In psychology, coping is the process of managing taxing circumstances, expending effort to solve personal and interpersonal problems, and seeking to master, minimize, reduce or tolerate stress or conflict. Psychology (from Greek: ψυχή, psukhē, spirit, soul; and λόγος, logos, knowledge) is an academic/ applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental processes and behavior. ... Process (lat. ... In medical terms, stress is a physical or psychological stimulus that can produce mental or physiological reactions that may lead to illness. ... For other uses, see Conflict (disambiguation). ...

In coping with disease, people tend to use one of the two main coping strategies: either problem focused or emotion focused coping.^{[citation needed]} The term disease refers to an abnormal condition of an organism that impairs function. ...

People using problem focused strategies try to deal with the cause of their problem. They do this by finding out information on the disease, learning new skills to manage their disease and rearranging their lives around the disease. The ASCII codes for the word Wikipedia represented in binary, the numeral system most commonly used for encoding computer information. ... The term disease refers to an abnormal condition of an organism that impairs function. ...

Emotion focused strategies occur when the person modifies the way they think, for example: employing denial, or distancing oneself from the problem. People may alter the way they think about a problem by altering their goals and values, such as by seeing the humour in a situation. For other uses, see Emotion (disambiguation). ... Denial is a defense mechanism in which a person is faced with a fact that is too painful to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. ... It has been suggested that Long-term goal be merged into this article or section. ... Value is a term that expresses the concept of worth in general, and it is thought to be connected to reasons for certain practices, policies or actions. ... Look up humour in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

People may use a mixture of these different types of coping, and coping mechanisms will usually change over time. All these methods can prove useful, but some claim that those using problem focused coping strategies will adjust better to life.^{[citation needed]} A coping skill is a behavioral tool which may be used by individuals to offset or overcome adversity, disadvantage, or disability without correcting or eliminating the underlying condition. ... Personal life (or everyday life or human existence) is an individual humans personal, private career (including, but not the same as, their employment career), and is a common notion in modern existence -- although more so in more prosperous parts of the world, such as Western Europe and North America...

Men prefer problem focused coping, women prefer emotion focused. Problem focused coping leads to positive affect, giving the individual greater control of the situation. Emotion focused coping leads to negative affect, reducing the control the individual feels they have over the situation. (Nicholls & Polman, 2006)

An individual can cope with a taxing situation by either APPROACHING the source of the conflict by addressing it directly, or AVOIDING the problem (for example repression, denial, ignoring it).

See also

• Resilience
• Stress