The Development of Coping: Implications for Psychopathology and Resilience

Abstract

The goal of this chapter is to review conceptual and empirical progress in the study of the development of coping and to identify important ways in which this work may be useful to researchers studying the development of psychopathology and resilience. We first summarize perspectives that identify coping as a transactional process, reviewing theory and research on how individual differences in stress appraisals, coping, and emotional responses are linked to psychopathology and adaptive functioning. Then, in the normative developmental perspectives section, we describe coping as a fundamental human adaptive process that involves the regulation of multiple subsystems (like emotion and attention) that are activated by stress. We consider age‐graded developments in multiple ways of coping in order to bring structure to research on the negative and positive outcomes of coping for human adaptation, psychopathology, and resilience. In the developmental systems section, we consider coping as an integral part of developmental cascades that contribute to psychopathology and resilience. We review research on how coping is associated with temperament, attachment, and parenting to identify examples of underlying risk and protective factors. These factors likely play a role in developmental cascades that mark and contribute to psychopathology and resilience. We end with suggestions for future research and highlight some translational implications of research.