Perceived Control and the Development of Coping

Abstract

Perceived control is a powerful resource when dealing with stressful life events. Research on perceived control (in all its guises, including locus of control, self-efficacy, causal attributions, confidence, and perceived competence) documents its role in supporting constructive mastery-oriented coping at all points in the lifespan. Likewise, research at every age reveals the vulnerabilities induced by a sense of helplessness and loss of control, and documents their effects in undermining how people deal with difficulties and failures. This chapter uses work on the development of perceived control to help guide the developmental study of coping, examining (1) how masteryoriented and helpless ways of coping may change in their form across infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age; (2) how the development of perceived control may contribute to qualitative shifts in how coping is organized as people age; and (3) how coping itself may constitute a proximal process that shapes the development of perceived control. Throughout the chapter, a multi-level systems view on the development of coping is highlighted, with a strong emphasis on the role of social partners, relationships, and contexts in shaping both coping and perceived control.

Full text

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3 Perceived Control and the Development
of Coping
Ellen A. Skinner and Melanie J. Zimmer-Gembeck
 e controllability of stress appears to be information
that may be processed at an automatic and a
conscious level and serves to shape and organize
the ways that individuals mobilize their responses.
However, changes in the nature of perceptions of
control and the ways in which the objective and
perceived controllability shape coping responses
across development is not known and is an
important agenda for future research.
(Compas, 2009 , p. 96)
Fifty years of research have documented the crucial
role played by control, both objective and subjec-
tive, when people are faced with challenges and dif-
fi culties (Bandura, 1997 ; Dweck, 1999 ; Folkman,
1984 ; Lefcourt, 1992 ; Peterson, Maier, & Seligman,
1993 ; Seligman, 1975 ; Skinner, 1995 ; Taylor &
Stanton, 2007 ; Weiner, 1986 ). For example, degree
of objective controllability is considered a defi ning
characteristic of negative life events, with loss of
control one of the few events that researchers
acknowledge as universally stressful (Miller, 1979 ;
 ompson, 1981 ). Even more extensively studied,
however, is perceived or subjective control, one of the
most powerful personal resources that can be called
upon in dealing with obstacles or failures (Folkman,
1984 ; Taylor, 2007 ). Its salutary eff ects have
been demonstrated across domains and age groups
from earliest infancy (Watson, 1966 ) to oldest age
Abstract
Perceived control is a powerful resource when dealing with stressful life events. Research on perceived
control (in all its guises, including locus of control, self-effi cacy, causal attributions, confi dence, and
perceived competence) documents its role in supporting constructive mastery-oriented coping at all
points in the lifespan. Likewise, research at every age reveals the vulnerabilities induced by a sense of
helplessness and loss of control, and documents their effects in undermining how people deal with
diffi culties and failures. This chapter uses work on the development of perceived control to help guide
the developmental study of coping, examining (1) how mastery-oriented and helpless ways of coping
may change in their form across infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age; (2) how the
development of perceived control may contribute to qualitative shifts in how coping is organized as
people age; and (3) how coping itself may constitute a proximal process that shapes the development
of perceived control. Throughout the chapter, a multi-level systems view on the development of coping
is highlighted, with a strong emphasis on the role of social partners, relationships, and contexts in
shaping both coping and perceived control.
Keywords : perceived control , self-effi cacy , coping , aging , social factors
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1(Baltes & Baltes, 1986 ). Multiple programs of
research have traced the many pathways by which a
sense of control infl uences reactions to stress, includ-
ing through physiology, behavior, emotions, energy,
attention, motivation, volition, and cognition.
 e vast majority of research has focused on
individual diff erences, examining how people who
experience diff ering levels of objective or perceived
control behave diff erently during stressful encoun-
ters.  is focus meshes well with the majority of
research on coping, which also examines individual
diff erences: how people who possess diff erent levels
of personal and social resources (e.g., perceived con-
trol or social support) show diff erent kinds of
coping, and how diff erent kinds of coping contrib-
ute to aspects of individual physical, psychological,
and social functioning (Aldwin, 2007 ; Compas
et al., 2001 ; Folkman & Moskowitz, 2004 ). Many
fewer studies have considered the development of
either control or coping, at least partly because the
work on individual diff erences seems so unequivo-
cal:  e benefi ts of perceived control when dealing
with stress are found at all ages.
However, at a general level, researchers also agree
that every aspect of how individuals detect and
respond to stress is shaped by their developmental
level (Aldwin, 2007 ; Compas, 1998 ; Garmezy &
Rutter, 1983 ; Murphy & Moriarity, 1976 ; Skinner
& Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007 ). For example, infants,
children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly diff er
in the kinds of encounters they experience as stress-
ful, in the nature of their appraisals, in their reper-
toires of potential coping responses, and in the role
played by social partners. All these processes should
show age-graded shifts, at least up until early adult-
hood, and potentially across the lifespan (Aldwin,
2007 ). At the same time, however, researchers have
noted the diffi culty of realizing a developmental
agenda for the study of coping (Compas, 1998 ,
2009 ; Coping Consortium, 1998 , 2001 ; Fields &
Prinz, 1997 ; Skinner & Edge, 1998 ; Skinner &
Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007 , 2009), precisely because
coping refl ects a higher-order construct, integrating
work on a variety of processes involved in detecting
and responding to challenges, threats, and losses.
 e goal of this chapter is to use research on the
development of perceived control to serve as a scaf-
fold for work on the development of coping.
Although most studies of control, like most studies
of coping, have focused on individual diff erences,
pockets of research have examined age-graded shifts
in many of the processes used for perceiving and
interpreting control experiences (e.g., Flammer,
1995 ; Gurin & Brim, 1984 ; Heckhausen, 1982,
1984; Skinner & Connell, 1986 ; Skinner, Zimmer-
Gembeck, & Connell, 1998 ; Wang & Pomerantz,
2009 ; Weisz, 1980, 1986; Wigfi eld et al., 2006 ;
Wigfi eld & Eccles, 2002 ). Taken together, they sug-
gest fundamental and systematic shifts at many ages,
for example, in the kinds of information used to
infer control, in the strategies used to exert control,
in the understanding of the causes of control (e.g.,
eff ort, task diffi culty, luck, ability), and even in the
nature of the self to which control is attributed
(Flammer, 1995 ; Skinner, 1995 ; Weisz, 1986 ).
Hence, a careful consideration of developmental
shifts in control, which is a reliably robust contribu-
tor to coping, might help map out some key devel-
opmental landmarks in coping processes.
 is chapter is organized in four sections. After
providing an overview of current multi-level sys-
tems conceptualizations of coping and a brief sum-
mary of the nature and terminology of control, we
use the research on the development of control to
explore three issues: (1) how mastery-oriented and
helpless ways of coping may change in their form
across infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood,
and old age; (2) how the development of perceived
control may contribute to qualitative shifts in how
coping is organized as people age; and (3) how coping
itself may constitute a proximal process that shapes
the development of perceived control. Running
throughout the chapter is a strong emphasis on the
role of social partners, relationships, and contexts in
shaping both coping and perceived control.
Multi-level Systems Views of Coping
At the core of the study of coping are the ways that
people actually react to and deal with real stressors
in their daily lives. As a result, the building blocks of
the area are “ways of coping,” including construc-
tive responses, such as problem-solving, eff ort exer-
tion, help-seeking, distraction, or accommodation,
as well as maladaptive responses, such as helpless-
ness, escape, opposition, social isolation, or rumina-
tion. A focus on actual stressful interactions means
that the study of coping has the potential to add
value to work on risk and resilience by investigating
how overarching risk factors may (or may not) pro-
duce daily encounters with stress, and how individ-
uals’ everyday dealings with stress may (or may not)
contribute cumulatively to lasting resources and
vulnerabilities (Coping Consortium, 1998 , 2001 ).
Moreover, because coping entails a repertoire of
responses, its study has the potential to integrate
research across a range of individual responses to
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1stress, such as help-seeking or rumination, which
typically have been studied in relative isolation from
each other (Coping Consortium, 1998 , 2001 ).
Although ways of coping are a defi ning feature of
research in the area, systems conceptualizations
point out that these ways, even though expressed by
individuals, are actually a function of the entire
transactional “coping system” in which the individ-
ual is embedded. A schematic of the coping system
can be seen in the middle portion of Figure 3.1 .
 is system includes many interacting components,
such as the nature of the stressor itself (e.g., its actual
severity and controllability), the context in which
the encounter takes place, the appraisal of what is at
stake, and the personal and social resources available
to the individual when dealing with the event
(Lazarus & Folkman, 1984 ). In addition, coping
episodes unfold over time, so previous encounters
and ongoing iterations infl uence how people deal
with both novel and recurrent stressors (Folkman &
Lazarus, 1985 ).
At the same time, as also depicted in Figure 3.1 ,
coping can be considered part of a multi-level
process that extends from conditions of risk and
resilience at the highest level to individual moment-
to-moment transactions with stressors at the lowest
level (Coping Consortium, 1998 , 2001 ). As shown
in the top portion of Figure 3.1 , coping can be
viewed as an adaptive process that potentially medi-
ates the eff ects of risk or adversity on the develop-
ment of competence. So within the larger frame of
work on risk and resilience, coping can be consid-
ered a “proximal process” or driver of development
under conditions of adversity (Bronfenbrenner &
Morris, 1998 ). At the same time, as shown in the
bottom portion of Figure 3.1 , coping episodes can
be decomposed into individual stressful encounters
that take place in real time and are shaped by the
actions of particular social partners as well as by the
subsystems that give rise to specifi c individual reac-
tions, such as physiology, emotion, attention, cog-
nition, motivation, and behavior. At this level,
coping overlaps with work on regulation, especially
the study of regulation under stressful conditions
(Compas, 2009 ; Eisenberg, Fabes, & Guthrie,
1997 ; Eisenberg, Valiente, & Sulik, 2009 ; Skinner
& Zimmer-Gembeck, 2009).
