Adjustment (psychology)

To cope with psychosocial stressors, one must adapt to the many pressures of everyday life and unexpected events—divorce, relationship problems, death or illness of a loved one, health issues, financial problems, loss of employment, or other life-changing events. A person's coping flexibility—the ability to modify coping strategies based on situational demands—is influenced by personality traits, life experiences, environmental supports, and emotional regulation skills. While all people differ in their reactions to stressors and life events, some may lack coping flexibility to such a degree that they develop a syndrome called adjustment disorder. Adjustment disorder is a stress-related condition involving emotional or behavioral symptoms, such as hopelessness, anxiety, sadness, and irritability, arising from the inability to cope with a stressful event.

Background

At the root of adjustment disorders are personality differences, which vastly influence the way people cope with situations. Personality theorists have long claimed that, to comprehend individual behavior, patterns of behavior must be broken down into discernible traits. Among these assumptions is Paul Costa’s and Robert McCrae’s popular Big Five personality classification model, which includes extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience.

A person with extraversion traits is sociable, proactive, and gregarious instead of shy and quiet. One who is agreeable is warm and cooperative rather than cold and antagonistic. Conscientious people are organized, reliable, and industrious instead of indolent, undependable, and disorganized. Emotional stability is characterized by self-confidence and calm rather than anxiousness and insecurity. An individual open to experience is curious and creative instead of practical and narrow-minded. Several of these traits are linked to career attainment. For example, extraversion and conscientiousness are favorable predictors of occupational success, while emotional instability is a negative predictor. Other characteristics can be linked to health and mortality. For example, emotional instability is associated with major mental disorders and physical illnesses, while conscientiousness is linked to fewer illnesses and a lower mortality rate.

The Big Five Model, also called the Five-Factor Model, became a leading personality model in early twenty-first-century psychology. However, some theorists argue that simply identifying traits is not enough to explain the differences observed in human personality. Further, early trait theories overlooked situational variables and process, which explain how specific traits lead to particular outcomes. Thus, contemporary researchers have adopted a broader, more integrative approach to personality research. Under integrative models, personality is described as a dynamic system of stable traits of the person’s psychological processes. The individual’s dispositions—attitudes, emotions, thoughts, and expectations—shape the way they respond and adjust to stressful situations. Some research has linked high conscientiousness and emotional stability with adaptive coping styles. Resilience is also a key protective factor in moderating the impact of stress on mental health.

Research examining personality type as a predictor of behavior continued to emerge in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The COVID-19 pandemic offered researchers an unprecedented opportunity to study adjustment. One study examined how patterns of solitude and sociability influenced adolescents' psychosocial adjustment during lockdowns and social distancing protocols. The longitudinal study used a sample of individuals described as "socially engaged," "socially withdrawn," and "solitary-sociable" adolescents. Overall, adolescents with higher levels of sociability and moderate, voluntary solitude, meaning time spent alone by choice rather than social avoidance, demonstrated better psychological adjustment and resilience during the pandemic. However, those with persistent social withdrawal or isolation—especially if it was involuntary or driven by anxiety—were at greater risk for psychological distress.

Historically, theorists have applied the word stress in various ways. Some regarded stress as an event that causes challenging situations, such as a divorce; others viewed it as a reaction prompted by a problematic occurrence. Contemporary researchers increasingly regard stress as a unique blend of these—a stimulus response to an event in which the person feels threatened or experiences harm or loss. These real or perceived threats are strenuous to the person’s coping abilities.

Overview

Psychology is a science and a profession that concentrates on behavior and associated physiological and mental processes. Adjustment is an extensive area of psychology that deals with how individuals capably or ineffectively deal with the demands and stresses of everyday life. Although early theorists and contemporary researchers have had conflicting views on the definition of stress and personality structure, the consensus is that there is a correlation between stress, personality, and adjustment.

Stress is an inevitable component of everyday life. While it is often associated with significant events, such as floods, divorce, and terrorism, stress can also arise from everyday challenges like household responsibilities or routine decision-making. According to the American Psychiatric Association's (APA's) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR) published in 2022, an essential feature of adjustment disorder is the development of clinically significant emotional or behavioral symptoms in response to an identifiable psychosocial stressor. These symptoms occur when an individual’s response to the stressor is either disproportionately intense compared to what would typically be expected, or when the stressor leads to marked impairment in social, occupational, or academic functioning.

