Ellen Skinner

Portland State University | PSU · Department of Psychology

Adolescents face many academic pressures that require good coping skills, but coping skills can also depend on social resources, such as parental support and fewer negative interactions. The aim of this study was to determine if parental support and parental negative interactions concurrently and longitudinally relate to adolescents’ ways of academ...

The field of achievement motivation is concept and data rich, housing more than a dozen major theories, all of which have withstood empirical scrutiny. Their very success, however, has enabled them to flourish within siloed territories. Such fragmentation creates major problems for educators, interventionists, and researchers entering the field. Th...

The present study examined the interconnections between parental motivational support and children’s academic coping as a bidirectional system, with each social partner shaping changes in the other, using a two-wave sample of 1,020 students in grades three through six, aged 8–13, measured at the beginning and end of one school year in a school dist...

Developmentalists have increasingly concluded that systems approaches to resilience provide a useful higher-order home for the study of the development of coping. Building on previous work on the complementarity of resilience and coping, this paper had two goals: (1) to propose a set of strategies for examining the role of coping in processes of re...

Despite broad interest in how children and youth cope with stress and how others can support their coping, this is the first Handbook to consolidate the many theories and large bodies of research that contribute to the study of the development of coping. The Handbook's goal is field building - it brings together theory and research from across the...

Despite broad interest in how children and youth cope with stress and how others can support their coping, this is the first Handbook to consolidate the many theories and large bodies of research that contribute to the study of the development of coping. The Handbook's goal is field building - it brings together theory and research from across the...

Introduction: Many adolescents are concerned about global and future crises, such as the health of the planet or terrorism/safety. Yet, adolescents can also express hope about the future. Thus, asking adolescents about their concern and hope could yield subgroups with different ways of coping and personal adjustment. Method: Australian adolescen...

Although motivational theories agree that environmental factors (like interpersonal relationships and pedagogical practices) are crucial in shaping students’ motivational development, few comprehensive conceptualizations of motivational contexts have been proposed. Instead, individual theories tend to focus on the contextual antecedents of the spec...

Coping with stressful events is a basic process integral to adaptation and survival. Coping involves how people of all ages detect, appraise, and respond or deal with stressful encounters, including threats, challenges, and loss. Decades of research has described the complexity of coping as it unfolds over each stressful event episode and develops...

In this article, we aimed to contribute to a fuller understanding of the complex social ecologies that shape students’ academic development by focusing on richer and more precise conceptuali- zations of mesosystem effects. First, building on bioecological models, we argued for the importance of collective influences, defined as influences from mult...

Introduction: This study sought to examine how warm involvement from parents and teachers contributes to the development of students' academic engagement, and whether the relative contributions of adults differ as students begin the transition to middle school. Methods: Trivariate latent growth curve modeling was used to examine 1011 third-sixth...

Background: Parents, teachers, and researchers all share the goal of optimizing students' academic engagement (Handbook of social influences in school contexts: Social-emotional, motivation, and cognitive outcomes, 2016, Routledge, New York, NY). While separate lines of research have demonstrated the importance of high-quality relationships and su...

Mindfulness training (MT) for teachers has become popular, yet gaps remain in our understanding of the time-course of the impacts of MT on teacher- and classroom-outcomes; the generalizability of MT impacts on elementary versus secondary teachers; and how characteristics of teachers and schools may moderate the impacts of MT. In this randomized-con...

The goal of this chapter is to explore how a motivational model based on self-determination theory can be used as a guide for specifying some of the elements of garden-based education necessary to promote science learning and achievement. This model posits that students’ intrinsic motivation and constructive engagement with garden-based activities...

Coping skills include a range of actions and adaptations in response to stressful experiences, which can be critical for determining pathways of resilience and vulnerability in children and adolescents. This article describes major theories of stress and coping concentrating on a developmental motivational theory of coping. Following this backgroun...

Re-engagement, resiliency, grit

We introduce the umbrella construct of “motivational resilience and vulnerability in school” and explain how this special section contributes to initial field building efforts aimed at integrating complementary work on motivational, regulatory, developmental, and social processes that foster the academic development of children and youth.

Misgivings about the use of the term "contagion"

The term “contagion” has become increasingly popular as an omnibus catch-all to depict all kinds of mutual influences between people of equal status (or “peers”). We argue that some of these influences may qualify as “contagion,” but others denote alternative processes better described, for example, as exchange, transactions, or diffusion. To trans...

Many subareas share a common interest in students’ motivational resilience, defined broadly as patterns of action that allow students to constructively deal with, overcome, recover, and learn from encounters with academic obstacles and failures. However, research in each of these areas often progresses in relative isolation, and studies rarely util...