Such a multi-level view has been used by theo-
rists to describe the place and purpose of research on
coping with respect to work on resilience (which
takes place at a higher level) and work on regulation
(which takes place at a lower level) (Skinner, 1999 ).
Researchers point out the requirements that such a
task places on conceptualizations of coping, but also
highlight the potential of coping to contribute to
the integration of a range of theories, methodolo-
gies, and fi ndings relevant to understanding how
individual development is shaped by stress and
adversity, work that currently inhabits a variety of
niches distributed across all of psychology (Coping
Consortium, 1998 , 2001 ).
Nature of Control and Control Constructs
In attempting to use research on the development
of control to inform work on coping, it is important
to be clear about the nature and functioning of
control. Because the area of control is so fertile, it
has supported research on a variety of constructs,
including locus of control (Lefcourt, 1992 ; Rotter,
1966 ; Strickland, 1989 ), expectancies of success
(Wigfi eld & Eccles, 2000 ), causal attributions
(Weiner, 2005 ), learned helplessness (Seligman,
1975 ), self-effi cacy (Bandura, 1997 ), mastery (Dweck,
1999 ), and perceived competence (Harter, 2006 ).
(See Heckhausen, 1991 ; Stipek, 2002 ; or Wigfi eld
et al., 2006 , for more details.) On the one hand, the
simultaneous investigation of these overlapping
processes has produced a mature understanding of
the antecedents, consequences, and mechanisms of
control across multiple domains and age groups.
On the other hand, the profusion of constructs has
made it diffi cult to judge the validity of competing
claims or even to discern the boundaries of the fi eld
of control itself (Skinner, 1996 ).
 e nature of control
Although consensus is not complete, a generally
accepted assumption in the area is that the power of
control to organize human behavior is based on the
fact that all people (and many other species) come with
a fundamental psychological need to be eff ective in
their interactions with the environment (Connell &
Wellborn, 1990; Deci & Ryan, 1985 ; Elliot & Dweck,
2005 ; Elliot, McGregor, &  rash, 2002 ; Harter,
1978 ; Koestner & McClelland, 1990 ; Skinner, 1985).
Referred to as the need for eff ectance, competence, or
control, this idea was fi rst articulated in the psycho-
logical literature in 1959 by Robert White, who
assembled a wide range of observations and research
sug gesting humans possess an intrinsic desire to create
eff ects in the environment, apparent, for example, in
infants’ delight in making things rattle and fall. White’s
insight — that this motive off ers an adaptive edge
because people are naturally motivated to discover
how the world works and how their actions can be
eff ective — has proven durable. Successive generations
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1of researchers have shown how species-wide human
neurophysiology supports this motivation, providing
energy and eff ort focused on producing desired and
preventing undesired outcomes, and leading to joy
upon creating eff ects and dejection at non-contingency
and loss of control (e.g., Amat et al., 2007 ; Gunnar &
Quevado, 2007 ; Watson & Ramey, 1972 ).
Terminology of control
Hence, at the core of control is the experience of
exerting eff ort that produces a desired outcome
(Skinner, 1996 ). Also referred to as generative trans-
mission or personal force , these experiences of control
or mastery can be distinguished from objective and
subjective control. Objective control conditions refer
Resources
Liabilities
Previous
episodes
Individual
factors
Social
factors
COPING Outcomes
Appraisals
Demands
COPING
ADAPTIVE
PROCESSES
STRESS
RISK
ADVERSITY
HEALTH
COMPETENCE
DEVELOPMENT
D
E
V
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L
O
P
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o
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a
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Appraisals
and
reappraisals
Changing
resolutions
Context
(re)action
Context
(re)action
Context
(re)action
Context
(re)action
Context
(re)action
Coping
(re)action
Coping
(re)action
Coping
(re)action
Coping
(re)action
Attention
Motivation
Emotion
Cognition
Physiology
Behavior
Coping as an interactional process
Coping as an episodic process
Coping as an adaptive process
Figure 3.1 A model of coping as a multi-level adaptive system operating (top) as an adaptive process across developmental time,
(middle) as an episodic process across episodic time, and (bottom) as an interactional process across real time.
(Reprinted, with permission, from the Annual Review of Psychology , Vol. 58, 2007.)
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1to the actual controllability of outcomes, usually
depicted by the objective contingencies in the envi-
ronment (the conditional probability of an outcome
given action compared to the probability of an
outcome given no action) and the actual competen-
cies of the actor (Seligman, 1977). Careful experi-
mental studies of objective non-contingency have
been able to uncover the neurological and hormonal
pathways by which it shapes stress responses, and
have shown that its deleterious eff ects can be found
across a range of mammalian species (Maier &
Watkins, 2005 ).
Subjective control refers to perceived control or
the actor’s estimations of the control available to
him or her. Most theories in the area are focused on
perceived control, and so their names refer to facets
of subjective control: an overall sense of control
(e.g., expectancies of success, control beliefs), beliefs
about available contingencies (e.g., locus of control,
causal attributions, learned helplessness, strategy
beliefs), or beliefs about one’s access to eff ective
means (e.g., self-effi cacy, perceived competence,
perceived ability, capacity beliefs). In discussions of
whether more control is better, these diff erent kinds
of control are often confused. Mastery experiences
have consistently been found to result in a range of
physiological and psychological benefi ts. However,
although objective control and subjective control
usually produce positive eff ects, they do not always.
For example, sometimes the availability of control
can prove to be coercive — pressuring people to exert
eff ort or to engage with stressors when they might
prefer not to.
Individual Diff erences in Control
and Coping
All three kinds of control, that is, objective, subjec-
tive, and experiences of control — shape coping
(Folkman, 1984 ). Objective controllability is a defi n-
ing feature of the stressors to which individuals are
exposed (Seligman, 1975 ). When examining coping,
researchers are usually careful to distinguish situa-
tions that are objectively uncontrollable from those
that are open to infl uence (Compas et al., 1991 ).
Controllability matters, whether the event is rela-
tively trivial and short-lived (e.g., going to the den-
tist or giving a report in front of the class) or more
chronic and potentially life-changing (e.g., parents’
divorce or life-threatening illness). In fact, a key dif-
ference between stressors appraised as challenge,
threat, or loss is the degree of controllability, with
loss events by defi nition off ering no possibility of
reversing the outcome (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984 ).
Subjective control describes an important per-
sonal resource individuals draw upon in forming
appraisals and planning actions (Dweck, 1999 ;
Folkman, 1984 ). It is the conduit by which objec-
tive control conditions shape coping (Abramson,
Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978 ). In contrast to objec-
tive and subjective control, experiences of control
describe the coping process itself: Mastery refers to
coping episodes in which problem-solving eff orts
are deployed, and in which, over time, desired out-
comes are produced and undesired ones are pre-
vented or terminated. In the same vein, helplessness
describes coping experiences in which attempts to
infl uence the outcome do not produce their desired
eff ects.
Control and the dynamics of coping
 e eff ects of control are apparent at every point in
the coping process (Dweck, 1999 ; Folkman, 1984 ;
Skinner, 1995 ; Wigfi eld et al., 2006 ). When events
are objectively controllable or when individuals
have high confi dence and effi cacy, they are more
likely to expect to be eff ective in stressful situations
and so to appraise negative events as challenges
rather than threats.  ey approach tasks with
concentration and vigor, break them into manage-
able sequential parts, and employ a variety of alter-
native strategies.  ey look for action opportunities
as events unfold, and remain focused on problem
solutions.  ey maintain access to their cognitive
resources and so perform close to the ceiling of their
capacity.  ey show fl exible and creative problem-
solving, and seek help when needed. Regulation is
constructive — that is, focused on generating strate-
gies and shaping actions to be eff ective.  ey collect
information about potential contingencies, viewing
even failed attempts as instructive.  ey show more
planning and proactive coping, taking preemptive
actions.  is pattern of coping is likely to be suc-
cessful in actually dealing with stressful situations,
and even when problems are not immediately solv-
able, produces gains in knowledge and skills. Over
time, these coping episodes augment actual compe-
tence and may even reduce the likelihood of sub-
sequent encounters with stressful events, both of
which in the long run bolster a sense of control
(e.g., Schmitz & Skinner, 1993 ).
Processes of helplessness have also been studied
in detail (Dweck, 1999 ; Peterson et al., 1993 ).
People who are exposed to uncontrollable events,
who feel incompetent, or who believe that events are
contingent on unknown or uncontrollable causes
(like powerful others, chance, luck, or fate) seem to
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1be debilitated by obstacles or failures.  ey are more
upset and show greater involuntary stress reactions.
 ey appraise events as more threatening and tend
to procrastinate or give up quickly.  ey lose focus
and concentration, becoming distracted by self-
doubt, rumination about failure, and worries about
lack of ability.  ese preoccupations rob them of
their previous skills at hypothesis-testing and strat-
egizing (Dweck, 1999 ), resulting in more rigid
problem-solving, passivity, confusion, escape, or
help avoidance.  is pattern of coping is not eff ec-
tive in dealing with stressors or learning from mis-
takes, and interferes with the development of actual
skills and competencies, even making future stres-
sors more likely (Downey, Freitas, Michaelis, &
Khouri, 1998 ). In the long run, such experiences
cement pessimism and expectations of future help-
lessness (e.g., Nolen-Hoeksma, Girgus, & Seligman,
1986 ).
