Your coping strategy and my distress: Inter-spouse perceptions of coping and adjustment among breast cancer patients and their spouses

Objective: To assess the perceptions of breast cancer patients and their spouses regarding each other's way of coping with the illness, and their associations with psychological and psychosocial adjustment. Method: Seventy-three breast cancer patients and their spouses reported on other-coping and self-coping using the COPE scale. Distress was measured by the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) and everyday functioning was assessed by the Psychosocial Adjustment (PSA) questionnaire. Results: Both spouses' perceptions of each other as emotion-focused copers were related to their own high distress and low psychosocial functioning. In contrast, husbands' perceptions of their wives as problem-focused copers were related to their own high psychosocial functioning. When perceptions of other-coping were analyzed, together with self-coping scales used as control variables, wives' adjustment was found to be related mainly to their own emotion-focused coping, while husbands' perceptions of their wives' coping were still associated with their own adjustment. Conclusions: Perceiving the patient as coping with emotion-focused strategies may constitute an important independent factor in spouses' adjustment to breast cancer but, for the patients themselves, their own emotion-focused coping is more influential than their perceptions of their husbands' coping.