Objective: To develop a theoretically grounded measure of self-perceived ability to cope with stress in a flexible (i.e. non-rigid) manner and test associations with well-being. Method: Participants in Study 1 (N = 395, 17–56 years) completed surveys to report flexible coping with stress and well-being. In Studies 2 (N = 645, 17–27 years) and 3 (N...

This study focused on the joint effects of teachers and peer groups as predictors of change in students’ engagement during the first year of middle school, when the importance of peer relationships normatively increases and the quality of teacher-student relationships typically declines. To explore cumulative and contextualized joint effects, the s...

How children and youth deal with academic challenges and setbacks can make a material difference to their learning and school success. Hence, it is important to investigate the factors that allow students to cope constructively. A process model focused on students’ motivational resources was used to frame a study examining whether engagement in the...

In this final chapter, we consolidate the main themes introduced in previous chapters, and provide five suggestions for the future study of the development of coping: (1) incorporate the whole coping system—including processes of threat detection and appraisal, stress and emotional reactivity, regulation, coping responses, and learning from stressf...

Three crucial developments lead to qualitative shifts in coping during early childhood, when coping is transformed from an interpersonal to an intrapersonal process. First, improvements in representational capacities allow children to appraise problems using increasingly complex mental models, enriched by the incorporation of emotional states and i...

During middle childhood, coping becomes remarkably “sturdy,” which may be one reason why this phase is seen as particularly resilient. Three key developments underlie reorganizations during this period. First, new representational capacities are consolidated that allow children to intentionally reappraise stressful events in ways that shape their e...

In this chapter, we explore parenting and family stress as foundations for the differential development of coping during childhood and adolescence, and describe several ways in which adaptive and maladaptive coping contribute to developmental cascades that lead toward resilience or psychopathology. First, we draw on research on parenting and coping...

Ways of coping are building blocks in the coping area, describing people’s actual behavioral, emotional, and cognitive actions in response to stress. Hundreds of ways of coping have been studied, but until recently theories and measures did not converge on a comprehensive set of core coping categories. Recent conceptual and empirical analyses have...

Three important developments underlie age-graded shifts in coping during the second year of life. First, the emergence of representational capacities transforms implicit appraisals to explicit belief systems that filter experiences of potentially stressful transactions and guide subsequent reactivity and readiness for action. This new system create...

Three important developments underlie transformations in the coping system during adolescence. First, neurophysiological threat detection and stress reactivity systems are recalibrated to incorporate greater sensitivity to emotionally distressing experiences. Along with normative increases in actual stressful life events, heightened reactivity can...

Two major reorganizations in the coping system occur during the first three months of life. Prior to birth, the neurophysiological systems subserving coping functioned inside the mother’s body, so the first reorganization enables these systems to develop the capacity to establish stable homeostatic functioning outside such a supportive context. The...

Early adversity, temperament, and attachment relationships lay the foundation for differentiated pathways along which coping can develop across infancy, childhood, and adolescence. These factors influence the basic architecture of coping because they not only contribute to underlying neurophysiological systems subserving reactivity and regulation,...

A review of studies examining age differences and age changes in ways of coping across childhood and adolescence reveals two kinds of age-graded patterns. First, there are age increases in children’s general coping capacities, as seen in cognitive and meta-cognitive elaborations of problem-solving (from instrumental action to planful problem-solvin...

The neurophysiological subsystems that underlie threat detection, stress reactivity, regulation, and recovery can be thought of as a single multi-level integrated system, whose development consists of the sequential appearance of these levels and their successive integration. Already at birth, the neurophysiological system is layered with redundant...

During the first twelve months of life, three developments are particularly important to age-graded improvements in coping. First, infants’ stress reactivity and regulation begin to be guided by implicit appraisals of challenging and stressful encounters (sometimes called internal working models or generalized expectations of contingency). These ar...

Advances over the last two decades have helped shape developmentally-friendly conceptualizations of coping. Building on constructs of regulation, definitions now have an explicit place for the emotional, behavioral, motivational, attentional, cognitive, and social processes that have long been implicated in coping: Coping focuses on how these multi...

Students perform better in school to the extent they are able to engage fully, cope adaptively, and bounce back from obstacles and setbacks in their academic work. These three processes, which studies suggest are positively inter-connected, may comprise a self-sustaining system that enables motivational resilience. Using self-determination theory t...

Teaching is a demanding profession, with the potential to provide high levels of satisfaction. However, research shows that it can also be stressful: Teachers report multiple sources of chronic stress (including workload, students, parents, and administrators) and symptoms of burnout, such as emotional exhaustion, helplessness, and cynicism; rates...

The goal of this chapter is to review conceptual and empirical progress in the study of the development of coping and to identify important ways in which this work may be useful to researchers studying the development of psychopathology and resilience. We first summarize perspectives that identify coping as a transactional process, reviewing theory...