As can be seen, these dynamics are amplifying.
Individuals who are initially high on perceived con-
trol, through the ways they engage with problems,
become even more competent and effi cacious,
whereas individuals who initially doubt their capac-
ity to infl uence events, through their ineff ectual
handling of challenges, become even less competent
and more helpless. Such cycles, if they iterate over
time, can magnify initial individual diff erences,
making the rich richer and the poor even poorer,
and transforming subjective control to objective
control. Taken together with information about
objective control conditions (actual stressors and
diffi culties) and social supports, these dynamics can
provide one account of the development of indi-
vidual diff erences in perceived control, competence,
and patterns of coping with stress (Seligman, 1975 ;
Skinner et al., 1998 ).
Developmental Conceptualizations
of Coping
It has proven surprisingly diffi cult to move beyond
research on individual diff erences in coping in order
to focus on the study of its development. A develop-
mental agenda calls for research that identifi es age-
graded shifts in how infants, children, youth, adults,
and the elderly detect, appraise, and respond to
actual stressful events in their everyday lives, and
would depict the underlying developments respon-
sible for these changes (Compas, 1998 , 2009 ;
Murphy & Moriarity, 1976 ; Skinner & Edge, 1998 ;
Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007 ). In making
progress on this agenda, researchers have had to
construct “developmentally friendly” conceptualiza-
tions that link coping to basic adaptive processes.
An important step in this regard has been consensus
that coping can be considered “regulation under
stress” (Compas et al., 2001 ; Eisenberg et al., 1997 ,
2009 ; Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007 ). From
this perspective, coping refers to how people mobi-
lize, coordinate, manage, and direct their actions
(including behavior, emotion, attention, cognition,
and physiology) under conditions of challenge,
threat, or loss.  is defi nition establishes links
between coping and the normative development of
emotional, attentional, and behavioral regulation as
well as the underlying constitutional and social fac-
tors that shape their development.
A second important step has been the use of
overarching families to help organize the seemingly
endless lists of ways of coping that have been stud-
ied to date (Skinner, Edge, Altman, & Sherwood,
2003 ). It has proven impossible to integrate studies
of coping across (or even within) age groups because
assessments utilize a wide variety of disparate and
partially overlapping categories of coping (Compas
et al., 2001 ; Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2009 ).
Analyses of their multiple functions allow ways of
coping to be classifi ed into about a dozen families
that serve three major adaptive functions (Table 3.1 ).
 e major adaptive function of the ways of coping
organized around control is to fi nd actions that
are eff ective in operating contingencies in the envi-
ronment.  e four families that serve this function
are: (1) problem-solving , which allows people to gen-
erate and adjust their actions so that they are eff ec-
tive; (2) information-seeking , which allows people
to discover new contingencies in the environment;
(3) helpless ness , which identifi es the limits of eff ective
action; and (4) escape, which is an extreme form of
avoidance that allows people to leave, distance them-
selves from, or deny non-contingent environments.
Each of these families contains many ways of
coping in addition to the one used as its label. For
example, “problem-solving” includes all ways of
coping that serve the function of adjusting actions
to be more eff ective, such as eff ort exertion, persis-
tence, instrumental action, strategizing, planning,
active attempts, and so on. Likewise, “information-
seeking” includes many ways of collecting knowl-
edge about how to produce desired and prevent
undesired events, including asking others, looking
up information in reference sources, direct observa-
tion of others’ performances, reading, experimenta-
tion, and so on.  ese four families of coping have
been the subject of intense scrutiny: Within research
on coping, they are some of the most common ways
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Table 3.1 A hierarchical model of adaptive processes and families of coping
Adaptive Process #1: Coordinate Actions and Contingencies in the Environment
Family of Coping 1. Problem-solving 2. Information-Seeking 3. Helplessness 4. Escape
Family Function in
Adaptive Process
Adjust actions to be eff ective Find additional contingencies Find limits of actions Escape non-contingent
environments
Ways of Coping Strategizing
Instrumental action
Planning
Mastery
Reading
Observation
Asking others
Confusion
Cognitive interference
Cognitive exhaustion
Passivity
Behavioral avoidance
Mental withdrawal
Flight
Denial
Wishful thinking
Adaptive Process #2: Coordinate Reliance and Social Resources Available
Family of Coping 5. Self-reliance 6. Support-Seeking 7. Delegation 8. Social Isolation
Family Function
in Adaptive Process
Protect available social resources Use available social resources Find limits of resources Withdraw from unsupportive
contexts
Ways of Coping Emotion regulation
Behavior regulation
Emotional expression
Emotion approach
Contact-seeking
Comfort-seeking
Instrumental aid
Social referencing
Maladaptive help-seeking
Complaining
Whining
Self-pity
Social withdrawal
Concealment
Avoiding others
Freeze
Adaptive Process #3: Coordinate Preferences and Available Options
Family of Coping 9. Accommodation 10. Negotiation 11. Submission 12. Opposition
Family Function in Adaptive
Process
Flexibly adjust preferences
to options
Find new options Give up preferences Remove constraints
Ways of Coping Distraction
Cognitive restructuring
Minimization
Acceptance
Bargaining
Persuasion
Priority-setting
Rumination
Rigid perseveration
Intrusive thoughts
Other-blame
Projection
Aggression
Defi ance
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1studied and some of the most common reactions to
stress (Skinner et al., 2003 ). Within the area of con-
trol, they are the operational defi nitions of mastery
and helplessness.  ese families represent complete
overlap between the areas of coping and control and
so are the primary ways of coping considered in this
chapter.
Perceived Control and the Development
of Ways of Coping
 e fi rst way that research on perceived control may
be able to contribute to developmental studies of
coping is to reveal how mastery-oriented and helpless
ways of coping change in their form across infancy,
childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age.  e
analysis of overarching functions of coping families
marks the beginning of such a catalog. Functions can
be used to identify corresponding lower-order ways
of coping that, despite their apparent topological
diff erences, are developmentally graded members of
the same family. Functional analyses have been used
in work on emotion and attachment to show that a
variety of forms of action (such as crying, calling,
and crawling to a caregiver) fall within the same cate-
gory because they serve the same function (in this
case, proximity-seeking) (Cassidy, 1994 ; Cassidy &
Shaver, 1999 ).  e identifi cation of functionally
analo gous categories allows a phenomenon to be fol-
lowed across developmental periods even if it changes
its form. A consideration of the action outcomes of
perceived control at successive ages may be helpful
in identifying functionally analogous ways of cop-
ing for the families of problem-solving, information-
seeking, helplessness, and escape.
Perceived control and coping
during infancy
Newborns react to stressors based on their species’
general stress physiology and their temperamental
characteristics (Derryberry et al., 2003 ; Gunnar &
Quevado, 2007 ). Generally, infants come with the
capacity to detect action-outcome contingencies
and to respond to them with interest and energy
(Papousek & Papousek, 1979 ; Watson, 1966 ). At
the same time, there also seem to be inborn indi-
vidual diff erences in sensitivity to contingencies,
interest in creating eff ects, focus of attention, and
intensity of emotional responsiveness to contingent
stimulation. Studied individually as dimensions of
temperament or collectively as mastery motivation
(Morgan & Harmon, 1984), such diff erences have
been documented in the fi rst months of life (Rueda
& Rothbart, 2009 ).
Critical to understanding perceived control in
infancy is the recognition that the earliest experi-
ences of control are created by caregivers when they
show sensitive responsiveness to infants’ signals
(Davidov & Grusec, 2006 ; Lamb & Easterbrooks,
1981 ; Landry, Smith, & Swank, 2006 ; Papousek
& Papousek, 1980 ). Social partners can provide
contingency long before infants have the motor
coordination to create eff ects in the physical world.
Control experiences (and early coping) for infants
consist of sending out distress signals, and gaining
confi dence that caregivers will soon respond with
appropriate comforting actions.  e same experi-
ences that promote a sense of control also promote a
secure attachment, and such attachments have been
shown to buff er stress and shape the development
of stress reactions, including physiological ones,
starting at birth (Nachmias, Gunnar, Mangelsdorf,
Parritz, & Buss, 1996 ).
 e earliest forms of stress reactions are based
on refl exes and temperament, but they are soon
supplemented by action schemes, such as directing
bids or shaping the distress signals sent to caregivers
(Barrett & Campos, 1991 ; Kopp, 1989 ). If care-
giver reactions are not forthcoming, eff orts are nor-
mally intensifi ed (Goldstein, Bornstein, & Schwade,
2009 ). In terms of creating contingencies in the
physical world, early object play involves repetition
and “practice” creating desired eff ects, such as shak-
ing rattles or hitting dangling toys (Piaget, 1976 ).
Early forms of information-seeking may include
social referencing, in which infants study their care-
givers for signs communicating the severity and
emotional signifi cance of novel or stressful events
(Diamond & Aspinwall, 2003 ; Hornik, Risenhoover,
& Gunnar, 1987 ; Lewis & Ramsay, 1999 ; Sorce
et al., 1985 ). Infants use this information to guide
their actions, deciding, for example, whether to
continue into a potentially dangerous situation or to
scoot back to the caregiver. Other early forms of
information-seeking may include object play, in
which the various potentials of an object are explored,
and “learning by doing,” in which infants succes-
sively try out multiple variants on an action, such as
banging a spoon with varying amounts of force
(Piaget, 1976 ).
 e earliest forms of helplessness usually involve
passivity in the face of objectively controllable
events, and may also involve protest and other forms
of emotional distress (Watson & Ramey, 1972 ).
