Richard S. Lazarus

Introduction

Richard S. Lazarus was an American psychologist who spent five decades arguing that stress is not something that happens to a person but something a person makes of what happens. His transactional model held that an event becomes stressful only through cognitive appraisal — an evaluation of what the event means for one's goals and of whether one has the resources to meet it — and that the emotions and the coping efforts that follow are shaped by that evaluation rather than by the event itself. Working at a time when behaviourism treated internal states as unscientific, Lazarus insisted that emotion was not noise obscuring the study of behaviour but the central fact to be explained. He is remembered for the distinction between problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping, for a research programme that used film to induce and then experimentally dismantle stress, and for a long public debate with Robert Zajonc over whether feeling can precede thinking.

Early Life and Education

Lazarus was born on 3 March 1922 in New York City and graduated from the City College of New York in 1942. He served in the United States Army for three and a half years during the Second World War, then entered graduate study at the University of Pittsburgh, where he completed his doctorate in 1948. There was, at the time, almost no field to enter: as his University of California obituary observed, when he began at Johns Hopkins, interest in stress and emotion was largely confined to the military.

That context shaped him. Lazarus came of age intellectually during the "New Look" movement in perception of the 1950s, which held that what people see is shaped by their motives, defences, and expectations. His own contribution to it, the 1951 study of subception with Robert McCleary, showed that participants could show a physiological response to threatening stimuli they could not consciously identify — evidence, at least to Lazarus, that meaning is registered before it is known.

Academic and Professional Career

Lazarus joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 1948 and moved to Clark University in 1953, where he directed clinical training. In 1957 he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until he became professor emeritus in 1991.

The Berkeley years produced his best-known experimental work. Beginning in the late 1950s, Lazarus showed participants short films designed to arouse stress — most notoriously a workplace safety film for woodworkers in which one man loses a finger to a saw and another is killed by a flying splinter from a circular saw — and then varied the instructional set given beforehand. Some participants were told to watch as a detached technician would; others were told to deny the horror or to intellectualise it. The same film produced markedly different self-reported and physiological stress depending on how participants had been told to construe it. For Lazarus this was the decisive demonstration: change the appraisal and you change the emotion, even though the stimulus is identical.

His 1966 monograph Psychological Stress and the Coping Process turned that finding into a general theory and became a classic whose influence reached well beyond psychology into sociology, anthropology, physiology, and medicine. Through the 1970s he worked with his doctoral student Susan Folkman, who coined the terms problem-focused and emotion-focused coping in her dissertation; their 1984 book Stress, Appraisal, and Coping set out the transactional model in full. In 1991 he published Emotion and Adaptation, which extended the theory into a general account of emotion built on core relational themes — anger as a demeaning offence against me and mine, fear as an immediate and overwhelming physical danger, sadness as irrevocable loss, and so on for fifteen emotions. Late in life he worked on hope and gratitude, and published an autobiographical volume in 1998.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The transactional model of stress

Lazarus and Folkman defined stress as a particular relationship between a person and the environment, one that the person appraises as taxing or exceeding their resources and as endangering their well-being. Three claims follow from that definition. Stress is a transaction, a property of the relationship rather than of the stimulus or of the person alone. It depends on appraisal, not on objective conditions. And it is therefore subjective: two people facing the same event need not be stressed at all, or to the same degree.

Primary, secondary, and reappraisal

The model distinguishes primary appraisal, in which a person judges whether an encounter is irrelevant, benign-positive, or stressful — and if stressful, whether it is a threat, a challenge, or a harm already done — from secondary appraisal, in which the person assesses what can be done about it: what coping options exist, whether they will work, and whether they can be carried out. Reappraisal closes the loop, since the outcome of coping changes the appraisal that produced it. Lazarus insisted all three are continuous processes rather than stages, and that they operate partly outside awareness.

Coping

Coping, in the model, is what a person does to manage the external or internal demands of an encounter that has been appraised as taxing. The primary distinction is functional: problem-focused coping aims at the source of the stress and acts on the environment, whereas emotion-focused coping aims at the distress itself and acts on the person's own response. Lazarus and Folkman were careful not to rank them. Which is adaptive depends on what can be changed — a point later formalised as the goodness-of-fit hypothesis, which holds that problem-focused coping serves best when the stressor is controllable and emotion-focused coping when it is not.

