Impact of personality type, health behavior and life satisfaction on wishful thinking coping style among cardiovascular patients

Abstract

Potentially stressful life events affect everyone almost daily. The manner in which people tackle those stressful events depends significantly on whether and how they perceive and respond to the situations. Wishful thinking is one of the Emotion-focused coping strategy aims to reduce and manage the intensity of the negative and distressing emotions that a stressful situation has caused rather than solving the problematic situation immediately. These coping strategies thus help to feel better and decision making to solve the source of distress. Emotion focused coping increases the sense of pleasure, positivity and contentment and thus enables us to increase our ability to focus on that which one can change. An attempt was made in the present investigation to study the impact of personality type, health behavior and life satisfaction on wishful thinking coping style among cardiovascular patients. Sample of study consists of 320 cardiovascular male and female patients in the age group of 40-60 years and the subjects were drawn randomly from various Districts of Andhra Pradesh, India. Type A personality scale developed by Glazer (1978), Type D personality scale developed by Denollet (2005), Health behavior scale developed by Ramamurthi and Jamuna (2005), Life Satisfaction Inventory developed by Ramamurthi (1969) and coping styles inventory developed by Tobin et al., (1984) were used to assess Personality type, health behavior and life satisfaction and wishful thinking coping style among cardiovascular patients. Means, SDs and ANOVA were employed to analyze the data. Findings of the study revealed that personality type, health behavior and life satisfaction have significant influence on Wishful thinking coping style among cardiovascular patients. Hoping that the present study will provide information helpful to counselors, yoga practitioners, health professionals, social workers and psychiatrists to use interventional programs like yoga and meditation to enhance the wellbeing, decrease stress, depression and to use effective coping styles.