When infants are passive, they create fewer action-
event contingencies. Moreover, learned helplessness
implies that they also pay less attention to eff ects
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1that are created, and so are less sensitive to detect-
ing existing contingencies. In terms of escape, its
prototypical expression involves leaving the stress-
ful situation, and so is most obvious after an
infant can loco mote. Nevertheless, prior to inde-
pendent loco motion, infants can express the desire
to escape by reaching for the caregiver (Robinson &
Acevedo, 2001 ) or leaning/looking away from an
event (Gianino & Tronick, 1988 ).  ey may also
escape through gaze aversion, head turning, or sleep
(Kopp, 1989 ; Kopp & Neufeld, 2003 ; Mangelsdorf,
Shapiro, & Marzolf, 1995 ).
Perceived control and coping during
preschool age
Ages 2 to 5 bring a major shift in children’s action
potential. For the fi rst time, they become able to
intentionally direct their own behaviors, stopping
themselves from doing things they spontaneously
want to do and making themselves do things they
do not really want to (Kochanska, Coy, & Murray,
2005 ).  is expands their repertoire of eff ective
actions and allows them to be more self-reliant in
producing desired eff ects. Temperament continues
to play a role, with children higher in emotional
reactivity less able to regulate and children higher
in eff ortful control more able to regulate their
behaviors of their own accord (Kochanska, Aksan,
& Carlson, 2005 ). Information-seeking can also
become more intentional. Preschool-age children
can pose explicit requests to adults and peers, asking
for information about what to do when faced with
obstacles and diffi culties (Kerns et al., 2006 ).
Young children still rely on caregivers and adults
in stressful situations, but with enough support they
are often able to carry out eff ective actions on their
own (Bronson, 2000 ). At the same time, however, the
severity of the stressful event and the quality of adult
participation determine whether children will be
able to act eff ectively in a given situation (Kopp,
2009 ). Joint problem-solving with caring adults likely
represents the kind of coping episodes out of which a
repertoire of adaptive strategies, as well as confi dence
and actual competence, emerges (Kopp, 2009 ).
At this age, helplessness and escape take on their
prototypical forms (Burhans & Dweck, 1995 ).
Compared to mastery-oriented children, young
children with low perceived control show less persis-
tence, focus, and concentration on diffi cult tasks,
and try out less sophisticated hypothesis-testing
strategies. In terms of escape, they stop working as
soon as possible and select easier future tasks.
Although there was initially some speculation that
young children might be less vulnerable to help-
lessness than older children, subsequent research
has demonstrated that preschool-age children, given
appropriate tasks and concrete evidence of failure,
show full-blown helplessness eff ects, including behav-
ioral, emotional, and self-derogatory components
(e.g., Boggiano et al., 1993 ).
It is important to note that the development of
coping strategies seems to be cumulative (Zimmer-
Gembeck & Skinner, 2009 ) — that is, there is no
evidence that, as new ways of coping emerge, old
strategies disappear. For example, as young children
become able to intentionally deploy actions and
explicitly request information, they nevertheless
continue to have access to action schema that served
them as infants, such as direct action, eff ort exer-
tion, expressions of distress, direct observation of
others, and social referencing. In this way, coping
repertoires are expanded and may become more
organized and integrated, although few studies of
coping have empirically examined this possibility
(Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2009 ).
Perceived control and coping during
childhood
A major shift taking place between ages 5 and 7 is
the development of problem-solving that is largely
cognitive in nature (Sameroff & Haith, 1996 ) — that
is, children are better able to imagine the eff ects of
diff erent strategies, and then select the one they
think is most likely to be eff ective, without needing
to actually try them out on the plane of action
(Piaget, 1976 ).  is expands coping possibilities,
saving children a great deal of time and energy, by
bringing strategies forward from previous episodes
and by avoiding potential failures and negative
social reactions. Children are also increasingly
able to use cognitive means of information-seeking,
for example reading, even though social means of
information-seeking are still preferred, including
going to adults for advice and, for specifi c issues,
turning to peers (Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner,
2008 , 2009 ).
 e use of cognition to organize coping responses
opens the way for adaptive strategies, but it can
also play a role in the creation of helplessness.
During middle childhood, children’s cognitive
expectancies become important and stubborn driv-
ers of action (Dweck, 1999 ). If children believe they
have little or no control (Carpenter, 1992 ) or are
given less objective control over a stressor (Manne
et al., 1992 ), they manage stressful events less com-
petently (see Miller et al., 1999 , for a review). As a
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1result, children’s cognitions interfere with the pro-
duction of evidence that would disconfi rm their
expectations of helplessness. Escape can also take
cognitive forms. In addition to physically escaping
situations in which they do not expect to succeed,
children increasingly escape via cognitive means,
such as daydreaming or withdrawal of mental eff ort
(Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2009 ).  ese forms
of escape may be less disruptive than physical
attempts to leave (in the classroom, for example),
but they are also harder to detect, which means that
they can impede teachers’ and other adults’ attempts
to remedy them.
Perceived control and coping during
adolescence
A major shift during adolescence is the potential for
youth to use meta-cognitive strategies when dealing
with challenges and failures (Kuhn & Franklin,
2006 ; see Compas et al., 2001 , for a review). Meta-
cognition, or the capacity to refl ect on one’s own
cognitive processes, emotions, and actions, provides
at least two advantages to coping. First, it allows a
teenager to use information about the long-term
eff ects of a course of action in making local deci-
sions about which strategy to use in solving a prob-
lem.  e capacity to imagine future emotional and
social consequences of an action extends the poten-
tial eff ectiveness of coping beyond the current
episode (Aspinwall & Taylor, 1997 ). Second, meta-
cognition allows adolescents to coordinate multiple
perspectives and alternative pathways in deciding
how to deal with a challenge or setback.  ey can
comfort themselves using largely cognitive means —
such as telling themselves that a depressed mood
is only temporary — and can coordinate their own
wishes and desires with those of others in their
problem-solving (e.g., Band & Weisz, 1990 ).
Although representations of attachment fi gures play
a role in stress reactions beginning in infancy (Lewis
& Ramsay, 1999 ; Nachmias et al., 1996 ; Urban,
Carlson, Egeland, & Sroufe, 1991 ), adolescents
have the potential to construct even more advanced
and coherent representations of others as available
and secure sources of comfort and aid. Hence, ado-
lescents’ cognitive representations can serve as stron-
ger and more durable sources of support when
others are not physically present, alleviating distress
and allowing adolescents to better focus their coping
actions (Seiff ge-Krenke, 2004 ; Shaver, Belsky, &
Brennan, 2000 ).
Consistent with growth in meta-cognitive strate-
gies, adolescents experience other cognitive advances
that expand their capacity to manage daily stressors
and major life events.  ese include abstract rather
than concrete representations, improvements in
working memory capacity, the ability to engage
in multidimensional thinking, and a greater capac-
ity for self-refl ection (Keating, 1999 ). Moreover,
based on practical experiences, adolescents also gain
knowledge in a range of content areas, including
knowledge about stressful events, controllability,
and coping, which assists them to automatize their
responses or to more easily recognize the most
salient cues and draw upon their knowledge of rel-
evant and useful responses. By having the back-
ground knowledge and the capacity to think about
multiple dimensions and self-refl ect, adolescents
often show signs of broader conceptual reorganiza-
tions (Case, 1985 ; Case, Hayward, Lewis, & Hurst,
1988 ), and they are more likely to use their new
abilities to adopt the perspectives of others, to nego-
tiate and accommodate, and to consider multiple
solutions to their problems (Seiff ge-Krenke, 2004 ).
 e use of meta-cognitive strategies and other
advances in thinking can have drawbacks, too.  e
same skills that permit adolescents to imagine long-
term consequences and think about multiple aspects
of phenomena also permit them to worry about the
future and imagine negative outcomes and failures.
 ey are more likely than children to ruminate and
worry excessively (Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner,
2008 ).  e inferential power of adolescents also
allows them to become stuck within a mindset
of helplessness (Dweck, 2002 ). Once an adolescent
views himself or herself as incompetent, even mul-
tiple experiences of success can be discounted using
inferential tactics — deciding that high performance
is due to luck, easy tasks, or the favor of powerful
others.  e capacity to take multiple perspectives
can also be deployed to evade detection when escap-
ing, whether that be via actual physical escape (like
skipping school) or procrastination (like delaying
household chores). Adolescents also have greater
access to and participate in some potentially detri-
mental escape coping behaviors, such as binge
drinking, other drug use, or risky sexual behavior,
and they report that they do so in order to cope with
stress (Frydenberg & Lewis, 2000 ).
Perceived control and coping during
adulthood
Compared with childhood and adolescence, age-
graded shifts in the means of exerting control are
not as well documented during adulthood (Baltes &
Baltes, 1986 ; Lachman & Prenda-Firth, 2004 ;
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1Wolinsky et al., 2003 ; Zarit, Pearlin, & Schaie,
2003 ). However, it is assumed that as adults develop
domain-specifi c expertise, they will be more eff ec-
tive in problem-solving and strategizing. One pos-
sible new skill is the capacity to integrate and
prioritize competing demands (Deci & Ryan, 1985 ).
 is would allow people to recognize situations in
which diff erent facets of themselves are pulling for
diff erent strategies, and to use their genuine priori-
ties to sort out the right course of action for them-
selves to use in dealing with challenges or failures.
 is might help explain individuals’ increasing
capacity to decline to employ the most eff ective
strategy for producing a given outcome, if the strat-
egy has negative side eff ects, for example, if it vio-
lates their own moral code or infl icts harm on
someone else (Deci & Ryan, 1985 , 2000 ).
