It is a practical truism that social support helps humans navigate through the ups and downs of life; as the Beatles pointed out, we get by with a little help from our friends. Social support has been defined as information that leads an individual to believe that he or she is cared for and loved, is esteemed and valued, belongs to a network of communication and mutual obligation, or any combination of these factors (Cobb, 1976). Perhaps unsurprisingly, social support is associated with abundant positive outcomes. These benefits encompass the lifespan, protecting against low birth weight in the beginning and death near the end (Cobb, 1976 and Cohen, 2004). In the years in between, social support has been found to encourage coping with crisis and change, as well as to promote health benefits including recovery from illness, stronger immune function, depression avoidance, lower incidence of escapist drinking, lower cholesterol levels, and lower rates of mental illness (Baron et al., 1990 and Cobb, 1976). Additionally, social support seems to protect people in crisis from a variety of ailments including arthritis, tuberculosis, coronary heart disease, and the common cold (Cobb, 1976, House et al., 1988 and Uchino et al., 1996). Psychologically, social support also predicts outcomes such as better adjustment and lowered rates of delinquency (Friedlander et al., 2007, Sheets and Mohr, 2009 and Yoshikawa, 1994). Central to the current analysis, life satisfaction, the cognitive evaluation of the global quality of one’s life (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985) and a central component of well-being (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999), has been found to be positively predicted by social support in a number of samples (e.g., Kong et al., 2014, Kong et al., 2012, Newsom and Schulz, 1996, Pinquart and Sorensen, 2000, Siedlecki et al., 2014 and Song et al., 2013).
Contradictory research findings, however, have challenged the notion that social support is a universally beneficial process. Indeed, some research has found that social support is related to increased distress. For example, in samples of new mothers and pregnant adolescents, support was found to be positively correlated with depressive symptomatology and stress ( Barrera, 1981 and Carveth and Gottlieb, 1979). Similarly, students giving speeches were more anxious after receiving support than were students who received no support ( Bolger & Amarel, 2007). Importantly, this counterintuitive effect does not seem to be explained by reverse causation (increased distress prompting social support seeking and receipt) ( Gleason, Iida, Shrout, & Bolger, 2008) as studies utilizing lagged models have predicted increased distress from the previous day’s support ( Bolger et al., 2000 and Shrout et al., 2006). Researchers have looked to individual differences to explain these inconsistencies ( Cohen et al., 2005, Coyne and DeLongis, 1986 and Gleason et al., 2008), but previously tested factors, including relationship satisfaction and self-esteem, have failed to account for individual differences in distress reactions to social support.
Similarly, the relationship between social support and life satisfaction is not consistent across the literature. Some studies have found a negative relationship between social support and well-being, particularly in older adults (e.g., Lee et al., 1995 and Silverstein et al., 1996). Interestingly, Thomas (2010) found that for older adults, receiving support from a sibling or spouse was positively associated with well-being, but this relationship was reversed when the support came from one’s children. This negative relationship might be due to the inconsistency between drawing this support and the parent role ( Lee et al., 1995). It seems that the positive effects of social support can be overwhelmed by an incongruency between receiving support and a person’s sense of self. Song et al. (2013) found that the positive relationship between social support and life satisfaction was mediated by core self-evaluations, specifically self-esteem, generalized self-efficacy, neuroticism, and locus of control. An additional aspect of the self that seems particularly relevant to this relationship is the relational self-construal, as we will now consider.
