and attitude on those who provide care for them.     

Functional roles of social support within the stress and coping process: A theoretical and empirical overview

This article reports four longitudinal field studies and one experimental study designed to shed light on the functional roles of social support within the stress and coping context. First, the enabling hypothesis is examined that assumes a facilitating effect of support on self-efficacy, which, in turn, promotes coping with the aftermath of cardiac surgery. Second, we discuss the support cultivation hypothesis that regards support as a mediator between self-efficacy and various outcomes, such as depressive mood, as illustrated by a finding on the experience of macrosocial stress during the East German transition. Third, support is highlighted as a coping resource by specifying provided partner support as a predictor of patients' coping with cancer. It was found that the direct effect of provided support on coping needs to be mediated by received support in order to become effective. Fourth, coping efforts of a target person are found to be predictive of support intentions of a potential provider. The better a victim appears to cope with various stigmas, the higher the likelihood that a significant other is willing to help. Fifth, in a dyadic study on coping with cancer, partners were found to provide high levels of support to patients, but received support was affected only at later points in time. Time-lagged partner effects may characterize resource transfer in asymmetric social situations in which only one element of the dyad is under severe stress.     

Patient and Partner Quality of Life and Psychosocial Adjustment Following Radical Prostatectomy

We prospectively examined differences in quality of life and psychosocial adjustment in 80 prostate cancer patients and their partners (n = 65) beginning before radical prostatectomy and proceeding across the first year postsurgery. Both members of the couple experienced significant changes associated with the patient's cancer, however their experiences differed in some regards. Patients experienced reprieve from emotional distress and negative affect immediately following surgery despite worsened physical functioning. Partner quality of life and psychosocial adjustment scores were generally more constant from presurgery to postsurgery, with improvements noted 1 year later. For both patients and partners, cancer-specific stress symptoms declined progressively over the year. We also obtained partial support for the effectiveness of a single-session communication intervention on patient social/family wellbeing and partner general stress. Findings have implications for patient and partner adjustment following radical prostatectomy, and attest to the importance of incorporating partner evaluations into psychosocial oncology research.     

Perceived social support, self-efficacy, and adjustment to abortion

Prior to their having a 1st trimester abortion, women's perceptions of social support from their partner, family, and friends and self-efficacy for coping were assessed. Depression, mood, physical complaints, and anticipation of negative consequences were measured after the 30-min recovery period. As predicted, perceived social support enhanced adjustment indirectly through its effects on self-efficacy. Women who perceived high support from their family, friends, and partners had higher self-efficacy for coping. Higher self-efficacy, in turn, predicted better adjustment on the psychological measures but not on the physical complaint measure. No direct path between social support and adjustment was observed. In addition, women who told close others of their abortion but perceived them as less than completely supportive had poorer postabortion psychological adjustment than either women who did not tell or women who told and perceived complete support.     

Stress and coping in mothers caring for a child with severe learning difficulties: A test of Lazarus' transactional model of coping

The literature on psychological stress among women consistently points to the adverse effects of child rearing on mothers, particularly those caring for children with physical or mental handicaps. Early studies of the effects on family functioning of caring for a child with severe learning difficulties adopted a pathological approach in which it was assumed that psychological distress was inevitable among family members, particularly mothers. Recent research has emphasised that many families cope with and adapt to the stress they experience, and seeks to discover how they do so. The paper reports on a study of 166 mothers caring for a child with severe learning difficulties. The aim of the study was to investigate both the factors associated with maternal stress and those which might mediate or buffer the effects of stress. The study used the Folkman and Lazarus' (1979) transactional model of stress. Stress is the condition that results when person/environment transactions lead the individual to perceive a discrepancy between the demands of a situation and his/her resources or ability to cope with those demands. The nature and type of coping generated by a person will be determined by the coping resources in the person's environment. The model identifies five categories of coping resource: utilitarian resources, health/morale, social networks, general and specific beliefs, and problem solving skills. In our study, the five coping resources were represented by the mother's social class and appraisal of her financial worries, physical health, social support, acceptance of and adjustment to the child, and assessment of coping skills. Stress was measured by the Malaise Inventory (Rutter, 1970). Four of the five coping resources were found to be significant contributors in a hierarchical regression analysis of stress scores, contributing additional variance beyond that of behavioural and other child characteristics. Altogether, 55% of the variance in stress scores was explained.     