During adulthood and old age, changes in how
control is exerted seem to be less a function of age
and more a function of social structure and the
nature of events that are encountered (Aldwin,
Sutton, Chiara, & Spiro, 1996 ; Heckhausen &
Schulz, 1998 ; Zarit et al., 2003 ). So, for example,
social and biological timelines seem to shape indi-
viduals’ control eff orts, with increased activity imme-
diately prior to a developmental deadline (such as
childbearing age) and activities focused on devalu-
ing the outcome once the deadline has passed
(Schulz, Wrosch, & Heckhausen, 2003 ). Despite
researchers’ assumptions that biological and cogni-
tive declines in old age should result in more help-
lessness and maladaptive coping, empirical evidence
contradicts this idea, leading researchers to focus
on the capacities of the elderly to deal with objective
losses without falling into helplessness (Aldwin,
2007 ). Moreover, although so far no evidence sug-
gests that it is age-graded, the emergence of wisdom
and spiritual developments during adulthood and
old age would be likely to reorganize people’s coping
strategies (Baltes & Staudinger, 1995 ), including
problem-solving and information-seeking, as well
as potentially reducing helplessness and the desire
for escape.
Summary of developmentally graded
ways of coping organized around control
Development decisively constrains the expression
of the four families of coping organized around
adjusting actions to be eff ective in producing desired
outcomes.  e limited repertoire of infants involves
refl exes, temperamental preferences, and action
schema. However, if infants have responsive caregiv-
ers, their joint coping repertoire is expanded greatly.
Infants learn in the fi rst days of life whether their
expressed desires create changes in the world.  is
discovery, the origins of a sense of control, can
provide motivation for eff orts to deploy increasingly
more diff erentiated and appropriate signals when dis-
tressed (Holodynski & Friedlmeier, 2006 ). Such expe-
riences actually reduce reactivity in stress physiology
and prepare the infant to be more curious and
active in subsequent interactions with the social and
physical world.
Consistent with research on regulation, research
on control suggests that general mechanisms of
coping accumulate developmentally, for example,
adding regulation via action schemes during infancy,
supplemented by coping through direct action
during preschool age, coping using cognitive means
during middle childhood, and coping using meta-
cognitive means during adolescence (Table 3.2 ;
Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007 ). Perhaps these
means of coping continue to be integrated and
elaborated during adulthood, becoming more selec-
tive and fl exible, at the same time that the develop-
ment of domain-specifi c expertise enriches coping
capacity in selected areas.  e entire repertoire
will be needed to deal adaptively with the normative
challenges of aging (Aldwin, 2007 ).
 ese developmental phases are accompanied by
diff erent kinds of participation by social partners.
During infancy, caregivers carry out coping actions
based on the expressed intentions of their infants.
During toddlerhood and preschool age, children
directly enlist the participation of social partners.
During middle childhood, children are increasingly
able to coordinate their coping eff orts with those
of others, consulting both peers and adults. By ado-
lescence, social partners are a backup system, with
much of their functioning expressed through the
internalization of values and guides by the adoles-
cent. During adulthood, individuals create their
own dyadic and family-level coping systems to
which they contribute and that shape their own
stress reactions and coping (Berg et al., 1998 ).
During later life, the loss of social partners and roles
requires signifi cant adjustment to maintain high-
quality coping, and constructive help from social
partners (e.g., an aging spouse, siblings, or adult
children) is an important interpersonal resource for
coping (Aldwin et al., 2009; Zarit et al., 2003 ).
 roughout the lifespan, reliance on others when
dealing with stressful life events is both normative
and adaptive (Newman, 2000 ). In fact, learning to
“cope well with others” is an important develop-
mental task at every age (Berg et al., 1998 ).
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1 Development of Perceived Control and
Age-Graded Shifts in Coping
 e second way that work on perceived control may
be able guide the developmental study of coping is
to use research on age changes in the processes of
perceiving and interpreting control experiences to
identify developmental periods marked by qualita-
tive changes, and to explore whether they corre-
spond to landmark shifts in processes of coping. In
examining the development of perceived control,
researchers fi nd it useful to organize the variety of
constructs populating the area according to the
functions they serve in an action sequence, such as a
coping transaction (Heckhausen, 1991 ; Skinner,
1995 ). Beliefs that come into play prior to the ini-
tiation of action can be thought of as regulatory
beliefs; beliefs that make sense of action sequences
after they have occurred can be referred to as inter-
pretative beliefs. Regulatory beliefs launch and
guide coping; they shape whether and how people
approach and engage in a stressful transaction.  e
beliefs that regulate action are control beliefs or the
sense that “I can do it.” Variously labeled as per-
ceived control, sense of control, expectancies of suc-
cess, and self-effi cacy, these constructs refer to
generalized expectations that the self can produce
desired and prevent undesired outcomes.
After performance outcomes, individuals employ
interpretative beliefs to translate the causal meaning
of the action episode.  ese include people’s expla-
nations about the likely causes of desired and unde-
sired events (also called strategy beliefs), as well as
people’s explanations about their own role in pro-
ducing success or failure (also known as capacity
beliefs). Strategy beliefs refer to generalized expec-
tancies about the eff ectiveness of certain causes
(such as eff ort, ability, powerful others, luck, and
unknown); they are similar to locus of control,
causal attributions, explanatory style, or response-
outcome expectancies. Capacity beliefs refer to
generalized expectancies about the extent to which
the self possesses or has access to potentially eff ec-
tive causes; they are similar to self-effi cacy, perceived
competence, or perceived ability (Connell, 1985 ;
Skinner, 1995 , 1996 ; Weisz, 1986 ). Both strategy
and capacity beliefs are important in interpreting
the meaning of a causal episode. For example, indi-
viduals may believe that eff ort is a good strategy for
success, but doubt that they have the personal capac-
ity to exert eff ort. Unknown strategy beliefs, or the
conviction that one has no idea how to succeed, are
some of the most pernicious and maladaptive beliefs
people can hold and, developmentally, some of the
earliest predictors of helplessness (Connell, 1985 ).
Profi les of control
Patterns of perceived control can be identifi ed that
are powerful predictors of motivation, performance,
and coping. Optimal profi les include high control
expectancies, high beliefs in eff ort as a strategy, and
high confi dence in one’s own capacities, combined
with low dependence on uncontrollable strategies
Table 3.2 Broad outlines of possible developmental shifts in means of coping
Developmental
Period
Approximate
Ages
Nature of Coping Role of Social Partners Nature of
Regulation
Infancy Birth to
18 months
From refl exes to
coordinated
action schema
Carry out coping actions
based on infant’s expressed
intentions
Interpersonal
co-regulation
Preschool age Ages 2 to 5 Coping using
voluntary direct actions
Available for direct help
and participation
Intrapersonal
self-regulation
Middle childhood Ages 6 to 8 Coping using
cognitive means
Cooperate with and support
child’s coping eff orts
Coordinated
self-regulation
Early adolescence Ages 10 to 12 Coping using
meta-cognitive means
Reminder coping Proactive
self-regulation
Middle adolescence Ages 14 to 16 Coping based on
personal values
Backup coping Identifi ed
self-regulation
Late adolescence Ages 18 to 22 Coping based on
long-term goals
Monitoring coping Integrated
self-regulation
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1(such as ability, powerful others, luck, and unknown).
In contrast, the most maladaptive profi le incorpo-
rates a low generalized sense of control, low beliefs
in eff ort as an eff ective strategy, and low confi -
dence in one’s own capacities, combined with high
reliance on uncontrollable strategies. Aggregate
scores created to refl ect these profi les in the aca-
demic domain are strong predictors of engagement,
achievement, and eventually retention or dropout,
all the way from elementary to high school (e.g.,
Connell et al., 1994, 1996; Skinner et al., 1998 ).
Developmental course of perceived control
Distinguishing among these diff erent kinds of
beliefs has been important for research on develop-
ment because diff erent aspects of perceived control
show diff erent patterns of age-graded change
1
(Skinner et al., 1988 ). In general, young children’s
beliefs start out optimistic, undiff erentiated, and
unrealistic, in that their outcome expectations are
much higher than their actual levels of performance
would warrant (Stipek et al., 1992 ). It is as if young
children have an amalgamated sense of personal
force, which incorporates not only actual eff ective-
ness but also the intensity of their wishes and desires.
At the most general level, normative development
involves successively diff erentiating other important
causes from this amalgam, coming to recognize, for
example, the roles played by other people, task dif-
fi culty, luck, and ability (Weisz, 1980 , 1981 , 1986 ).
Children become more eff ective agents as they
increasingly understand how outcomes are shaped
by the interplay among multiple necessary and suf-
fi cient causes. In this sense, normative change is a
series of developments leading toward more realistic
and complex causal schema as children grow older
(Sedlak & Kurtz, 1981 ; Weisz, 1983 , 1984).
