Lazarus

Lazarus, Richard

Emotion

Emotion. The term 'emotion' originates from the Latin emovere, which carries the sense of movement and excitation. This captures the activating quality emotions can have upon people. Although the term is widely used within psychology, it is not easily defined. Nor it is easily studied using most of the conventional methodological tools of experimental psychology. Emotions involve the experience of various feelings, though the term 'emotion' is usually only employed in the case of a fairly intense feeling, carrying a strong personal significance, such as joy or sadness.\nThe powerful motivating force of emotions has been of particular interest to both psychoanalysts and humanistic psychologists, with the former tending to focus more on the unconscious aspects of emotion, both positive and negative, and the latter on the possibilities for conscious experience of 'positive' emotions. Arguably, much of human activity can be seen in terms of a search to experience positive emotional states, and escape from negative emotions. It is perhaps interesting therefore to reflect on how little most branches of academic psychology over the last century have actually studied this topic.

Views: TOPICS, Ekman, James, Lazarus

Coping

Coping involves strategies that people can evolve and draw upon to help deal with internal or external situations/factors which are seen as being stressful, and at the limits of the person's ability to handle. Coping can be contrasted with avoidance behaviour, which involves developing patterns of behaviour which produce denial or avoidance of the worrying situation. For example, if you have many tasks to accomplish in a short time, avoidance behaviour might include procrastination. Coping behaviour would be to prioritise the tasks and construct a realistic timetable.

Views: TOPICS, Lazarus

Stress

Stress.This can be seen as a long-lasting strain that has both physiological and psychological effects. Physiologically, the hormonal and nervous system changes caused by stress ultimately undermine the functioning of the immune system. Psychologically, stress can lead to chronic anxiety and reduce the capacity of the individual for coping with the demands of their life. The stress involved in a situation is a product both of the objective circumstances and the way the individual responds to them. Hence what is highly stressful for one individual, may be relatively unstressful, or even enjoyable, by another person.

Views: TOPICS, Cooper, Lazarus, Luria

He became Professor Emeritus at Berkeley in 1991, in which status he continues to write and publish research on stress, coping, and the emotions. He and his wife are now working on a book on ageing and the emotions it brings. Written by: Richard Lazarus

Lazurus obtained his BA in 1942 from the City College of New York. After military service in World War II, he returned to graduate school in 1946, obtained his doctorate at Pittsburgh in 1948, taught at Johns Hopkins and Clark Universities, then came to Berkeley in 1957, where he has remained.

At Berkeley, after forming the Berkeley Stress and Coping Project, he mounted efforts to generate a comprehensive theoretical framework for psychological stress and undertook much programmatic research based on these formulations, pioneering the use of motion picture films to generate stress reactions naturalistically in the laboratory. Later he shifted to field research and a systems theoretical point of view. His theoretical and research efforts contributed substantially to what has been called the 'cognitive revolution' in psychology.

He has been honoured in many ways for his scholarly contributions. The most important honours include the 1989 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, and two honorary doctorates, one in 1988 from Johannes Gutenburg University in Mainz, Germany, the other in 1995 from Haifa University in Israel.

Lazurus's research career at Johns Hopkins and Clark centred on 'new look' experiments on motivated individual differences in perception. Among other research topics such as perceptual defence and studies of projective methods, he did research on autonomic discrimination without awareness (which he and McCleary called 'Subception').

Lazurus has published over 200 scientific articles and 23 books, both monographs and textbooks in personality and clinical psychology. In 1996. Psychological Stress and the Coping Process, which is now considered a classic, appeared. In 1984, with Folkman, he published Stress, Appraisal, and Coping, which continues to have world-wide influence. In 1991, he published Emotion and Adaptation, which presents a cognitive-motivational- relational theory of the emotions. In 1994 he and his wife Bernice published Passion and Reason: making sense of our emotions.

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