548 v. AFFECTI vE PROCESSES
idea that people have a set of resources that 
they try to protect, defend, and conserve. 
Resources can be physical (e.g., a house, car, 
clothing); they can be conditions of one’s 
current life (e.g., friends and relatives, stable 
employment, sound marriage); they can be 
personal qualities (e.g., a positive view of the 
world, work skills, social prowess); or they 
can be energy resources (e.g., money, credit, 
or knowledge). A resource is anything the 
person values.
This theory holds that people try to sustain 
the resources they have and acquire more. 
Stress occurs when resources are threatened 
or lost, or when people invest their resources 
and do not receive an adequate return on the 
investment. Hobfoll (1989) argued that loss 
is the central experience in stress (Hobfoll, 
Freedy, Green, & Solomon, 1996). Threat is 
an impending loss. One might think of the 
failure to receive an adequate return on in -
vestment of resources as the loss of an antici -
pated new resource.
This theory uses an economic metaphor 
for experience. People acquire resources, de -
fend them, and use them to acquire more re -
sources. Stress occurs when the market has 
a downturn in the value of your resources or 
when an event of some sort wipes out part of 
your resource base. In our view, however (and 
nothing about this view contradicts Hobfoll’s 
position), these resources matter to people in -
asmuch as they facilitate movement toward 
desired goals (or avoidance of threats).
What good is having a car? It can take 
you places, and it can make an impression 
on people. What use are friends? They can 
help you feel better when you are upset, and 
you can do things of mutual enjoyment with 
them. What use is a positive life view? It 
keeps you moving toward a variety of goals. 
Work skills permit you to complete projects, 
achieve things, and hold a job that fosters 
continued movement toward goals. Money 
and influence are means to a variety of ends.
In short, for most people, resources are in -
timately bound up in the continuing pursuit 
of goals. Thus, we think that any attempt to 
conserve resources occurs in the implicit ser -
vice of eventual continued goal attainment. 
A loss of resources represents a threat to that 
continued goal attainment. Once again, we 
see a strong implicit connection to principles 
of self-  regulation.The Structure of  Coping
These approaches to stress have a good deal 
in common with self-  regulatory principles. 
The self-  regulatory principles also have im -
portant implications for conceptualizing the 
activities of coping. Coping responses have 
been organized in several ways by differ -
ent authors (e.g., Carver & Connor-  Smith, 
2010; Compas, Connor-  Smith, Saltzman, 
Thomsen, & Wadsworth, 2001; Skinner, 
Edge, Altman, & Sherwood, 2003). How -
ever, two distinctions in particular among 
coping responses have become ingrained in 
the literature.
A distinction that was made early on 
(Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) was between 
problem- focused and emotion- focused cop -
ing. Problem-  focused coping consists of at -
tempts to remove the obstacle or to mini -
mize its impact. Emotion-  focused coping 
is attempts to reduce the distress emotions 
caused by the obstacle (either by reapprais -
ing it or by management of the emotions; 
Gross, 1998). Although these two classes 
of responses have different proximal goals, 
they also facilitate one another (Carver & 
Connor-  Smith, 2010). Problem-  focused cop -
ing diminishes the threat, but thereby also 
diminishes the distress generated by that 
threat. Emotion-  focused coping diminishes 
distress, which makes it possible to consider 
the problem more calmly, perhaps yielding 
better problem-  focused coping.
Another, more recent, distinction is 
between engagement coping and disen -
gagement or avoidance coping (Carver & 
Conner-  Smith, 2010; Skinner et al., 2003). 
Engagement coping encompasses problem-  
focused coping and many sorts of emotion- 
focused coping. In contrast, avoidance cop -
ing is a set of responses that appear to be 
aimed either at avoiding acknowledgment 
that the problem exists (via self-  distraction, 
denial, substance use, wishful thinking, etc.) 
or at giving up the attempt to do anything 
about it (by substance use, giving up goals 
that are being interfered with, etc.). Some -
times disengagement coping is almost liter -
ally an effort to act as though the stressor 
does not exist, so that it does not have to be 
reacted to, behaviorally or emotionally.
This distinction between engagement cop -
ing and disengagement coping has a very 