Anticipatory Coping Diversity: Implications for Emotional, Physical, and Cognitive Reactivity to Daily Stressors

Shevaun D Neupert

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 2022, vol. 77, issue 4, 721-732

Abstract: ObjectivesThis study examines the concept of anticipatory coping diversity, reflected in the evenness and richness of anticipatory coping strategies. The overarching goal of this study is to show how individual differences in anticipatory coping diversity are associated with emotional, physical, and cognitive reactivity to daily stressors and to examine whether these dynamic characteristics might differ between younger and older adults.Methods107 younger (M age = 19.44, range 18–36) and 116 older (M age = 64.71, range 60–90) participants reported on 1,627 total days via an online daily diary study. Participants reported baseline demographic information (Day 1) and anticipatory coping, stressor exposure, negative affect, physical symptoms, and memory failures (Days 2–9). Anticipatory coping diversity was indexed at the person level using Shannon’s entropy to capture the evenness and richness of anticipatory coping strategies across stressors.ResultsPeople with more anticipatory coping diversity were less emotionally reactive, but more physically and cognitively reactive to daily stressors. Older adults exhibited less anticipatory coping diversity than younger adults, but the patterns of anticipatory coping diversity differences in reactivity appeared to be consistent across younger and older adults.DiscussionAnticipatory coping diversity reflects a useful index within the stress process that is associated with benefits as well as costs. These findings bridge dispositional and contextual approaches to coping and highlight the importance of understanding how deployment of coping strategies is related to well-being across the adult life span.

Keywords: Anticipatory coping diversity; Coping; Daily stressors; Reactivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/geronb/gbab169 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:geronb:v:77:y:2022:i:4:p:721-732.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B is currently edited by Psychological Sciences - S. Duke Han, PhD and Social Sciences - Jessica A Kelley, PhD, FGSA

More articles in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B from The Gerontological Society of America Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().