Does Spousal Support Moderate the Association Between Perceived Racial Discrimination and Depressive Symptoms among African American Couples?

Social stress theory proposes that stress resulting from one's social position in society leads to fewer coping resources, and subsequently causes an increase in mental health problems. Guided by this framework, we investigated whether the relationship between perceived discrimination and depressive symptoms was moderated by spousal social support in a sample of 487 African American heterosexual couples. Using the actor‐partner interdependence model, findings suggested that female partner's perceived racial discrimination was predictive of her depressive symptomology irrespective of spousal support and male partner's perceived racial discrimination was predictive of depressive symptomology only among men with low levels of spousal support. No partner effects were present. The results demonstrate the need to examine variability in social stress and mental health outcomes for those in close relationships.     

Development of the HIV/AIDS Stress Scale

Development of a self-report measure of stress specific to HIV/AIDS is needed to advance our understanding of the role of stress in adaptation to HIV/AIDS; hence, the aim of this study was the development of the HIV/AIDS Stress Scale. A total of 132 homosexual/bisexual men with HIV/AIDS were interviewed and completed the HIV/AIDS Stress Scale and measures of coping strategies, appraisal, social support and adjustment (global distress, depression, social adjustment, number of HIV symptoms, and subjective health status) at three time points. Thirty-nine primary caregivers were interviewed and completed measures of stress and adjustment. Exploratory factor analyses of the HIV/AIDS Stress Scale items revealed three factors: Social, Instrumental and Emotional/Existential Stress. Factors had adequate internal reliabilities and were stable over 12 months. Construct validation data are consistent with recent stress/coping research that links higher levels of stress with more HIV symptoms, reliance on emotion-focused coping, lower social support, poorer levels of adjustment and higher levels of caregiver stress. Results extend this research by revealing new differential relations between various stress dimensions and stress/coping variables. Convergent validation data suggest that the HIV/AIDS Stress Scale shares conceptual similarity with threat appraisal, and differs from controllability and challenge appraisals. The HIV/AIDS Stress Scale shows potential for the elucidation of the role of stress in coping and adaptation to HIV/AIDS and disease progression in both research and clinical applications.     

The effects of cystic fibrosis on couples: marital satisfaction, emotions, and coping strategies

An earlier diagnosis and better overall multidisciplinary care enable people suffering from Cystic Fibrosis (CF) to have a life expectancy of 40. Consequently, new populations and questions about the development of the life of couples have arisen. This study by questionnaires takes a first look at marital adjustment, anxiety, depression, and emotion focused, social support focused, and problem focused coping strategies in 16 CF patients and their partners. As a whole, the couples' marital adjustment level was good; it was higher for men who were patients than men who were partners, and vice versa for women. Anxiety was high for at least one partner in 10 of the couples; depression, for at least one partner in seven of them. The participants seem to use coping strategies to a lesser extent than the general population. The results are discussed in terms of how the quality of life as a couple with one partner suffering from CF is affected by the proper mutual adjustment of the partners.     

