accommodative coping
a stress-management strategy in which a person adjusts his or her preferences and orientations to suit given situational forces and constraints. Involving a devaluation of, or disengagement from, blocked goals and a lowering of personal performance standards and aspirations, accommodative coping thus represents a neutralization rather than an active solution of a particular problem. Accommodative processes generally appear following repeated unsuccessful attempts to change the situation through assimilative coping. Additionally, accommodative processes are thought to be more prominent in later life, when individuals tend to experience an increasingly unfavorable balance of developmental gains and losses. [identified in 1990 by Jochen Brandtstädter and Gerolf Renner, German psychologists]