Catastrophizing Coping Strategies

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Participants who scored low on the Executive Function Index (compared to those who scored high) averaged higher in the use of catastrophizing coping strategies when faced with negative life events. Items measuring catastrophizing are based on its operant definition, which includes “thoughts of explicitly emphasizing the terror of an experience”(Garnefski et al., 2000, p. 1316). Catastrophizing is considered a maladaptive coping style and has been linked to depression and anxiety (Garnefski et al., 2000). The general understanding of catastrophizing is that it focuses on, and exaggerates, the negative stress-inducing aspects of a stimulus (Sullivan, Bishop & Pivik, 1995).

Sullivan and team’s (1995) research on catastrophizing have found three …show more content…
One such example is directed attention, which, in the case of rumination, directs attention to the negative feelings and consequences related to the stressor (Gross, 1998). One study has shown that people who tend to ruminate a lot show greater amygdala modulation during reappraisal than do nonruminators (Ochsner & Gross, 2008). Similar to rumination and magnification is ‘focusing on the venting of emotions’, a concept defined by Carver and his team (1989) as a tendency to focus on whatever distress or upset one is experiencing (rumination), and to ventilate those negative feelings (magnification). Prolonging the experience of these emotions can have short-term benefits in extreme cases, such as dealing with the trauma of losing a loved one, but it is more likely to lead to maladjustment in the long run. Focusing on the distress of such traumatic experiences may exacerbate the effects of such trauma and may also distract or block people from making active coping strategies to move beyond the distress (Carver et al., 1995), inevitably leading to feelings of helplessness, a likely by-product of

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