Cognitive Styles and Stress-Proneness

Abstract

The secret of power over stress lies in your ability to think. Actually, there is nothing new about this insight. In the 17th century, Shakespeare’s Hamlet said, ”There is nothing good nor bad but that thinking makes it so.” Fifty years later, René Descartes, the French philosopher and mathematical genius, echoed the same point when he described the source of certain knowledge in the Latin phrase cogito, ergo sum, ”I think, therefore I am.” In recent decades, however, psychologists have begun to specify the actual processes by which the mind imposes its own order upon ”reality.” These scientists have revealed the cognitive processes by which we experience, organize, store, and understand the information that constitutes our world.