Lazarus Theory Of Stress

The conceptualization of stress is important to understand how people learn to cope with stress. How an individual conceptualizes stress will determines his or her adaption, response, or the way managing strategies. There are three main models of stress, which are stimulus based stress models, response based models, and transactional based models. The stimulus based stress models viewed stress as significance life event or change that demands response, adaptation, or adjustment. This refers to the identification of potential sources of stress. An individual is bombarded with possible sources of stress, which is also called as stressor, but only one more apparently event that can change the balance between coping and the total failure of

There are two concepts that related to this theory which are cognitive appraisal and coping. Cognitive appraisal is a based on the idea that emotional process are dependent with regard to the consequence of a specific encounter. This concept is important in explaining individual differences in environment that are factually equal for different people. A number of personal and situational factors such as values, goals, and motivational characters determine this concept. Lazarus also distinguishes 15 basic emotions and nine of it is negative such as anger, anxiety and sadness, whereas four are positives which are love, happiness and pride. The other concept is coping in which it defines as the cognitive and behavioral efforts made to endure and lessen conflict. However, coping actions are not classified according to its effects but to certain characteristics of the coping process. Coping is frequently characterized by the simultaneous incidence of different action orders creating coping

According to Lazarus, he focused on the fact that there are differences among people in understanding of stress. People and groups of people differ in sensitivity and their responds to certain types of event. Thus, it is important to take into account factors like the cognitive processes that differentiate stimulus and response. Cognitive process in this case means the process of judgment in which how an individual recognize available resources and choices that help them to deal with any events. When faced a stressor, a person evaluates the potential threats and this is called as primary appraisal. Second appraisal is defines as how an individual facing a stressor and how they coping the situations. Coping of a certain situations could help the individual to get healthy emotional and physical conditions due to great plans they make when dealing with an event and how they change the way, they feel and think about a stressful condition. Based on all of these theories, it is important to analyze the problem of stress including the sources and the way to handle such events according to these three models. It is important to define stress according to these theories because it is clear that the pattern of disease caused by stress cannot be explained simply by physiological factors