Daily Communal Coping in Couples With Type 2 Diabetes: Links to Mood and Self-Care.

Zajdel M, Helgeson VS, Seltman HJ, Korytkowski MT, Hausmann LRM. Daily Communal Coping in Couples With Type 2 Diabetes: Links to Mood and Self-Care. Annals of behavioral medicine : a publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine. 2018 Feb 17; 52(3):228-238.

Dimensions for VA is a web-based tool available to VA staff that enables detailed searches of published research and research projects.

If you have VA-Intranet access, click here for more information vaww.hsrd.research.va.gov/dimensions/

VA staff not currently on the VA network can access Dimensions by registering for an account using their VA email address.    Search Dimensions for VA for this citation
* Don't have VA-internal network access or a VA email address? Try searching the free-to-the-public version of Dimensions

Search for Abstract from PubMed

---

Abstract:

Background: Adjusting to the challenges of a chronic illness does not affect patients alone but also influences social network members-most notably spouses. One interpersonal framework of coping with a chronic illness is communal coping, described as when a problem is appraised as joint and the couple collaborates to manage the problem. Purpose: We sought to determine whether daily communal coping was linked to daily mood and self-care behavior and examined one potential mechanism that may explain these links: perceived emotional responsiveness. Methods: Patients who had been diagnosed with diabetes less than 5 years ago and their spouses (n = 123) completed a daily diary questionnaire that assessed communal coping and mood for 14 consecutive days. The patients also reported daily self-care behaviors. We used multilevel modeling to examine the links of communal coping to patient and spouse mood and patient self-care. Because both patients and spouses reported their mood, the actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) was employed to examine mood. Results: Multilevel APIM showed that actor communal coping was associated with lower depressed mood, higher happy mood, and lower angry mood and partner communal coping was linked to higher happy mood. Patient communal coping was related to better dietary and medication adherence, and spouse communal coping was linked to better medication adherence. Perceived emotional responsiveness partially mediated the relations of communal coping to mood but not to self-care behaviors. Conclusions: Communal coping on a daily basis may help both patients and spouses adjust psychologically to the illness as well as enhance patient self-care behaviors.