In this video I describe how social support can help people to manage stress. This may come in the form of tangible support, informational support, or emotional support, though not all social interactions are beneficial for managing stress. I also describe how groups can provide social capital, though they also run the risk of becoming overly isolated or hostile to outsiders. Social support likely plays a role in the faith factor, which refers to individuals with higher levels of religiosity or spirituality having better health outcomes and living longer.

Coan, Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006: Lending a Hand – Social Regulation of the Neural Response to Threat: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/1…

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous videos on coping and stress management we’ve mostly taken an individual perspective; we focused on techniques that individuals can apply in their own lives in order to confront the stressors that they face, whether this is in the form of reappraising the situation or engaging in physical exercise but in this video we’re going to consider how other people also influence your ability to manage stress, and this brings us to consider stress and social support. So social support refers to feeling loved, feeling valued, feeling that you’re connected to other people. And this support can come in a number of different ways. It can come in the form of tangible support, so this would be someone cooking a meal for you or providing you with money if you need it, or providing physical assistance for a task that you can’t complete on your own. Or that could come in the form of informational support; so this could be advice that someone gives you or suggestions for how to solve a particular problem. And lastly we have emotional support; this is where somebody helps you to deal with the emotions that you’re facing, whether they console you or they just provide a shoulder to cry on.

Now we have to be careful when it comes to providing social support with others because it needs to be balanced with their individual sense of control. We don’t want to provide so much support that the person feels they’re no longer controlling the situation; they’re actually powerless and they need other people and they’re dependent on other people to solve their problems. We don’t want to encourage that viewpoint. We want to provide what’s called invisible support; we want to have the support there, we don’t want to be stealing the person’s independence when we provide. We want to leave them with a sense of control and we also might think about providing perceived support. This is where in the video on perceived control and learned helplessness I described the idea that if people are working on a particular task and they have this potential stressor of a loud noise if they’re given a switch and told this switch will turn the loud noise off this actually improves their concentration, even if they don’t use the switch.

And so the idea is just knowing that it’s there, knowing that if the loud noise happens I know what to do, I have a plan, I can deal with it, that’s actually able to to help them to stay focused on the task at hand. And so we can think about social support in the same way and so perceived support would be the idea that we have friends who we know are there if we need them, even if we never actually use them. This might still be beneficial to us. So knowing that I have a friend I can call if I really need to might help me manage my stress, even though I’m not actually making the call.

And so when we think about how effective social support is for helping us to manage stress it can become very difficult to understand and the reason for this is that our social support is tied up with a number of other factors. So we might wonder about somebody who has a really excellent social support network. We might think maybe this person is able to confront stress very well because of this social support but we might wonder if, “well, maybe they have this great social support network because they just have better social skills. They have better social competence” and maybe that’s related with their ability to manage stress.

We might wonder if maybe somebody has this social network because they are managing stress well already so that other people see them as more capable of managing stress. Other people see them as independent and maybe that makes it easier to form a relationship with that person. Maybe people who are lower in anxiety or lower in neuroticism find it easier to form friendships and relationships and maybe they also find it easier to deal with stress because they’re not experiencing quite as much anxiety or other negative emotions as somebody else. So it can be difficult to assess and we also have the problem that social support doesn’t necessarily provide benefits.

Sometimes social support is negative. Sometimes we have relationships with people but those are not actually helping us to manage stress and so we might have close family members who actually encourage us to think in negative ways. So this is social support that’s not positive, right? We can also have social support that encourages bad habits, harmful behaviors. So you might have people that you smoke cigarettes with and so they’re providing a sense of social support, maybe you stand around smoking and they’re offering you advice for things, but you’re also engaging in harmful behaviors. Or you might have your drinking buddies that might not be the best group to turn to when you’re confronting certain types of stressors because they might urge you to drink more alcohol. That might not help you to resolve the problem that you’re facing. Or you could have groups that engage in drug use together.

And we can also have the problem that social support can be intrusive. So sometimes it might increase our stress. Somebody might think that they’re providing support to us but they might actually be intruding. They might be violating our privacy, they might be asking us things that we don’t really want to tell them. It’s not really any of their business and so they might think they’re providing social support but actually they’re increasing the stress that the person is experiencing.

