Stress, Appraisal, and Coping - Assignment Example

The variations in feelings lead to high mental instability, characteristic of anxiety disorders. Coping responses to anticipated stress, in the form of anxiety, vary among people with anxiety disorders and others. In fact, research has revealed that people with high anxiety tend to mentally prepare for the anticipated stressful events, with ideas and plans to hide their anxiety in public; these people were found to be internally disturbed and could not help themselves to reach a state of balance.

Research indicated that these people had a tendency to restore a number of negative thoughts than positive self-concepts. Lazarus refers to this kind of behavior as a cognitive-transactional process in which the person tends to evaluate a specific instance or environment as stressful and taxing on his well-being. Therapy for such individuals should focus on coping with anxiety emerging out of such specific situations or environments. This can be achieved by producing changes in the way the person evaluates the same situations, i.e., the person must be consciously made to think and view these situations with different perspectives and suggest alternative interpretations.