Coping Styles and Aggression: A Biobehavioral Approach

Health and stress-related disease are generally considered to be influenced by a complex interplay between the actual environmental demands and the individual’s capacity to cope with these demands. A wide variety of medical, psychological, and biological studies both in humans and in animals demonstrate that individuals may differ in their capacities to cope with such environmental demands. Factors that have been shown to affect the individual coping capacity include genotype, ontogeny, adult experience, age, social support, and so forth. For ages, researchers have tried to determine the individual vulnerability to stress-related diseases using estimates of the individual coping capacity. These attempts date back to the times of Hippocrates who distinguished the following four temperaments: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic. Each of these temperaments was supposed to reflect a general attitude in dealing with everyday problems. More recent approaches use the concept of coping and try to classify coping responses into distinct coping strategies. Psychologists define coping in humans as the cognitive, behavioral, and emotional ways of managing stressful situations. According to Lazarus (1966), coping responses are determined by the appraisal of the degree of control over important resources available to the individual. In their conceptualization, psychologists divide coping responses into emotion-focused coping and problem-focused coping strategies. The concept of coping is also used by biologists to understand the behavioral and physiologic ways animals manage stressful conditions. A coping strategy can therefore be defined as a coherent set of behavioral and physiologic stress responses that is consistent over time and context and that is characteristic of a certain group of individuals. Most studies describe individual differences in behavior and physiology as trait characteristics that may determine the individual’s vulnerability to stress-related diseases. These studies are in the realm of biomedical sciences, yet there is a growing interest in individual differentiation in behavior and physiology in the science of ecology and evolutionary biology (Sih, Bell, Johnson, & Ziemba, 2004). Individual variation in coping with challenges in the natural habitat is not only considered as the origin of speciation but may be an important factor in the regulation of populations as well. It seems that coping strategies have been shaped by evolution and