Guided by the motivational theory of coping (Skinner and Zimmer-Gembeck in Ann Rev Psychol 58:119–144. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.58.110405.085705, 2007), we investigated children’s anticipated coping with three different stressful events (bullying, parental argument, parent–child verbal conflict), and examined whether their reliance on challenge co...

This book traces the development of coping from birth to emerging adulthood by building a conceptual and empirical bridge between coping and the development of regulation and resilience. It offers a comprehensive overview of the challenges facing the developmental study of coping, including the history of the concept, critiques of current coping th...

Coping, a basic process integral to adaptation and survival, depicts how people detect, appraise, deal with, and learn from stressful encounters. Decades of research in the social and medical sciences have examined coping in many domains across the life span. Mainstream research, focusing on measurement of individual differences and correlates of c...

Attachment theorists have described the parent–child attachment relationship as a foundation for the emergence and development of children's capacity for emotion regulation and coping with stress. The purpose of this review was to summarize the existing research addressing this issue. We identified 23 studies that employed validated assessments of...

We examined adjustment problems as risks for patterns of emotions, appraisals, and coping with rejection, and explored whether these processes could account for sex (boy/girl) differences in coping. Young adolescents (N = 669, grades 6-8) completed questionnaires, which assessed responses to peer rejection threat with two short scenarios. Using str...

all individuals need to feel that they are capable of producing desired and avoiding undesired events / this need gives perceived control its power to regulate behavior, emotion, and motivation under conditions of challenge / formulated an integrative conceptualization of perceived control which distinguishes between individuals' beliefs about the...

High quality relationships with teachers and peers in the classroom form the foundation for the development of students’ academic engagement, achievement, and motivational resilience. This chapter offers teachers and researchers (1) a motivational framework that explains the dynamics that sustain positive and negative relationships, and (2) a set o...

A study was designed to examine a multidimensional measure of children’s coping in the academic domain as part of a larger model of motivational resilience. Using items tapping multiple ways of dealing with academic problems, including five adaptive ways (strategizing, help-seeking, comfort-seeking, self-encouragement, and commitment) and six malad...

The same stressor can evoke different emotions across individuals, and emotions can prompt certain coping responses. Responding to four videotaped interpersonal stressors, adolescents (N = 230, (X) over bar (age) = 10 years) reported their sadness, fear and anger, and 12 coping strategies. After identifying emotion patterns using cluster analysis,...

This article focuses on how mindfulness train-ing (MT) programs for teachers, by cultivating mindful-ness and its application to stress management and the social-emotional demands of teaching, represent emerging forms of teacher professional development (PD) aimed at improving teaching in public schools. MT is hypothesized to promote teachers' "hab...

The goal of this chapter is to present a perspective on student engagement with academic work that emphasizes its role in organizing the daily school experiences of children and youth as well as their cumulative learning, long-term achievement, and eventual academic success. A model grounded in self-determination theory, and organized around studen...

Building on self-determination theory, this study presents a model of intrinsic motivation and engagement as “active ingredients” in garden-based education. The model was used to create reliable and valid measures of key constructs, and to guide the empirical exploration of motivational processes in garden-based learning. Teacher- and student-repor...

Perceived control is a powerful resource when dealing with stressful life events. Research on perceived control (in all its guises, including locus of control, self-efficacy, causal attributions, confidence, and perceived competence) documents its role in supporting constructive mastery-oriented coping at all points in the lifespan. Likewise, resea...

Identifying correlates of children's emotional reactions and coping can provide information about developmental processes and identify useful strategies for improving children's adaptation to stress. We investigated associations of social competence with children's responses to standardised, controllable interpersonal stressors. The stressors inclu...

Despite consensus that development shapes every aspect of coping, studies of age differences in coping have proven difficult to integrate, primarily because they examine largely unselected age groups, and utilize overlapping coping categories. A developmental framework was used to organize 58 studies of coping involving over 250 age comparisons or...

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An analogue methodology was used to present a set of realistic, salient stressors to children in grades 3, 5, and 7. Children (N=146) viewed eight videotaped vignettes depicting interpersonal and non-interpersonal stressors; these were expected to differentially threaten psychological needs for relatedness, competence and autonomy and provoke diffe...

This article presents a motivational conceptualization of engagement and disaffection: First, it emphasizes children's constructive, focused, enthusiastic participation in the activities of classroom learning; second, it distinguishes engagement from disaffection, as well as behavioral features from emotional features. Psychometric properties of sc...

We summarize progress in the developmental study of coping, including specification of a multilevel framework, construction of definitions of coping that rely on regulation as a core concept, and identification of developmentally graded members of families of coping. We argue that these accomplishments are a prelude to the real tasks of a developme...

Abstract Theories and research on children’s motivation in s chool employ a wealth of constructs to explain its differential development (Wigfield, Ecc les, Schiefele, Roeser, & Davis-Kean, 2006). Classes of major predictors have been drawn from work on self-system processes, such as