Discriminative facility in the face of threat: Relationship to psychological distress

This study explored whether discriminative facility in dealing with threate ning situations is negatively associated with distress. Discriminative faci lity entails the ability to (1) "accurately" appraise the controllability o f stressors and (2) use more problem-focused relative to emotion-focused co ping with controllable stressors and at the same time more emotion-focused relative to problem-focused coping with uncontrollable stressors. We conduc ted a preliminary study to obtain "accurate" appraisals of the controllabil ity of two stressors. In the main study, college students (N= 109) provided information regarding their appraisal of the controllability of the two st ressors, how they coped with these two stressors, and their level of both s tressor-specific distress and general distress. The relationship between co ping strategy (problem- vs emotion-focused) and stresser-specific distress was found to be a function of the controllability of the stressor. Specific ally, with controllable stressors, the high use of problem-focused coping w as associated with less distress than the high use of emotion-focused copin g. The opposite was found to be the case with uncontrollable stressors. Mor e importantly, discriminative facility was negatively related to general di stress. The results suggest that discriminative facility in the appraisal o f and coping with stressors is an important mediator in the experience of p sychological symptoms as a result of stress.