Health Benefits of Positive Reappraisal Coping Among People Living with HIV/AIDS: A Systematic Review.

People living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) often face significant stress, ranging from perceiving changes in their identity to encountering barriers to engaging in daily health behaviors. To manage these experiences, many people engage in positive reappraisal coping (including benefit finding and perceiving personal growth). Effective coping is highly important for PLWHA; stress reduction has salutary effects on affective, somatic, and behavioral health-related outcomes. The present systematic review, conducted in PubMed, PsycINFO, and CINAHL, synthesizes findings from 33 studies of PLWHA, addressing the effects of this class of strategies on health-related outcomes in adults living with HIV as a chronic illness. Studies were evaluated based on methodological and sampling considerations, measurement of key variables, and implications for multiple indicators of health, broadly defined. Results suggest that positive reappraisal is often beneficial when dealing with the implications of a potentially traumatic HIV diagnosis on one's identity, although effects may be moderated by contextual factors. Potential implications of these findings are reviewed, with an emphasis on the importance of positive reappraisal coping for enhancing health promotion and self-management of HIV as a chronic disease. Although the present review is limited in inclusion of multiple disparate outcomes and exclusion of non-English-language articles, the findings presented here inform a comprehensive model of direct and indirect effects of positive reappraisal on emotional, functional, physiological, and behavioral aspects of health useful in guiding future research.