A social-cognitive approach to understanding the positive and negative consequences of social support receipt in close relationships

Social support is one of the most frequently studied concepts in research on close personal relationships. However, different definitions of social support have led to seemingly contradictory findings about its consequences. On the one hand, individuals who perceive more help to be available to them experience a range of beneficial outcomes. On the other hand, individuals' reports of actually receiving help are frequently associated with increased distress. In this dissertation, I apply principles of social cognition to integrate these findings. Specifically, I propose that support receipt conveys both positive information about one's relationship (i.e., that one is loved and cared for) and negative information about oneself (i.e., that one's own efforts were inadequate). Social support events should simultaneously evoke both types of evaluation, but the extent of each should vary by context. When a stressor is highly self-relevant or when issues of competence are central to the task, support receipt should be more likely to activate negative self-evaluations and less likely to activate positive relational evaluations, compared to when a stressor is not relevant to one's self-concept or when the stressor is temporally distant. I tested this perspective in a daily diary sample of committed romantic couples (N=291 couples) where one member of each couple was a graduating law student preparing to take the state bar examination. I used two single-item measures to assess relationship- and self-relevant evaluations---individuals' daily reports of feeling "loved" and "supported" in their relationships---and I established that reports of feeling supported were associated both with positive relational evaluations and negative self-evaluations. I found that the association between support receipt and distress became stronger as the exam approached and was stronger on days of exam-related versus exam-unrelated stress. These changes were paralleled by changes in the associations between support receipt and feeling loved and supported. I discuss the implications of this work in terms of thinking more broadly about the social-cognitive dynamics of social support, emphasizing the importance of considering social support as an individual-level phenomenon as well as a relationship-level phenomenon.