C. R. Snyder - Böcker

Most people take the process of coping for granted as they go about their daily activities. In many ways, coping is like breathing, an automatic process requiring no apparent effort. However, when people face truly threatening events--what psychologists call stressors--they become acutely aware of the coping process and respond by consciously applying their day-to-day coping skills. Coping is a fundamental psychological process, and people's skills are commensurately sophisticated. This volume builds on people's strengths and emphasizes their role as positive copers. It features techniques for preventing psychological problems and breaks from the traditional research approach, which is modeled on medicine and focuses on pathology and treatment. Collecting both award-winning research and new findings, this book may well set the agenda for research on stress and coping for the next century. These provocative and readable essays explore a variety of topics, including reality negotiation, confessing through writing, emotional intelligence, optimism, hope, mastery-oriented thinking, and more. Unlike typical self-help books available at any newsstand, this volume features the work of some of the most eminent researchers in the field. Yet like those books it is written for the general reader, as well as for the specialist, and includes numerous practical suggestions and techniques. It will prove an invaluable tool for a wide range of readers.

This is a companion volume to Coping: The Psychology of What Works, which is also edited by Snyder. This second book includes chapters by some of the most well known clinical and health psychologists and covers some of the newest and most provocative topics currently under study in the area of coping. The contributors address the key questions in this literature: Why do some of us learn from hardship and life's stressors? And why do others fail and succumbto depression, anxiety, and even suicide? What are the adaptive patterns and behaviors of those who do well in spite of the obstacles that are thrown their way? The chapters will look at exercise as a way ofcoping with stress, body imaging, the use of humor, forgiveness, control of hostile thoughts, ethnicity and coping, sexism and coping aging and relationships, constructing a coherent life story, personal spirituality, and personal growth.

Social Cognitive Psychology is the first text to provide comprehensive coverage of the field, including thorough discussions of its historical foundations cross-referenced with significant recent developments. Highlights include ;the discipline's origins in pragmatic philosophy and the need for a second social psychology; the contributions of cognition, affect, and direct perception to social knowing, and the development of positive and negative self theories in social context.This valuable reference contains comprehensive chapter summaries, lists of key terms and concepts, and graphs of processing models from various theories.

A pragmatic social cognitive psychology covers a lot of territory, mostly in personality and social psychology but also in clinical, counseling, and school psychologies. It spans a topic construed as an experimental study of mechanisms by its natural science wing and as a study of cultural interactions by its social science wing. To learn about it, one should visit laboratories, field study settings, and clinics, and one should read widely. If one adds the fourth dimen­ sion, time, one should visit the archives too. To survey such a diverse field, it is common to offer an edited book with a resulting loss in integration. This book is coauthored by a social personality psychologist with historical interests (DFB: Parts I, II, and IV) in collaboration with two social clinical psychologists (CRS and JEM: Parts III and V). We frequently cross-reference between chapters to aid integration without duplication. To achieve the kind of diversity our subject matter represents, we build each chapter anew to reflect the emphasis of its content area. Some chapters are more historical, some more theoretical, some more empirical, and some more applied. All the chapters reflect the following positions.

The authors—professional psychologists who work with children and families—believe that adults can help children build hope and combat hopelessness, and use stories that children construct about themselves to document the hope-building process. Included are two useful appendixes and a new introduction, in which the authors respond to readers’ questions and reactions to the original edition, which was published by Westview Press in 1997.   From the Introduction to the Percheron Press Edition . . . '[H]ope results when an adult spends the time and effort to convey hopeful thinking to a child.  Hope is a highly personal experience. The power rests in the adult who is committed to raising a child’s hope.'   From the Foreword . . . 'The authors . . . have captured and conveyed the preciousness of hope in human development throughout one’s life span. Here you will encounter numerous stories that illustrate the formidable power of positive possibilities in helping people to cope with and grow from the challenges of everyday life.' Michael J. Mahoney, University of North Texas and Saybrook Graduate Research Center