The coping strategies in the context of Reformulised Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory

Abstract

The research presented by this paper was designed with an aim of insight to the structural simmilarities of Gray`s Revised reinforcement sensitivity theory and Amirkhan`s Tripartite model of coping strategies. The research included 297 participants, 186 of them female and 111 male gender, with average age of 21.5 years, which completed The Coping Strategy Indicator (CSI; Amirkhan, 1990) and Reinforcement Sensitivity Questionnaire (UOP; Mitrović, Smederevac i Čolović, 2008) . The joint principal component analysis of subscale sums of both of the instruments resulted in three uncorrelated components explaining 68.81% of total variance. The first of them contains Avoidance coping strategy, Anxiety, Fight and Freeze- dimensions, the second contains only the rest of coping strategies, while the third contains the rest of personality variables. Confirmatory factor analyses tested six relation models, from which the last two of them revealed that the best-fitting indices. These findings provide only unambiguous positive relation of Anxiety with avoidant coping strategies. Further analyses revealed a subtle positive relation between Social support seeking strategy and Impulsivity as manifestation of Behavioral Activation System, which was masked by their opposite individual correlations with Fight dimension. In general, we can conclude that the avoidant and social coping strategies share the latent space with personality dimensions, while the problemsolving strategy isolates as a specific construct, due to it`s specific operationalisation within the CSI questionnaire. We suggest that including some measures of cognitive efficacy in the research design could gain more foresightful findings about basic relations and latetnt dynamics of these constructs.