Exploring Risk Communication by Oene Wiegman & Jan M. Gutteling

Author:Oene Wiegman & Jan M. Gutteling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer-Verlag Wien 2012
Published: 2014-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

4.5. Coping with stressful events

The stress-coping paradigm has been applied to numerous disturbing events in everyday life. Lazarus and Cohen (1977) developed a classification of environmental stress conditions in which three major groups of stressors are distinguished. Their categorization is based on the speed of onset (sudden versus gradual) of an environmental stress condition, whether the experience is shared or individual, and whether the experience with the stressor is of short or long duration. The first group of stressors comprises very serious disturbances of the psychological balance by large-scale events, such as natural disasters or technological catastrophes (see also Section 4.5.1). The second group of stressors is referred to as critical life events and comprises events potent enough to elicit adaptive responses in the individual, such as a divorce or the death of a loved one. We will not elaborate on this category of stressors. The third category comprises relatively light, but chronic disturbances of everyday life, usually in the form of daily worries about financial or family problems, traffic jams, etc. According to Lazarus and Cohen (1977), these stressors are relatively stable, occur on a regular basis, and do not require a distinct or immediate individual reaction. Stallen and Tomas (1988) studied the daily hassles related to living in the neighborhood of a highly industrialized area and observed more worries about environmental risks than with individuals living somewhere else. Kanner et al. (1981) compared the stress caused by daily hassles and the more positive daily uplifts with the stress caused by critical life events. Psychological stress symptoms were found to be correlated more strongly with the level of daily hassles than with the occurrence of critical life events. DeLongis et al. (1982) and Monroe (1983) reported similar findings, underlining the importance of daily worries for people’s well-being. Campbell (1983) identified a fourth category of stressors, which she labelled ambient stressors, to be distinguished from daily hassles. Ambient stressors are chronic, negatively valued, nonurgent, physically perceptible, and intractable to the efforts of individuals to change them (see Campbell, 1983). Examples of ambient stressors are noise and air pollution. With these types of pollution, often both a physical and a perceptual exposure exist; physically, because certain substances can influence the body, perceptually because some cognitive processing of sensory information is occurring.

In the remainder of this chapter, we will focus on the psychological reactions to large-scale events, and the reactions to warnings for these events.

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