Psychological Resilience of Life Transitions: Coping Flexibility as an Adaptive Quality

Abstract

Stressful life changes are inevitable in an ever-changing and complex world, and psychological adjustment to stressful life transitions is thus a crucial life task for many people nowadays. Such an adjustment process is often complicated and lengthy, and may even elicit undesirable consequences. Psychological resilience is thus proposed as an adaptive psychological quality that fosters effective adjustment to stressful life changes. In the extant literature, researchers have conceptualized psychological resilience in a vast variety of ways. Our research team applied this construct to the context of coping, and operationalized it by assessing the levels of coping flexibility. Grounded in the person-situation inter-actionist approach, coping flexibility refers to the ability to deploy coping strategies that meet the specific demands of an array of stressful life events. This construct comprises three components: (a) cognitive flexibility, (b) response flexibility, and (c) a good match or “fit” between strategy characteristics and situational demands. Our research team has evaluated the effectiveness of this construct in explaining individual differences in psychological adjustment to stressful life transitions. As consistently shown in the findings derived from our research programs, coping flexibility was positively associated with a range of desirable mental and physical health outcomes among both community and patient samples, thus attesting to the adaptive role of coping flexibility in psychological adjustment to stressful life changes.