Objectives: Cancer is a serious event in a person's life. However, certain coping strategies in relation to selected social, emotional, and personality factors appear to manage the disease.
Methods: Sources of social support were tested in cancer survivors (N = 696) using hierarchical linear regression. Selected personality variables in terms of sociodemographic, clinical, and emotional factors were used as predictors of adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies.
Results: It was found that adaptive coping strategies were more frequent in younger patients, in patients who attended cancer support groups and those with a greater level of optimism. Maladaptive coping was related to the higher level of experience of pain and sadness, neuroticism, and pessimism. The absence of a relapse and the time since the disease had been diagnosed were also important factors in coping with cancer.
Conclusions: The results point to the importance of considering various individual factors in the process of intervention to facilitate adaptive coping and to reduce maladaptive coping.
Keywords: Cancer; Coping; Neuroticism; Optimism; Pessimism; Psychosocial support.
© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.