At the same time, however, an increasingly real-
istic understanding of how to exert control comes
with a potential downside. As children become
more clear about the important role played by causes
other than personal force, their sense of their own
competence (which relies on the strength of per-
sonal force) is naturally diminished.  is general
pattern can be discerned in research on the develop-
ment of children’s causal conceptions and perceived
competence in the academic domain (Skinner et al.,
1998 ; Weisz, 1986 ). As causal schema develop that
allow children to successively diff erentiate concep-
tions of eff ort from the contributions of other
people, from their own desires and wishes, from
task diffi culty, from luck, and from ability, a steady
decline in children’s sense of their own competence
can be detected (Stipek & Daniels, 1988 ), accom-
panied by evidence that these perceptions come to
be calibrated to their actual levels of performance
(e.g., Stipek, 1984).
In integrating work on development with
research on individual diff erences, the key question
for control theorists becomes: How can children’s
generalized sense of control, which ideally would
remain strong, weather the successive developments
needed to produce a more realistic understanding of
the complexity (and potential uncontrollability)
of causes? In other words, how can children con-
struct a successively more complex and veridical
picture of causal phenomena without exerting so
much downward pressure on their control expec-
tancies that it undermines their motivation, engage-
ment, and coping? We consider these questions
briefl y for three well-documented developmental
shifts that take place during early childhood, middle
childhood, and early adolescence. We also speculate
about some less well-studied shifts during adult-
hood and aging. In keeping with a multi-level devel-
opmental framework, the answers to these questions
include a consideration of what the individual
brings from previous developmental periods, as well
as the nature of the current shift (typically based on
underlying cognitive developments), and the
demands and supports provided by social partners
in the current context.
Diff erentiating self and other as causes
of outcomes
Sometime during the second year, children come to
appreciate the diff erence between the actions of the
self and those of other people as causal factors in
producing task outcomes (Heckhausen, 1982 ,
1984 ). In the parlance of control, conceptions of
personal force no longer include concrete instru-
mental help from others. Hence, to feel effi cacious,
a toddler needs to “Do it myself!” (Geppert &
Kuster, 1983 ).  is development may be one factor
underlying the emergence of the desire for autono-
mous action, which is a marked characteristic of
2-year-olds (Heckhausen, 1988 ). In terms of coping,
such a development suggests that caregivers may
need to take a step back from directly carrying out
coping actions for children or risk undermining
their sense of control. However, despite the fact that
it refl ects a cognitive advance and may contribute to
gains in self-reliance, the loss of direct physical assis-
tance from caregivers seriously limits what children
are able to achieve, and so creates its own corre-
sponding risk of helplessness.
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1 To negotiate this transition in ways that support
independence and still preserve a sense of effi cacy,
caregivers are required to show careful developmen-
tal attunement during coping episodes (Kliewer,
Sandler, & Wolchik, 1994 ). Caregivers can gently
move to more distal forms of support, scaff olding
toddlers’ performance with suggestions, ideas, and
encouragement. Patience is also required, as children’s
initial struggles take longer than caregivers’ solu-
tions, and children’s frustration and discouragement
may be diffi cult for caregivers to tolerate. In a sense,
caregivers now move to standby alert, so they are
available if children ask for direct help, to respond
with a teaching attitude, suggesting to the child
“I’ll show you how, so you can do it yourself.”
 e transition in modes of coping is smoother if,
prior to toddlers’ demands for independence, care-
givers have a history of actively promoting children’s
skill acquisition and independent coping.  is
increases the likelihood that toddlers have more
actual competence at their disposal when attempt-
ing to be self-reliant. Moreover, the handoff to more
independent coping is facilitated by a secure attach-
ment, based on a previous history of sensitive coop-
eration between caregiver and child.  is results in
more fl exibility on the child’s part in relying on and
welcoming appropriate forms of participation from
caregivers. It also supports the development of a
child’s sense that he or she has access to powerful
others during coping episodes. In contrast, when
caregivers are intrusive and continue to insert them-
selves into children’s coping episodes when help is
not needed or over children’s protests, children can
become helpless, passive, resistant, or angry
(Pomeranz & Eaton, 2000 , 2001 ). In a similar vein,
when children try to cope by themselves with events
that overwhelm them, such as often occurs with
neglectful parenting, children can become discour-
aged, confused, or anxious. Both intrusive and
neglectful parenting undermine the development of
self-reliant strategies for dealing with challenges and
threats, as well as interfering with a sense of control
(Flammer, 1995 ; Skinner, 1995 ).
No wonder this transition can feel like a balanc-
ing act, in which caregivers are continually gauging
whether children are competent enough to handle
certain tasks on their own and how to provide the
minimum support necessary to allow toddlers to
eventually achieve success through their own sus-
tained eff orts (Heckhausen, 1988 ; Skinner & Edge,
1998 ). Ensuring that the challenges toddlers face
are developmentally appropriate, in turn, depends
not only on whether caregivers can show the kind
of authoritative parenting that sets fi rm limits on
the everyday tasks toddlers are allowed to tackle,
but also on whether caregivers have the higher-
order resources they need to keep overwhelming
stressors out of their children’s lives (Tolan & Grant,
2009).
 roughout coping episodes, of critical impor-
tance are the explanations that caregivers off er chil-
dren for their successes and failures (Dweck &
Molden, 2005 ).  e most benefi cent attributions
are ones that direct children’s causal interpretations
toward their eff orts and strategies, and away from
their permanent characteristics and abilities. Perhaps
surprisingly, even praise for positive traits, such as
goodness and smartness, focuses children’s attention
on the causal force of immutable entities, which are
by defi nition uncontrollable (Kamins & Dweck,
1999 ). Of course, when children do not succeed
and adult help is needed, caregivers can assure chil-
dren that they will be successful at more diffi cult
tasks by themselves when they are older and have
more practice.
Social comparison, perceived control,
and coping
Starting in about fi fth grade, children become more
interested and able to use the performances of peers
as a standard against which to measure their own
levels of performance (Ruble, 1983 ).  is new skill
refl ects a gain in the accuracy of control beliefs in
that normative performance information allows
children to distinguish task diffi culty (when every-
one performs poorly) as a cause of performance out-
comes. It also allows children to recognize when it is
something about their own action that is contribut-
ing to performance, namely, when their own level of
performance diff ers from the norm (i.e., when they
perform better or worse than everyone else) (Weiner,
1986 ). Social comparison can be seen in many
domains in middle childhood, but it is most obvi-
ous in areas that are highly valued by the social con-
text, and in which outcomes are directly compared
and evaluated, such as in school, sports, physical
appearance, and popularity.
Social comparison can serve useful purposes
when coping. An accurate estimate of diffi culty can
be used to gather the resources and allow the time
needed to be eff ective. If one is performing poorly
on tasks while others are succeeding, it can also be
interpreted as information that one needs to apply
more eff ort or try diff erent strategies. In fact, down-
ward social comparison seems to be an important
mechanism for dealing with losses during old age,
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1when the elderly compare their well-being and
performance with other people their own age, and
note that they themselves are better off in compari-
son (e.g., Heckhausen & Krueger, 1993 ).
However, despite the fact that better estimates of
task diffi culty represent a cognitive advance, they
also create a potential vulnerability for coping and a
sense of control. When dealing with diffi culties and
setbacks, they can add the burden of self-evaluation,
of “looking over one’s shoulder” at how everyone
else is doing. For children who are lagging behind
their age-mates, it is easy to become discouraged
and to denigrate their own potential. Such a mind-
set adds stress to already demanding situations and
subtracts resources that could be used for coping.
It can even be a basis for devaluing whole areas of
activity, namely, those in which one is behind or in
which one needs to exert much more eff ort com-
pared to others. It is a sad irony that such decisions
can steer children away from precisely those activi-
ties where more experience and practice could lead
to improvement.
 is transition is easier for children who have
developed adequate levels of social, academic, and
physical competence before social comparison comes
online. Social partners, both adults and peers, can
also ease the transition if they encourage children to
use normative comparisons as information about
task diffi culty and eff ort, but not about capacity
(Dweck, 1999 ). At the level above individual part-
ners, social contexts communicate key messages
about the centrality and meaning of performance
comparisons (Elliot, 1999 ). For example, work on
achievement goals shows that explicit rankings and
competition, which characterize many schools,
sports teams, and peer groups, exacerbate the poten-
tial negative impact of social comparison, leading
children to focus on their relatively stable attributes
as causes of performance and to avoid participation
in areas where their rankings are low (Anderman
et al., 2002 ).
In contrast, social groups or classrooms with a
“learning” orientation lead children to concentrate
on eff ort and improvement, emphasizing intra-indi-
vidual comparisons in which children track their
own past performance to mark progress. Participation
in activities in which sustained practice results in
obvious improvements, such as sports or the cre-
ative arts, is a concrete operational way to demon-
strate to children that sustained eff ort has the power
to lift their level of performance. Of course, high-
quality teaching or tutoring (which transmits eff ec-
tive strategies) as well as consistent practice are
necessary if children’s eff orts are to be eff ective in
boosting their performance outcomes.
Conceptions of ability, perceived control,
and coping
In late middle childhood or early adolescence
(between the ages of 10 and 12), children come to
understand the cognitively complex notion of ability
(Nicholls, 1978 ). “Ability” is an inferential concept;
it represents an invisible capacity that can only be
inferred from a pattern of performance outcomes:
success on normatively hard tasks with little eff ort.
