Adjustment to Life Stresses: Models, Coping, and Resilience
Adjustment items test stress and coping models, what makes transitions easy or hard, and the evidence on resilience across development.
Stress models
- Selye's general adaptation syndrome: alarm → resistance → exhaustion. It is a physiological response model, not a coping or emotional stage model.
- Lazarus & Folkman's transactional model: primary appraisal (is this harm, threat, or challenge?) and secondary appraisal (what resources do I have?). Stress lives in the appraisal, not the event. Coping is problem-focused (change the situation) or emotion-focused (change the response); problem-focused coping usually works better for controllable stressors, emotion-focused for uncontrollable ones.
- Holmes & Rahe's Social Readjustment Rating Scale assigns life-change units; it is criticized because change itself is a weak proxy for perceived stress and the weights are arbitrary.
- Allostatic load and cumulative risk models emphasize the dose–response relationship between chronic adversity (including ACEs) and later health.
Timing, transitions, and resilience
On-time transitions (per the social clock, Neugarten) are generally easier than off-time ones. Resilience research (Garmezy; Werner's Kauai study, where about a third of high-risk children thrived) identifies protective factors: at least one stable caring adult, easy temperament, cognitive and self-regulation skills, meaning or faith, and socioeconomic resources.
Specific adjustments
Retirement is a process, not an event (Atchley's phases: honeymoon, disenchantment, reorientation, routine). Its success is predicted by health, income adequacy, social network, and voluntary timing. Baltes' SOC model (selection, optimization, compensation) explains successful aging: narrowing goals and compensating for loss. Continuity theory stresses maintaining existing roles and identity. Post-traumatic growth (Tedeschi & Calhoun) describes positive change alongside distress, not instead of it.
Worked example
Two employees face identical layoffs. One appraises it as a threat and stops searching; the other sees a challenge and schedules interviews. Reasoning: the event is constant and the appraisal differs - primary appraisal (threat vs challenge) and secondary appraisal (available resources) create different coping. Job search is controllable, so problem-focused coping fits; a diagnosis of terminal illness is largely uncontrollable, where emotion-focused coping and reappraisal are more adaptive.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating GAS stages as psychological coping stages.
- Assuming problem-focused coping is always superior.
- Assuming retirement adjustment is best predicted by income alone.
- Reading post-traumatic growth as evidence that trauma was beneficial.