Abstract
The present study investigated how the individuals accommodate their schema to adapt to stressful environments. The environments have been changing rapidly over the past few decades. Recently, adaptation to environments and well-being have been brought to public attention. It has been proposed that the degree of perceived stress in a certain environment is largely affected by personality differences. From this view point, the adaptation system is static. On the other hand, as Piaget pointed out, there is an interest in the dynamic adaptation system. In his theory, the individuals accommodate their inner environments by interacting with their social environment. Such an adaptation system can be called "adaptation schema". There has been almost no study to investigate the mechanism of the adaptation schema so far. We have tried to make a hypothetical model of this schema and identified their components as follows: social support, achievement and social competency, physical competency, self-fulfillment motivation, achievement motivation, vulnerability, problem focused strategy, emotional focused strategy, and sense of self. The scale to measure how much an individual relies on these components is the stress self-regulation inventory (SSI). Participants, university students, completed the SSI and perceived stress inventory. These nine factor scores, and correlation patterns among the nine factors, were compared between high-stress group (N=41) and low-stress group (N=41). The results were as follows: (1) Using t-test, the problem focused strategy score in the high-stress group was higher than the low-stress group. The other scores were not significantly different between the two groups. (2) The number of significant correlations in high-stress group were less than in the low-stress group. (3) The correlation patterns were overconcentrated on "social support" in the high-stress group and more evenly diffused to almost all factors in the low-stress group. In conclusion, the individuals accommodate their adaptation schema according to the degree of perceived stress. Individuals under high stress cope by reducing their coping strategies to mainly "social support", thereby preventing overadaptation and preserving mental resources.