A threshold model of social support, adjustment, and distress after breast cancer treatment

This study examined a threshold model that proposes that social support exhibits a curvilinear association with adjustment and distress, such that support in excess of a critical threshold level has decreasing incremental benefits. Women diagnosed with a first occurrence of breast cancer (N = 154) completed survey measures of perceived support (Social Provisions Scale), quality of life (Functional Living Index--Cancer), adjustment (Psychological Adjustment to Illness Scale) and psychological distress (Brief Symptom Inventory) approximately 3 weeks after surgical treatment and 8-16 months later. Consistent with a threshold model, multiple regression analyses suggested a significant curvilinear relationship between social support and distress at Time 1 and Time 2 and between social support and adjustment at Time 2. Consistent with this model, the significant bivariate correlations between social support and outcomes were accounted for almost entirely by women in the lowest quartile of support. Social support among women in the highest 3 quartiles was unrelated or only marginally related to adjustment and distress.     

Pathways for psychological adjustment in breast cancer: A longitudinal study on coping strategies and posttraumatic growth

This longitudinal study examined the role of coping strategies and posttraumatic growth (PTG) on the psychological adjustment to breast cancer trajectory. The participants were 50 women assessed at the time of surgery (T1), during adjuvant treatment (T2) and six months after the end of treatment (T3). Women completed questionnaires assessing coping strategies, PTG and psychological adjustment (psychological quality of life, anxiety and depression). Results showed that the greatest impact of breast cancer on women's adjustment occurred at T1, when patients were significantly more anxious than in the other phases of the disease. The type of surgery and adjuvant treatment did not account for the course of PTG and adjustment. Coping through seeking social support and using cognitive strategies at T1 were linked to psychological quality of life and depression at T3 via PTG dimension of personal resources and skills at T2. Findings emphasise the value of promoting adaptive coping strategies and PTG in order to improve psychological adjustment in breast cancer patients.     

Coping with work and family: How do dual‐earners interact?

Juggling the demands of both work and family has become increasingly difficult, especially for dual‐earner households; nevertheless, families have developed strategies to deal with work‐family challenges. This paper uses couple level analyses (APIM models) with 100 dual‐earner couples to provide insight about partners' mutual influence on the use of work‐family coping strategies. The results show that women's use of coping strategies is more associated with work‐family conflict and work‐family enrichment than men's coping. In addition, using partner coping, having a positive attitude towards multiple roles, using planning and management skills and avoiding having to cut back on professional responsibilities is associated with better outcomes (more enrichment and less conflict). Surprisingly, the use of childcare facilities is associated with women's conflict and partner effects were only found concerning the use of management and planning skills. These skills, however, have distinct effects for men and women's outcomes: their use by men reduces their own conflict but increases their wives', while their use by women decreases their own conflict and increases their own and their partner's enrichment. These results point to the fact that gender roles continue to be a hallmark of work‐family issues. Our design and results point out the need for new interventions that take couple interdependences into account.     

Race,psychosocial vulnerability and social support differences in inner-city women's symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder

Background/Objectives: Inner-city Black women may be more susceptible to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than White women, although mechanisms underlying this association are unclear. Living in urban neighborhoods distinguished by higher chronic stress may contribute to racial differences in women's cognitive, affective, and social vulnerabilities, leading to greater trauma-related distress including PTSD. Yet social support could buffer the negative effects of psychosocial vulnerabilities on women's health. Methods/Design: Mediation and moderated mediation models were tested with 371 inner-city women, including psychosocial vulnerability (i.e., catastrophizing, anger, social undermining) mediating the pathway between race and PTSD, and social support moderating psychosocial vulnerability and PTSD. Results: Despite comparable rates of trauma, Black women reported higher vulnerability and PTSD symptoms, and lower support compared to White Hispanic and non-Hispanic women. Psychosocial vulnerability mediated the pathway between race and PTSD, and social support moderated vulnerability, reducing negative effects on PTSD. When examining associations by race, the moderation effect remained significant for Black women only. Conclusions: Altogether these psychosocial vulnerabilities represent one potential mechanism explaining Black women's greater risk of PTSD, although cumulative psychosocial vulnerability may be buffered by social support. Despite higher support, inner-city White women's psychosocial vulnerability may actually outweigh support's benefits for reducing trauma-related distress.