State affect and emotion-focused coping: examining correlated change and causality

The purpose of the study was to verify whether two kinds of emotion-focused coping, namely strategies aimed at reducing negative emotions (palliative coping [PC]) and strategies aimed at inducing positive emotions (salutary coping [SC]) are related longitudinally to relevant affective states. Positive and negative state affects were assessed among 133 cardiac patients, along with coping strategies at three time points: a few days after myocardial infarction, one and 6 months later. Due to SC stability, the correlated change with affect was estimated only for PC, but the directionality was examined in all four affect-coping pairs. For uncomplementary pairs, the models with diagonal paths equal to zero fitted the data best. For the first complementary pair, i.e., negative affect-PC, reciprocal influences were revealed with both starting points and the amount of decline positively correlated. For the second pair, i.e., positive affect-SC, strategies consequently increased affect, whereas affect decreased SC, but only at first lag. Concluding, PC may be a behavioral manifestation of negative affect rather than reflective goal-oriented efforts. Although the relation between SC and positive affect is more complex, it still supports the idea of distinctiveness within the scope of emotion-focused coping.