Stress and Coping with Womens Health Issues
A Review from a Self-Regulation Perspective
Abstract
The goals of this review are: (1) to present the Leventhal common-sense model (CSM) of self-regulation of stress and coping with health threats as well as new directions and questions arising from this model, and (2) to apply this theoretical perspective to womens health issues in order to highlight concerns that are unique to women. Examples from research on womens health are reviewed to show: (a) how women apply decision rules to the internal and external information available to them in order to interpret their symptoms, in an attempt to reach a coherent representation of the health threat; (b) how these representations are related to womens choices of coping strategies and why they are often unrelated to actual coping; and (c) how women appraise their situation and in what ways this internal appraisal could differ from objective outcomes. Viewing coping with womens health issues through the lens of the CSM highlights the ways in which biological and social gender differences in the experience of illness and the interactions between them affect each stage of the self-regulation process (i.e., womens experience of the stressor and the representations they form, how these representations guide coping, and womens appraisal of their situation). This review helps identify principles and general conclusions derived from the CSM and generalizes them across various threats to womens health, which should be taken into account when planning theoretically-based interventions to support women coping with health threats, as well as questions that should be investigated in future research.
References
2003). Men, masculinity, and the contexts of help seeking. American Psychologist, 58(1), 5–14.
(2007). It was not chest pain really, I cant explain it! An exploratory study on the nature of symptoms experienced by women during their myocardial infarction. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 16, 1292–1301.
(1990). Social supports and social relationships. In , Handbook of aging and the social sciences (3rd ed., pp. 205–226). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
(2008). Cultural and educational disparities in the use of primary and preventive health care services among midlife women in Israel. Womens Health Issues, in press.
(2008). Coping specificity: The case of women coping with infertility treatments. Psychology and Health, 23, 221–241.
(2005). Variability in the difficulties experienced by women undergoing infertility treatments. Fertility and Sterility, 83, 275–283.
(2009). Womens and mens perceptions of infertility and their associations with both partners psychological adjustment. British Journal of Health Psychology, in press.
(2000). Gender differences in processing information for making self-assessments of health. Psychosomatic Medicine, 62, 354–364.
(2003). Living with the worry of cancer: Health perceptions and behaviors of elderly people with self, vicarious, or no history of cancer. Psycho-Oncology, 12, 161–172.
(2004). Epidemiology, comorbidity, and impact on health-related quality of life of self-reported headache and musculoskeletal pain – A gender perspective. European Journal of Pain, 8, 435–450.
(2004). The effect of a communal lifestyle on depressive symptoms in late life. Journal of Aging and Health, 16, 151–174.
(1995). Seeking medical care in response to symptoms and life stress. Psychosomatic Medicine, 57, 37–47.
(2007). A randomized trial of a self-regulation intervention for women with asthma. Chest, 132(1), 88–97.
(2004). A comparison of breast, testicular, and prostate cancer in mass print media (1996–2001). Social Science and Medicine, 59, 541–551.
(1996). The mismeasure of coping by checklist. Journal of Personality, 64, 959–991.
(2006). Comfort, control, or conformity: Women who choose breast reconstruction following mastectomy. Health Care for Women International, 27(1), 75–93.
(2005). Women, men, and coronary heart disease: A review of the qualitative literature. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 51, 382–395.
(1979). Cognitive processes as mediators of stress and coping. In , Human stress and cognition: An information processing approach (pp. 265–298). Chichester, UK: Wiley.
(2002). Psychological stress, distress, and disability in patients with psoriasis: Consensus and variation in the contribution of illness perceptions, coping, and alexithymia. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 41, 157–174.
(2009). The experience of miscarriage in first pregnancy: The womens voices. Death Studies, 33(1), 1–29.
(2005). A review of the diagnosis and management of male breast cancer. The Oncologist, 10, 471–479.
(2005). A cervical cancer prevention program in rural Mexico: Addressing women and their context. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 15, 338–352.
(2005). Illness perceptions among cardiac patients: Relation to depressive symptomatology and sex. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 59, 153–160.
(2007). Systematic review of studies of patients satisfaction with breast reconstruction after mastectomy. The Breast, 16, 547–567.
(2001). HIV infection in women in the United States: Status at the millennium. Journal of the American Medical Association, 285, 1186–1192.
(2006). Longing for a child: Perceptions of motherhood among Israeli-Jewish women undergoing in vitro fertilization treatments. NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies and Gender Issues, 12, 177–202.
(2003). A meta-analytic review of the common-sense model of illness representations. Psychology and Health, 18, 141–184.
(1993). Women recovering from coronary artery bypass surgery. Scholarly Inquiry for Nursing Practice, 7, 223–244.
(2002). A generation apart? Gender-related experiences and health in women in early and late mid-life. Social Science and Medicine, 54, 663–676.
