Coping with breast cancer thoughts, behavioral and emotional reactions

Abstract

The objective of this research has been to obtain basic information about how patients cope with the disease and analyse the possible existence of relations between different ways of coping with illness: cognitive, behaviours and emotional responses. Descriptive analysis and principal components analysis with varimax rotation was performed on a sample of 189 breast cancer women. A two-factor solution emerged explaining 32.45% of variance characterized by “coping focused on oneself” and “coping involving others”. The results indicate that in a situation of chronic illness, the person faces their health problems through various forms of coping, not mutually exclusive. For example, one person may tend to communicate but also can conceal many things in relation to their concerns for his health, or talk a lot with some people and conceal much with others, etc. The results are consistent with the general Lazarus´ theory of coping and partly with the by Moos and colleagues proposed coping styles in the field of the health.