The less-frequent use of rumination and blaming others may reflect cognitive coping strategies consistent with the type C coping style.
The diminishing marginal disutility may reflect a coping mechanism, a maximum trade-off limit, or study design limitations, where some respondents might pay more attention to the health-state descriptions than the actual frequencies.
In some contexts, this may reflect a coping strategy among health personnel to overcome unsatisfactory remuneration or working conditions in order to fulfil professional and material expectations, in terms of seeking alternative ways to increase income by undertaking other forms of employment either after or during official working hours.
Generally speaking, higher level of education is associated with less pain and disability, which may reflect better pain coping strategies [25]; nevertheless, the economic returns of education vary by gender, ethnicity, and era [1, 25, 26].
Also, our participants were not clinically diagnosed with anxiety disorders, and thus it is very likely that the responses in these regions may reflect the engagement of coping strategies probably developed to deal successfully with potentially uncomfortable social situations.
The dismissiveness and detachment of attachment-related avoidance may reflect a learned coping mechanism for dealing with exposure to particularly untrustworthy relationships.
Continued injection drug use may reflect a negative coping response to the multiple stigmas of injection drug use, being HIV-positive, and being a MSMW.
This indicates that hormonal responses during encounters may vary according to the individual status and may reflect different styles of coping with social stress [72].
The correlation analyses between brain activity and WM scores also identified brain-behaviour relationships that may reflect responses engaged to cope with the presence of anxiety-inducing distraction, as opposed to reflecting a detrimental impact of emotional distraction (see Table 4).
This postulation that anxious preoccupation and helplessness-hopelessness may reflect illness representations rather than coping strategies is also supported by findings from the MAC [ 21] studies that indicate anxious preoccupation coping and anxiety are highly correlated.