Emotion as relational meaning

Lazarus's account of emotion went against the behaviourism of B. F. Skinner and, later, against the neuroscientific reductionism he distrusted to the end of his life. Emotions, on his view, are not reflexes or modules but syndromes organised around a person's relationship to their goals: they track how a person is faring in what matters to them, which is why they are rational in structure even when they are not reasonable in content. Appraisal theory became one of the principal rationales for cognitive-behavioural therapy from the 1970s onward.

Major Publications

Lazarus, R. S., & McCleary, R. A. (1951). Autonomic discrimination without awareness: A study of subception. Psychological Review, 58, 113–122.
Lazarus, R. S. (1966). Psychological Stress and the Coping Process. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Lazarus, R. S. (1968). Patterns of Adjustment and Human Effectiveness (3rd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. New York: Springer.
Lazarus, R. S. (1984). On the primacy of cognition. American Psychologist, 39(2), 124–129.
Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and Adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Impact and Legacy

Lazarus was ranked the eightieth most-cited psychologist of the twentieth century in a 2002 survey published in Review of General Psychology. His concepts are now so thoroughly absorbed into clinical psychology, health psychology, and behavioural medicine that their origin is often forgotten: the idea that a stressor has to be appraised before it can stress you, and that what people do about it can be classified by function, is standard equipment in clinical psychology and in the study of coping strategies. He received a Guggenheim fellowship and the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, and held honorary doctorates from the University of Haifa and the University of Mainz. He died on 24 November 2002.

The Lazarus–Zajonc debate was never settled, and partly because it was terminological. Zajonc argued from mere-exposure and subliminal-affect findings that preference can be generated with no prior inference, and concluded in his 1984 reply that Lazarus's position "is based entirely on an arbitrary definition of emotion that requires cognitive appraisal as a necessary precondition" — and that to sustain it, Lazarus had broadened appraisal "to include even the most primitive forms of sensory excitation, thus obliterating all distinction between cognition, sensation, and perception." Lazarus conceded the impasse in the same exchange: "Zajonc can no more prove that cognition is not present in any emotion, much less before it occurs, than I can prove it is present." Commentators including Kleinginna and Kleinginna and Scheff concluded that the two were defining cognition and affect at different breadths, and the debate ended closer to a draw than to a resolution.

Coping research inherits a serious measurement problem. The field knows coping almost entirely through self-report, and the instruments Lazarus and Folkman built — the Ways of Coping Checklist and its successor the Ways of Coping Questionnaire — have never produced a stable factor structure. Their scales were derived by factor analysis, and different studies with different samples and different added items have produced six, eight, or five factors, with researchers adding items freely and so limiting comparability across studies. Skinner and colleagues' 2003 structural review and Peñalba's 2016 survey of more than a hundred coping category systems both concluded that the field has not converged. Worse, retrospective reports may not measure what they claim to: Smith, Leffingwell, and Ptacek (1999) found only about 25% shared variance between daily and retrospective accounts of exam coping, and for the most stressed students less than 10% of the retrospective score was predicted by the daily records. Stone and colleagues (1998) found similarly poor correspondence between momentary and retrospective reports.

The transactional model is vulnerable to circularity. Appraisal is what produces emotion, but in practice appraisal is often inferred from the emotion a person reports, and coping is measured at the same time and by the same instrument as both. The model's flexibility — an apparently maladaptive response can always be explained by reappraising the person's goals or resources after the fact — is a large part of its clinical appeal and also the reason it is hard to state in a form that could be falsified.

The laboratory films were a thin proxy for real stress. The woodshop study and its successors showed that instructions change physiological response to an aversive film. Whether that generalises to chronic illness, bereavement, or poverty — the conditions to which the model is most often applied — is a separate question, and the experimental control that made the demonstration clean also makes it remote from the phenomena the theory is used to explain.

His own findings on denial sit awkwardly with the model. Lazarus repeatedly reported that patients who denied the seriousness of their situation did better than those who were more realistic, a result he relished because it contradicted the assumption that accurate appraisal is always healthier. The model, which treats accurate appraisal of threat and problem-focused coping as the adaptive path, does not predict this in any obvious way, and the wider literature has never settled when denial helps and when it costs.

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References

Lazarus, R. S. (1966). Psychological Stress and the Coping Process. McGraw-Hill.
Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. Springer.