When in 1998 Spencer Johnson published his book “Who moved my cheese?”, The concept of coping It was already at the center of many contributions of psychological literature.
Johnson’s book had the merit of illustrating in a simple and immediate way – using an allegory based on the story of two mice and two small men struggling with the disappearance of their cheese – interpersonal diversity in the way of reacting in front of stressful changes of life.
While some individuals show themselves more willing and ready for change and actively engage in the experimentation of different strategies to face the stressful event, others are more reticent in front of a new and unexpected environmental request and tend to persevere in old strategies.
In this case, individuals with one inflexible coping style – compared with those capable of greater flexibility – show difficulties in adapting to stressful changes.
In the face of the great attention paid to the construct of coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), understood as the set of mental and behavioral strategies that are implemented to face a certain situation, the most specific concept of coping flexibility It was relatively less investigated.
For “Coping flexibility“We refer to the subjective ability to adopt strategies in the face of the problem that are variable and adapt to the requests of the environment at that moment (Canton & Fleeson, 1994; Mischel & Schoda, 2000).
This flexibility undoubtedly promotes a greater psychological adaptation to stressful life events and environmental changes in general (Borestein & collaborators, 2009; Cooper, Hedges, & Valentine, 2009) but the studies conducted in this regard have often investigated different aspects within the same construct. Only recently was an accurate meta-analysis (Cheng, La, & Chan, 2014) aimed at ascertaining what the individual strategies that promote the beneficial effect of psychological flexibility are.
Based on this study, it seems that the Coping flexibility It is positively associated with a greater degree of psychological adaptation, even if the correlation varies from child to moderate. In particular, the characteristics that correlate most with a good adaptation are the subjective perception of their coping skills and the ability to choose the most suitable strategies for the situation to be faced, rather than the width of the repertoire of Coping strategies in itself.
In conclusion, it seems that the individuals most capable of responding effectively to environmental stress are those able to select the most appropriate strategy to manage the requests of the specific stressful event, to adequately implement it and to evaluate their effects to decide, to experience other solutions, if necessary.
All this obviously also requires adequate subjective perception of one’s skills, a fundamental element to carry out the whole process successfully.
