Sense of coherence as predictor of emotional, cognitive, and physiological responses

Three hundred eighty-eight male and female undergraduates completed Antonovsky's scale measuring sense of coherence (SOC). Of these, seventy-eight with scores toward the extremes of the distribution were selected to participate in the study. They listened to a ten minute taped story with ambiguous emotional content and told about important emotional learning experiences from their own lives. Following the tape and their own stories, they completed measures of emotion, cognitive appraisals, and physiological reactivity. Observers rated tapes of subjects' stories on the same cognition measures that subjects had completed. SOC was found to have no relationship to emotions in general or to physiological reactivity. It also did not predict observers' ratings of subjects' stories. However, SOC was significantly related to the degree of shame subjects expressed about their personal events, and it was marginally related to guilt and contempt. (Subjects lower in SOC described feeling these emotions more intensely than those higher in SOC.) There was no significant relationship between SOC and how subjects, in retrospect, reported feeling about the event when it occurred. However, people higher in SOC reported significantly more positive personal changes as a result of the experience than did people lower in SOC. Though there was only weak support for the hypotheses, the abundant data supporting the validity of a construct like sense of coherence makes further investigation in this area worth while.