Biological and environmental factors—such as culture, gender, age, and social conditions—help shape personality. The APA advises clinicians to consider these factors when making clinical observations about an individual’s response to stress and determining if the response exceeds what is typically expected. Adjustment disorder commonly co-occurs with anxiety and depressive symptoms, which may result from the stressful event or may be evidence of another underlying psychological condition, such as an anxiety disorder.

Some studies suggest women are more frequently diagnosed with adjustment disorder than men. However, this may simply reflect differences in help-seeking behavior, symptom presentation, or sociocultural expectations rather than true differences in prevalence. Culturally, the demands of daily living in modern societies and Indigenous cultures are quite different—what is viewed as stressful and how people respond depends on their upbringing. In addition, people’s evaluations of stressful occurrences are subjective, as some people are more inclined to feel threatened by life’s challenges than others.

Human reaction to stress is complicated and multifaceted. The situations that induce stress affect people on various levels. From traffic frustrations to relationship problems to scheduling conflicts and more, stress often elicits strong emotional responses, such as annoyance, anger, envy, and guilt. Although stress is typically associated with negative emotions and distress, researchers have detected an association between stress, positive emotions, and adjustment. For example, researchers Annmarie Groarke, Ruth Curtis, and Michael Kerin assert that cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of breast cancer survivors show that optimism has a notable impact on emotional well-being.

Effective adjustment to life’s stressors requires the application of good coping skills, which vary by individual. Positive coping skills may include exercise; reading; relaxation techniques like meditation; taking personal time off such as a mini-vacation; enlisting the support of friends; caring for a pet; using humor to lighten the situation; indulging in creative outlets such as drawing or writing; eating nutritional foods; or sleeping to allow the body to recover from the stressful event. Ineffective adjustment occurs when negative coping skills are used to manage stressors, such as using illegal drugs, excessively drinking alcohol, storing or ignoring negative feelings, overworking, avoiding issues, and self-mutilation. Whether one adjusts positively to life’s difficulties comes down to one's method of coping.

Bibliography

"Adjustment Disorder." Mayo Clinic, 6 July 2023, www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/adjustment-disorders/symptoms-causes/syc-20355224. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.

"Adjustment Disorder." MedlinePlus, US National Library of Medicine, 4 May 2024, medlineplus.gov/ency/article/000932.htm. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.

"Adjustment Disorders." Cleveland Clinic, 6 Oct. 2023, my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21760-adjustment-disorder. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.

"Adjustment Disorders." Johns Hopkins Hospital, www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/adjustment-disorders. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.

Borg, Meghan E., and Teena Willoughby. “Longitudinal Changes in Psychosocial Adjustment before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic for Adolescents with Differential Patterns of Solitude and Sociability.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence, vol. 53, no. 9, 2024, pp. 2121–38, doi:10.1007/s10964-024-02004-8. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.

Cheng, Cecilia, et al. "Coping Flexibility and Psychological Adjustment to Stressful Life Changes: A Meta-Analytic Review." Psychological Bulletin, vol. 140, no. 6, 2014, pp. 1582–607, doi:10.1037/a0037913. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.

Groarke, Annmarie, et al. "Global Stress Predicts Both Positive and Negative Emotional Adjustment at Diagnosis and Post-Surgery in Women with Breast Cancer." Psycho-Oncology, 2013, pp. 177–85.

Hales, Robert E. The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychiatry. 7th ed., American Psychiatric Pub., 2019.

Heszen, Irena. "Temperament and Coping Activity under Stress of Changing Intensity over Time." European Psychologist, vol. 17, no. 4, 2012, pp. 326–36.

Nelson, Debra L., and James C. Quick. Organizational Behavior: Science, the Real World, and You. 8th ed., South-Western Cengage Learning, 2013.

Sadaghiani, Nazila Seyyed Khorasani, and Mohsen Saghatyzad Sorkhab. "The Comparison of Coping Styles in Depressed, Anxious, Under Stress Individuals and the Normal Ones." Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 84, 2013, pp. 615–20.

Weiten, Wayne, et al. Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century. 13th ed., Cengage Learning, 2024.