C onventional wisdom suggests that the experience of stress is ubiquitous and omnipresent. Conventional wisdom also posits that a modicum of stress is important for our daily lives-if we did not have it, we would not get up in the morning and go to school or work. A further truism (which research findings confirm; e.g., Vrshek-Schallhorn et al., 2020) indicates that too much stress can lead to negative consequences, such as depression. However, we opine that it is not the presence of stress per se that engenders psychopathology but how we handle or manage such stress that best predicts the likelihood of experiencing depressive reactions. As such, this chapter focuses on ineffective social problem solving (SPS) as one major risk or vulnerability factor for depression, as well as on how psychosocial interventions aimed at improving SPS can attenuate such distress. DEFINITION OF CONSTRUCTSWe begin by differentiating between the constructs of problem solving and social problem solving. The topic of problem solving has been the focus of many decades of research within the fields of cognitive and experimental psychology. As such, human problem solving has been conceptualized as a higher order set of cognitive processes and one major aspect of executive functioning. Such research generally addresses how individuals attempt to solve cognitive, mathematical, or intellectual problems, as compared with the types of problems that people experience in living (e.g., dealing with financial stressors,

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