ABSTRACT
We begin this chapter by emphasizing how fundamental our understanding of how people cope is to work stress research. We then turn our focus to how in coping research to capture the realities of contemporary working we need to integrate into this work issues like the mindful use of technology and argue that when classifying coping strategies we now need to explore concepts like cyberloafing and whether it expresses a contemporary coping mechanism. To capture whether cyberbehaviours should become a part of coping research we suggest that classifying coping strategies is an evolving practice and our understanding of coping must be built around the realities of contemporary working and so this is a direction that future research should take. We also touch on the influence of the positive psychology movement and the need to explore both positive emotions when coping and the work that follows on emotional approach coping. We then turn our attention to reinforcing the fundamental importance when researching coping of the process of primary appraisal and the powerful explanatory potential that resides in such a concept and how it is a compelling and powerful piece of the stress process. It is this process that gives a context that is fundamental to developing our understanding of the coping process. We argue that focusing future research on the primary appraisal process gives a synthesis to our work and gives us new meaning to the transactional nature of stress. We end the chapter by pointing to the future directions coping research may wish to take.