(2007). Decreased risk of death from coronary heart disease among men with higher femininity scores: A general population cohort study. International Journal of Epidemiology, 36, 612–620.
(2005). A life shaped by pain: Women and endometriosis. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 14, 1124–1132.
(1999). Gender differences in coping with infertility: A meta-analysis. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 22, 341–358.
(2007). The relationship between beliefs about depression and coping strategies: Gender differences. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 46(Pt. 3), 315–332.
(2006). Gendering the migraine market: Do representations of illness matter? Social Science & Medicine, 63, 1986–1997.
(1997). Preventing misdiagnosis of women: A guide to physical disorders that have psychiatric symptoms Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
(2003). Myocardial infarction: Gender differences in coping and social support. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 44, 360–374.
(2002). Issues for a psychology of mens health. Journal of Health Psychology, 7, 209–217.
(1997). Illness representations: Theoretical foundations. In , Perceptions of health and illness: Current research and applications (pp. 19–45). Amsterdam: Harwood.
(1980). The common sense representation of illness danger. In , Contributions to medical psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 17–30). New York: Pergamon.
(2008). Health psychology: The search for pathways between behavior and health. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 477–505.
(2003). Back pain and the resolution of diagnostic uncertainty in illness narratives. Social Science and Medicine, 57, 1045–1054.
(2003). How gender stereotypes influence self-regulation of cardiac health care-seeking and adaptation. In , The self-regulation of health and illness behavior. New York: Routledge.
(2004). Gender differences in stress and coping styles. Personality and Individual Differences, 37, 1401–1415.
(1990). Psychosocial adaptation to illness by women with breast cancer and women with cancer at other sites. Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, 8(4), 1–25.
(1996). Women and cancer: Have assumptions about women limited our research agenda? In , The psychology of womens health: Progress and challenges in research and application (pp. 51–84). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
(2002). Informal caregiving: Differential experiences by gender. Medical Care, 40, 1249–1259.
(2007). Vulnerability of first-time expectant mothers during ultrasound scans: An evaluation of the external pressures that influence the process of informed choice. Health Care for Women International, 28, 525–533.
(1999). Preventing HIV infection in heterosexual women: What do we know? What must we learn? Applied and Preventive Psychology, 8, 257–263.
(2001). The symptom experience of women with chronic illness. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 33, 257–268.
(2005). Constructions of masculinity following prostatectomy-induced impotence. Social Science and Medicine, 60, 2249–2259
(2002). Changing illness perceptions after myocardial infarction: An early intervention randomized controlled trial. Psychosomatic Medicine, 64, 580–586.
(2000). Gender-role identity after heart attack: Links with sex and subjective health status. Psychology and Health, 15, 123–133.
(2003). Unraveling the mysteries of timing: Womens perceptions about time to treatment for cardiac symptoms. Social Science and Medicine, 56, 271–284.
(2002). Why are women missing from outpatient cardiac rehabilitation programs? A review of multilevel factors affecting referral, enrollment, and completion. Journal of Womens Health, 11, 773–791.
(2004). Gender and age inequity in the provision of coronary revascularisation in England in the 1990s: Is it getting better? Social Science and Medicine, 59, 2499–2507.
(1992). The impact of gender on configurations of care among married elderly couples. Research on Aging, 14, 313–330.
(2004). Compliance as strategy: The importance of personalized relations in obstetric practice. Social Science and Medicine, 59, 2053–2069.
(2001). Gender differences in the self-regulation of hypertension. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 24, 469–487.
(1998). Adjustment to a low-control situation: Reexamining the role of coping responses. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1078–1092.
(2006). Providers constructions of the role of women in cervical cancer screening in Bulgaria and Romania. Social Science and Medicine, 63, 776–787.
(2003). Physician-patient interaction: A gynecology clinic in Turkey. Social Science and Medicine, 57, 205–215.
(1995). Involuntarily childless couples: Their desire to have children and their motives. Journal of Psychosomatics in Obstetrics and Gynecology, 16, 137–144.
(2007). Epilepsy and womens health issues: Unmet needs–Survey results from women with epilepsy. Epilepsy and Behavior, 10, 163–169.
(1997). I just cope from day to day: Unpredictability and anxiety in the lives of women. Social Science and Medicine, 45, 1729–1739.
(2002). Effects of gender in social control of smoking cessation. Health Psychology, 21, 368–376.
(1997). The nature of chronic stress. In , Coping with chronic stress (pp. 43–73). New York: Plenum.
(2007). How do women experience myocardial infarction? A qualitative exploration of illness perceptions, adjustment, and coping. Psychology, Health, and Medicine, 12, 278–288.
(2000). Doing health, doing gender: Teenagers, diabetes, and asthma. Social Science and Medicine, 50, 387–396.
(