Stress, Coping, and Health

This chapter addresses the confluence of two sets of processes as they come to bear on a class of outcomes. The processes are stress and coping. The outcome is health. This topic is enormous in its scope. The literature of stress itself is broad enough to have had a handbook devoted to it (Goldberger & Breznitz, 1993); the same is true of the literature on coping (Zeidner & Endler, 1996). Although those handbooks are by now dated, the years since their publication have brought only further growth in their respective literatures (Folkman & Moskowitz, 2004). It will be obvious, then, that this chapter does not survey the literature of stress and coping in its entirety. Rather, it addresses a set of basic issues, problems, and conceptual themes that have arisen within the literature bearing on stress, coping, and health.