To make such inferences, children must be cogni-
tively capable of understanding inverse compensa-
tory relations between eff ort and ability (Miller,
1985 ; Nicholls, 1984 ).  is means children under-
stand that to produce the same outcome, smart
children do not need to try as hard. With this cogni-
tive advance, however, comes the vulnerability
described as “the double-edged sword of eff ort”
(Covington & Omelich, 1979 ), in which children
come to see that high exertion that ends in failure
can imply low ability, thus making all-out eff ort a
potentially risky proposition. At this age, the aspects
of perceived control that best predict engagement
(and that are best predicted by performance) change
from those focused on the capacity to exert eff ort to
those focused on one’s own level of ability (Skinner
et al., 1998 ).
In early studies of the development of learned
helplessness, researchers hypothesized that young
children, because they did not have the cognitive
capacity to infer ability, would be shielded from the
eff ects of non-contingency, and that all children,
once they acquired “mature” conceptions of ability
during early adolescence, would be more vulnerable
to helplessness. However, both these hypotheses
turned out to be incorrect. For younger children,
research shows that there is no age at which they are
free from the eff ects of repeated failure (Burhans &
Dweck, 1995 ). Instead, the experiences that pro-
duce helplessness are diff erent for younger children.
In early elementary school, more concrete tasks and
more directly observable outcomes exacerbate the
eff ects of repeated failure (e.g., Boggiano et al.,
1993 ). Moreover, although young children are
not able to make complex inferences about the rela-
tions of patterns of outcomes to levels of ability,
they can construct conceptions of their traits (e.g.,
goodness and badness) as fi xed and immutable
(Dweck, 1999 ).  ese are the experiences and belief
systems that make young children more vulnerable
to helplessness.
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1 For older children and young adolescents, it
turns out that the eff ects of cognitive advances on
control and coping depend completely on the social
context, both local and cultural. When children
acquire the cognitive capacity to understand inverse
compensatory relations among causes, they will
apply these schema to eff ort and ability only in
cultures (such as the United States) that endorse
conceptions of ability as a fi xed entity that can be
diagnosed from levels of performance (Nicholls,
1984 ; Rosenholtz & Simpson, 1984 ). Moreover,
these cultural conceptions must be communicated
to children, for example, by teachers who respond
to children’s failures by doubting their capacities
(Graham, 1990 ). Finally, these messages must be
internalized by children, so that they are convinced
that their own ability is a fi xed immutable entity
that is demonstrated by every performance (Dweck,
1999 ). In contrast, if children operate in classrooms
and cultures that allow them to continue to see abil-
ity or competence as a fl exible, incremental attri-
bute, open to cultivation through eff ort and practice,
young adolescents (despite cognitive advances) will
maintain a high sense of control and high levels
of eff ort and engagement in the face of obstacles
and setbacks (Mueller & Dweck, 1998 ).
Adulthood and aging
Work during adulthood and old age has not been
able to identify specifi c age-graded changes in per-
ceived control (Aldwin, 2007 ; Baltes & Baltes,
1986 ; Lachman & Prenda-Firth, 2004 ; Wolinsky
et., 2003 ; Zarit, Pearlin, & Schaie, 2003 ). However,
lifespan theories have suggested that a general shift
from primary to secondary control takes place across
later life (Heckhausen & Schulz, 1995 ). In this
context, primary control refers to reliance on proto-
typical control strategies, such as eff ort and instru-
mental action, aimed at bringing the external world
in line with one’s own preferences, whereas second-
ary control refers to eff ort that “targets the self and
attempts to achieve changes directly within the
individual” (1995, p. 285).
 e basic idea is that, due to societal constraints
and biological declines, people are not as able to
exercise primary control as they age, so they come
to rely more and more on secondary control. Two
main kinds of secondary control can be distin-
guished.  e fi rst refers to secondary control as a
backup system: After initial attempts have failed,
people can shift resources from other endeavors to
the implementation of the blocked goal ( ompson
et al., 1998).  is kind of control, sometimes referred
to as compensatory secondary control, includes pro-
cesses like increased eff orts or the construction of
new strategies. Especially important during aging,
secondary control increasingly involves having access
to the resources of others (such as doctors or one’s
adult children) through “proxy” control (Bandura,
1997 ; Brandtstädter & Renner, 1990 ; Heckhausen
& Schulz, 1995 ).
 e second kind of secondary control refers to a
hierarchy of outcomes. From this perspective, when
it is no longer possible to “fi x” the primary outcome
of choice, people can shift their focus toward “sec-
ondary” targets that are more amenable to control.
For example, in the face of a chronic medical condi-
tion, elderly people can shift their focus from fi nd-
ing a cure to having an impact on the daily symptoms
or treatment of the condition, and minimizing its
eff ects on others ( ompson et al., 1993 ).  is kind
of secondary control can also include attempts to
infl uence one’s own internal states (such as emo-
tional reactions or attitudes) (Heckhausen & Schulz,
1995 ); these are also studied as emotion regulation
(Gross, 1998 ).
Many of these “secondary control strategies”
have already been studied in research on coping,
which is the more common term used to describe
how people deal with losses, failures, and diffi culties
that threaten control (Folkman, 1984 ; Lockenhoff
& Carstensen, 2003 ). Both coping and secondary
control can serve to create control experiences even
in “low control” circumstances ( ompson et al.,
1993 ). In fact, people’s ingenuity in fi nding second-
ary outcomes they can infl uence, even in “uncon-
trollable circumstances,” has compelled researchers
to rename such real-life situations as “low control”
circumstances. Outside of the laboratory, research-
ers have not been able to identify any situations in
which people cannot fi nd something of value to
infl uence. Hence, it is possible that these ways of
coping, or secondary control strategies, are elabo-
rated and consolidated as people age, perhaps result-
ing in increased confi dence in one’s capacity to enact
them (also called coping self-effi cacy), despite nor-
mative declines in primary control.
Coping as a Process that Shapes the
Development of Perceived Control
and Competence
 e third and fi nal goal of this chapter is to high-
light the reciprocal dynamics that exist between
control and coping. If coping describes how people
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1deal with ongoing challenges, diffi culties, and fail-
ures, then it becomes clear that coping transactions
are an important form of control experiences.  at
is, the ways in which people actually approach and
engage with real-life stressors, how they cope, is the
grist from which perceptions of control are shaped.
All of the basic elements of the coping process
can be found in theories about the construction of
control, namely, the actual stressor and its objective
controllability, the individual’s personal resources
(including previous perceived control and actual
competence), and the participation of social con-
texts (e.g., the availability and responsiveness of
social partners). Hence, one important resource that
can be infl uenced by coping is an individual’s sense
of control, with adaptive coping promoting con-
fi dence, perceived competence, and a focus on
mastery, and maladaptive coping contributing to
helplessness.
Failure experiences and perceived control
One situation in which coping can have a decisive
eff ect on a sense of control is when individuals
are dealing with objectively uncontrollable events
and losses. As mentioned previously, the notion of
secondary control has been useful in understanding
how people can deal adaptively with situations
where primary control is not working, and has
helped explain how people, when they do succumb
to experiences of non-contingency and loss, can
navigate their way back from helplessness. Control-
related conceptions of secondary control focus on
strategies that increase eff ort and concentration,
access supplementary social resources, and locate
sub-goals where control can be eff ectively enacted.
 ese coping strategies create a feedback loop back
toward a sense of renewed effi cacy and control.
Equally important in dealing with uncontrolla-
ble events and failures are coping appraisals . Decades
of research on causal attributions and explanations
have demonstrated that, although unsuccessful
attempts to produce a desired or prevent an unde-
sired outcome are a risk factor for becoming help-
less, it is the interpretation of the experience that
mediates its eff ects on subsequent control expecta-
tions (e.g., Abramson et al., 1978 ; Weiner, 2005 ).
Work on control paints a clear picture of the kinds
of appraisals that support adaptation in the face of
failures, as well as the important roles played by
social partners in shaping those appraisals.
Although some theories emphasize the importance
of attributions of failure to unstable and controllable
causes (most notably lack of eff ort), the overarching
mindset that seems to promote a sense of control is
the conviction that all transactions contain impor-
tant information about how to produce outcomes,
that is, how to exert control. Failures and mistakes
can be “our friends” in that they tell us what isn’t
working “yet.”  ey can imply that more eff ort,
time, or concentration is needed, that diff erent
actions or better strategies are required, and that
the task is harder than expected (Dweck, 1999 ).
Interestingly enough, such a mindset even allows
people to discover more quickly that tasks are objec-
tively unsolvable and so to stop working on them
sooner (Janoff -Bulman & Brickman, 1982 ).
It turns out that social factors are critical to the
development of this mindset. Parents, teachers, and
friends who view mistakes and “failures,” not as
embarrassing and shameful events to be hidden, but
as fascinating learning opportunities will invite chil-
dren to see them the same way (Dweck & Molden,
2005 ). Although studied most often during child-
hood and in the academic domain, there is no
reason to think that the same principles would not
apply at other points in the lifespan and in other
arenas. For example, during old age, when elderly
people make mistakes or can no longer perform at
previous levels, it is easy for them and their social
partners to see these “failures” as signs of irreversible
losses of aging. Alternatively, they can be viewed as
temporary setbacks that can be worked around or
compensated for by various coping strategies, such
as increased practice, external aids, or social sup-
ports.  is mindset facilitates the types of coping
that maintain a sense of control late into old age.
Beyond control in processes of coping
and resilience
At the same time, the picture painted in the control
area is incomplete. Recovery from setbacks, losses,
and helplessness can be conceived more broadly as
issues of resilience, and there can be no question
that true resilience relies on other adaptive pro-
cesses in addition to control (Brandtstädter &
Rothermund, 2002 ).  e analyses of coping fami-
lies can immediately suggest two additional funda-
mental processes by which coping contributes to
resilience: one organized around relatedness and one
around autonomy (Baumeister & Leary, 1995 ;
Connell & Wellborn, 1989; Deci & Ryan, 1985 ;
Skinner & Wellborn, 1994 ).  e primary ways of
coping that follow from relatedness are part of the
family of seeking social support (see Table 3.1 ).
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1Support-seeking seems to be a general all-purpose
strategy that is extremely common at every age
(Skinner et al., 2003 ; Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner,
2009 ). It can include contacts that directly support
control — for example, asking for advice about eff ec-
tive strategies or requesting direct help. However,
support-seeking adds value to resilience beyond its
instrumental potential. Processes of relatedness can
add perspective to issues of control (e.g., “I love you
whether or not you get that outcome”), failure (e.g.,
“You did everything you could”), and disappoint-
ment (“Well, we still have each other, so it’s really
not so bad”). And when it really is so bad, such as
dealing with the death of a loved one, the presence
and support of caring others can provide comfort,
distraction, and healing, even when there is nothing
to be done (Stroebe et al., 1996 ).
 e adaptive function of autonomy is to coor-
dinate preferences with available options, and the
adap tive families of coping organized around auton-
omy are negotiation and accommodation (see
Table 3.1 ). Negotiation , of course, refers to attempts
to locate or create desirable options, and so clears
the way for control eff orts aimed at securing those
options. However, in the control area, much more
interest has been focused on processes of accommo-
dation , which allow people to actually adjust their
preferences to fi t within existing constraints
(Brandtstädter & Renner, 1990 ). Once considered
part of secondary control, researchers now view it
as a distinguishable set of processes that involve
fi t, “going with the fl ow,” willing acceptance, acqui-
escence, adjustment, and “getting into it” (Morling
& Evered, 2006 , 2007; Rothbaum et al., 1983;
Skinner, 2007 ). As opposed to control-related pro-
cesses of secondary control, which involve adding
instrumental resources or changing the self to be
more eff ective, accommodation has nothing to do
with control: it is about letting go of desired out-
comes and previously held goals (Brandtstädter &
Rothermund, 2002 ; Skinner, 2007 ). Researchers
emphasize that accommodation can be adaptive
when primary control is not available. However, it
can also be used as a fi rst line of defense, with pri-
mary control engaged only if accommodation
proves impossible. In many cases, accommodation
can replace primary control all together from the
outset, for example, in situations where people feel
that pursuing control (even successfully) would use
too many resources, upset relationships, or interfere
with other more important commitments.
 e opposite of accommodation is not control, it is
“rigid perseveration,” in which an outcome is infl exibly
pursued no matter what the cost (Brandtstädter &
Renner, 1990 ). No complete analysis has been made
of the processes that defuse rigid persever ation and
allow accommodation to occur when coping with
stressful life events (Brandtstädter & Rothermund,
2002 ). However, it is likely that strategies will include
cognitive restructuring and focusing on the positive
aspects of the current situation, making meaning
and fi nding benefi ts in adversity, distrac tion with
genuinely pleasurable alternative activities (Folkman
& Moskowitz, 2000 ;  ompson, 1985 ), and inten-
tionally seeking downward social comparisons. Broad-
ening the study of resilience to include not only
strategies of control but also ways of coping orga-
nized around relatedness and autonomy will provide
a more complete picture of the processes needed to
deal constructively with stress and adversity.
Implications for Research on the
Development of Coping
 e central implication of a developmental analysis
of perceived control is that the study of coping as it
develops can be organized around specifi c ages during
which children’s understanding of control undergoes
qualitative shifts, likely based on underlying tem-
peramental traits, as well as physiological, neurologi-
cal, and cognitive developments and changes in the
environmental challenges and supports available to
children.  ese shifts produce changes in the strate-
gies individuals use to coordinate actions with con-
tingencies in the environment and in the causal
schema they use to predict and process causal experi-
ences. Both of these changes shape the ways people
cope, and so can be used to focus the developmental
study of coping on specifi c age windows during
which corresponding qualitative shifts in coping may
be found.
Developmentally graded ways of coping
An analysis of age-graded changes in the means for
exerting mastery and becoming helpless has impor-
tant implications for the measurement of coping.
First, assessments of coping should include develop-
mentally appropriate markers of all four coping
families organized around control (i.e., problem-
solving, information-seeking, helplessness, and
escape) at every age. Second, when studies seek to
examine age diff erences or changes, they should be
sure that assessments distinguish each of the means
hypothesized to characterize coping at diff erent
ages, for example, both behavioral and cognitive
means of problem-solving and escape (Zimmer-
Gembeck & Skinner, 2009 ).
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1  is analysis also suggests that developmental
studies should examine qualitative changes in cop-
ing as a supplement to the typical focus on quantita-
tive changes. For example, an important empirical
question would be whether one developmentally
graded form of coping predicts the subsequent use
of a diff erent, but functionally analogous, way of
coping at later ages; and whether during transitions
when both forms should be readily accessible, the
two forms of coping are tightly coupled. Research
could also examine whether developmentally-graded
members of the same family become hierarchically
organized as new forms are added, and could inves-
tigate the factors that determine which of the strate-
gies from a person’s repertoire will be deployed in a
given transaction. For example, do children and
youth fall back on earlier forms of coping as stress
levels rise, and do they return to more mature forms
as social supports increase? Such studies will add to
our understanding of the “building blocks” of the
area, namely, ways of coping — and should help to
move dominant conceptualizations in the fi eld
beyond an age-delimited focus on individual diff er-
ences and toward a view of coping as an increasingly
elaborated and fl exible repertoire of developmen-
tally ordered responses.
Qualitative shifts in the understanding
of control
 e development of perceived control includes the
construction of increasingly complex schema for
analyzing multiple causes of success and failure as well
as increasingly veridical analyses of individuals’ own
roles in producing desired and preventing undesired
outcomes.  ese qualitative shifts represent progress
toward more accurate prediction and analysis of causal
experience. However, each transition also represents a
potential turning point during which vulnerabilities
can be introduced that will undermine subsequent
confi dence, engagement, and coping. Future research
can focus short-term longitudinal studies on these nor-
mative shifts as time windows that may be critical to
the development of coping. Explanatory studies can
locate normative shifts by focusing on the cognitive
devel opments that likely underlie qualitative changes
(Band & Weisz, 1990 ). Such studies should incorpo-
rate important predictors of how the transition will
be negotiated, including the individual’s previous level
of functioning and the nature of the demands in the
current situation, especially their severity and objective
controllability.
 eories of control also highlight the importance
of mapping the roles of social partners, especially
caregivers, in shaping the development of coping.
 ey are critical in helping children achieve nor-
mative developments in causal understanding
without undercutting their initially high sense of
effi cacy. At the same time, studies should include
information from multiple levels of the social con-
text, not only about immediate social partners
who participate in coping transactions but also about
the social climates and societal assumptions that
frame these transactions. Pivotal in this regard are
societal and individual mindsets about the nature of
personal force, whether it is a stable immutable
entity that is displayed by every performance or,
instead, is a dynamic plastic capacity that can be
improved through sustained eff ort and practice
(Dweck, 1999 ).
Studies can include key markers of how the
developmental shift is progressing, such as individu-
als’ appraisals and reappraisals of the transaction
as well as the strategies that people are actually using
to cope with real-life demands — the balance of
constructive (e.g., problem-solving, information-
seeking) and maladaptive (e.g., helplessness, escape)
ways of coping, and the general reliance on imma-
ture, age-appropriate, or mature strategies. Research
can also trace the emergence of new and adaptive
ways of dealing with stress and follow their integra-
tion into an increasingly dependable yet fl exible
repertoire of coping strategies. Critical in this regard
would be the identifi cation of factors that allow
people to maintain access to the most constructive
ways of coping in their current repertoire.
Especially important to assess across these transi-
tions would be the individual’s sense of control and
effi cacy, which can survive normative improvements
in causal understanding only if children and youth
(and adults) repeatedly experience transactions with
the environment in which outcomes of value can be
achieved through sustained eff ort. Such experiences
require objective control conditions characterized
by contingency, responsiveness, and manageable
levels of diffi culty, which remain attuned to the
person as he or she develops.  ey also require judi-
cious social support and the development of increas-
ing levels of actual competence in the person. Such
a view makes clear the interlocking dynamics of per-
ceived control and coping, and how previous coping
episodes are carried forward in individuals’ own
characteristics and in their social relationships. From
this perspective, adaptive coping is the grist from
which a sense of control is won just as control, strat-
egy, and capacity beliefs permeate stress appraisals
and coping responses.
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1 Conclusion
Both perceived control and coping have largely
been conceptualized and studied as individual dif-
ferences phenomena. We hope that by focusing on
what is known about the development of perceived
control, and highlighting its connections to coping,
this chapter may contribute to progress in realizing
a developmental agenda for the study of coping.
 is agenda will conceive of coping as an organiza-
tional construct that has the potential to provide an
integrative link across multiple levels — from the
physiological processes of individual stress reactions
to the sociocultural forces that determine the stres-
sors societies allow into people’s lives.
Note
1.
Since the most detailed research on development has been
conducted in the achievement domain, many of the fi ndings
about age changes cannot yet be generalized to other domains
of functioning during childhood (for example, peers, or physical
or artistic endeavors) or during adulthood (for example, work,
romantic relationships, or health).
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