A Place for Traits in Stress Research

Richard Lazarus has made a pioneering and lasting contribution by reintroducing complex mental processes to behavioral psychologists interested in stress and coping. His ideas are a significant part of the "cognitive revolution. " His concepts of primary and secondary appraisal and his analyses of the various mental "maneuvers" in which homo sapiens engages to make stress tolerable have been accepted widely by cognitive behaviorists. Lazarus, in fact, has probably had as much to do as anyone with the fact that "cognitive behavioral" is no longer an amusing or annoying oxymoron. Although clearly influenced by psychodynamic ideas about the mental gymnastics of people in quandaries, Lazarus jettisoned most of the elaborate psychoanalytic apparatus as so much unneeded ballast. His own conceptual scheme, although describing invisible workings of the mind, is sparse and common-sensical enough not to alarm behaviorists wary of mentalistic backsliding. Another characteristic of Lazarus's current thinking that might appeal to the behaviorally oriented psychologist is a conspicuous lack of interest in how contemporary personality trait concepts could be brought to bear on differences in the way individuals experience and cope with stress. Such a neglect did not characterize Lazarus's earlier thinking and research. On the contrary, personality variations specifically thought to relate to stress and coping were studied seriously in his early investigations. A chronological review of Lazarus's inquiries into the psychology of stress reveals a clear trend beginning with a near-exclusive focus on individual differences and their consistency across situations, but ending in a repudiation of the relevance of personality traits to this area of research in psychology. Typical of the initial position is a laboratory study reported by Lazarus and Longo (1953) in which the authors concluded that "it appears likely that Ss have a relatively consistent way of dealing with threat situations" (p. 498). In interpreting their findings, Lazarus and Longo speculated that they were "dealing with a retroactive defense process such as is assumed in the concept of repression" (p. 498). Findings and interpretations such as these encouraged efforts to develop self-report measures to assess individuals' standing on a personality trait termed repression-sensitization (Byrne, 1964; Gordon, 1957). Most such measures consisted of single scales, or combinations of scales taken from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). During the early 1960s, Lazarus focused on the experimental study of factors influencing the cognitive appraisal of threat. In one study, Lazarus and Alfert (1964) found that the success of experimental interventions designed to reduce stress reactions depended on personality: "Ss high in disposition to deny threat as measured by various MMPI scales did indeed deny affective disturbance more than low deniers" (p. 195). A few years later, Lazarus became concerned with the discrepancy between self-report and physiological indices of stress. Following a reanalysis of six experiments, Weinstein, Averill, Opton, and Lazarus (1968) concluded that "repressors showed relatively greater autonomic than self-report reactions to stress, while sensitizors tended to show the opposite pattern of response. These results were primarily due to the influence of defensive style on self-reports" (p. 406). We return to the issue of discrepancy in our discussion of Lazarus's current research on the relation between "hassles" and health. In a subsequent article, Averill, Olbrich, and Lazarus (1972) reported a failure to replicate previous findings by Lazarus and his colleagues that had shown personality correlates of differential responsiveness to direct and vicarious threat. This article appears to mark a turning point in Lazarus's thinking about the importance of personality traits for understanding stress. He concluded that "it indicates the need for a change in strategy-perhaps along the lines suggested by Endler and Hunt (1968), and Mischel (1968), and others-which places less emphasis on transsituational personality dispositions and more emphasis on isolating the specific sources of variance operating in any given situation" (Averill, et al., 1972, p. 29). The failure to replicate one rather special aspect of the relation between personality and stress (reactions to direct vs. vicarious threat) had a marked and, we believe, disproportionate effect-namely, the abandonment of trait concepts. Lazarus's current thinking on the importance of traits in stress research is evident in the following statement: