Barbara J. Felton

Disability and coping as predictors of psychological adjustment to rheumatoid arthritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients have been identified as a medical population at risk for psychological disorder, largely because of the pain and functional disability that are the hallmarks of the disease. This study examined the degree to which self-reported functional disability and coping efforts contribute to psychological adjustment among adult RA patients over a 6-month period. Adaptive outcomes included maintaining a sense of worth, mastery, and positive affect despite the illness. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that increases in disability were related to decreased acceptance of illness and increased negative affect. Coping efforts were related to increases in positive affect. The findings provide modest support for the role individual coping efforts play in shaping illness-related outcomes. Although disability is not easily reversed, knowledge about coping strategies that moderate its psychological impact may provide a useful basis for designing psychological interventions to promote adjustment.

Social supports as stress buffers for adult cancer patients.

&NA; Although a growing body of research evidence suggests that persons encountering stressful life circumstances are protected from potential declines in health and well‐being by supportive relationships, the evidence for the stress‐buffering qualities of social support for cancer patients is equivocal. This study examines the relationship between naturally occurring, supportive behaviors and psychological adjustment to the illness for 32 nonhospitalized adult cancer patients, and includes follow‐up data collected 7 months after the initial interview. Results indicated that although support appeared to have few effects on adjustment at either time point for the sample as a whole, social support was related to poorer adjustment for patients not undergoing chemotherapy or radiation treatments, or for those with many limitations on physical functioning. These findings, though tentative because of the sample size, point to the need to consider the specific contextual stresses the cancer patient is experiencing in evaluating psychosocial adjustment to the illness, and suggest caution in assuming social supports to be a universal boon.

Social integration and social support: Moving “social support” beyond the individual level

Despite the extra-individual nature of social relationships, social support and social networks have been treated by and large as individual-level concepts. This article describes some of the forms that an individualistic bias takes in our current approaches to conceptualization and measurement of social support and social networks and suggests three steps towards an extra-individual treatment of these concepts: (1) expand notions of social support to encompass social integration; (2) examine the role of groups and settings as social network “members”; and (3) explore functional and structural characteristics of social networks as independent and dependent measures.

The coping function of sex-role attitudes during marital disruption.

This study of 114 couples seeking help for their marital problems examines the hypothesis that nontraditional sex-role attitudes function as a coping resource to ameliorate the distress of marital disruption. Stress was measured by whether or not the individuals marital goal was congruent with the current situation of living together or apart and with the spouses marital goal of maintaining the marriage or the separation. Incongruence was found to be related to reported distress for both men and women; incongruence in the living situation had a greater effect on distress than incongruence with the spouses goal. Nontraditional sex-role attitudes were associated with reduced distress for both men and women, but such sex-role attitudes interacted with the stress measures to reduce reported distress only for women. The finding that nontraditional sex-role attitudes perform a coping function for women but not for men is discussed in terms of its implications for sex-specific and situation-specific coping mechanisms.