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Social Comparison, Stress, and Coping

University of California, Los Angeles

Bram P. Buunk

University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Lisa G. Aspinwall

University of California, Los Angeles

In recent years, basic research and theory on social comparison activities has been applied to understanding the coping processes of people undergoing stressful events. These investigations have both elucidated coping and highlighted issues that need reconsideration in traditional social comparison frameworks. These issues include the predominant motives that guide social comparison activity; the role of cognitive processes in the creation of targets and the selection of dimensions for evaluation; the limits imposed on available social comparison information by stressful or victimizing circumstances; the role of similarity in social comparisons under threat; the inherent meaning of upward and downward comparisons; and the divergence of evaluative versus information-seeking comparative activities. Implications for theoretical integration and for understanding coping and social support are discussed.

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