Chapter 2: Unraveling the Mental Representation Students Make of Stressful Events

Surprisingly little research is available concerning such fundamental questions as how adolescents mentally represent a stressor, how they frame their coping goal, and whether or not they select successive coping strategies in function of the coping goal. Nevertheless, we need to know how these aspects of a student’s mental representation are linked to observed coping strategies. A theory of coping with stress should not only be based on a thorough understanding of what particular types of stressors mean to different students; it should also take account of a student’s coping goal and the unique way it is linked to his or her selection of coping strategies. Coping goals are part of a student’s larger goal structure, meaning that the literature on goal hierarchies, goal setting, and goal striving is highly relevant to this issue. In this chapter, it is illustrated that our understanding of how students cope with school-related stressors could be taken further by examining how youngsters evaluate the context of a stressor, the stability of the context, and the personal and social resources to which they have access. The studies referred to in this chapter suggest that students, who frequently report meeting with frustrations and impediments and have the tendency to focus on what may go wrong, are handicapped, mainly because they select coping strategies that are counterproductive.