So all of this makes it very difficult to assess just how much social support is related to people’s ability to manage their stress. But we do have some direct evidence from laboratory studies and so one example of this comes from a study by James Cohen, Hilary Shafer, and Richard Davidson in 2006 and so what they did was they had a simple stressor of an electric shock to be delivered to a woman’s ankle while she’s in an fMRI scanner. And then while the woman is in this fMRI scanner the researchers were going to look at the threat-related neural activation so activation in brain areas like the hypothalamus and the insula to see her response to this stressor. And then the women in the study had, were in different conditions, in one case they were alone, so the women in this group had to go into the scanner they didn’t have any social support. Then a second group of the women had a stranger that they could get support from the stranger’s hand that they could hold while they’re in the fMRI scanner and they’re going to receive these electric shocks to their ankle. And then a third group were able to hold their husband’s hand, right? So here we have a more personal type of social support that’s being provided.

And what the researchers found was that this threat-related neural activation was highest in the group of women that were alone, that it was reduced in the woman who were able to hold the stranger’s hand, and that was lowest when they were able to hold their husband’s hand. And within that group, they even found that the women who reported the highest quality of, the highest quality of their marriage showed the greatest reductions in this brain activity associated with stress and threat. And so this suggests that having some social support can help us in immediate terms to deal with an acute stressor that we’re currently experiencing.

Now we can also think about groups of people in terms of social support and building up what’s called social capital within a group; where everybody feels a sense of community. They feel that they’re part of this group and they trust the other members of this group and they have a feeling of reciprocity, that people within the group will be willing to help each other. And in these groups that have high levels of social capital we see reduced hierarchy, so people feel that they’re closer to each other that they’re more equal and that there’s less exertion of dominance from some people in the group over others, and they see each other as more equal and they’re more willing to look out for one another regardless of who they are within the group.

Now this all sounds great and so we might think you’d want to be in the groups with the highest social capital. Whatever group would provide you with the most social capital, this would be a great thing and would probably help you to manage stress. But there is a downside to high levels of social capital and the downside is that while this may provide support to members of the group, it might do so in ways that are harmful to others. So they might help to protect members of the group at cost to outsiders. So they might be engaging in behaviors that are harmful to people outside of the group or to society as a whole. So we might have very tight-knit groups that form but these might become intolerant, prejudiced, or even discriminatory against outsiders. So this is one of the dangers of tight-knit groups with high levels of social capital.
Now lastly we can consider a type of social support that is important for many people and this brings us to what’s called the faith factor. This refers to the idea that people in religious communities and people who have higher levels of spirituality or religiosity actually have a number of positive health outcomes associated with this. So people with greater religiosity or higher levels of spirituality tend to have better health outcomes. They tend to recover more quickly from illness and they actually tend to live longer now. This is regardless of what faith it is that they practice. So it’s probably not the case that this is praying to the correct God who then allows them to live longer because of their devotion. It doesn’t seem to matter which God it is you’re praying to but the fact that you’re praying, the fact that you have a sense of faith or spirituality is associated with living longer and with having better health outcomes. And this is what’s called the faith factor.

Now the reasons for this faith factor are not fully understood but there’s a number of possible influences. So it might be the case that having a sense of faith, having a religious community that you’re a part of provides you with a clear way of understanding the world. The world is complex and chaotic and impossible for an individual to understand as an individual. But being part of the group and having a faith that you’re a part of provides a way of understanding the world, simplifying it in some ways and this might help you to manage some of the stress of existing. And it could also be the case that faith provides reappraisal of the meaning of events; that when things happen they’re not just random chaotic events, that they have some sense of purpose to them or we can have an increase in perceived control. One feels that if I’m more devoted if I engage in prayer or if I meet with my religious community that I can do something about my stressor. I know that I have people I can depend on and so this gives me a sense of control and a sense of support. It could be the case that feeling there’s an overall plan, there’s a reason for one’s suffering, that they’re not just cursed with bad fortune, that there’s something that they will get out of this, there’s a potential benefit, there’s this is part of an overall plan or that it’s a challenge, it’s a test of my faith or a test of my devotion. And so seeing this stressful event as a challenge rather than just a threat might help people to cope with stress and might help them to recover more quickly.

Now this isn’t always the case and there are some aspects of religious communities that might have negative effects on how people cope with stress. One way this can happen is when people struggle with their faith and they have doubts and they have difficulties and if this also is happening during a period of stress then this might worsen the stress that they experience. Or if they see their misfortunes as being punishments from an angry god, this is associated with higher levels of stress. People think that God is angry with me, he’s punishing me, and this actually can make their stress worse. And there’s also the tendency to engage in victim blaming, so if you believe that everything is you know happening for a reason, then you might think there’s a reason why people are suffering. Some people might deserve, maybe they’re experiencing punishments from an angry god and so this might lead people to more victim blaming or blaming of people who are suffering from illnesses as deserving those illnesses.

And as I said before with other groups, any tight-knit group like a religious community has the potential to become insulated and to shun outsiders and engage in discrimination against other groups but I think overall we can see that having groups, having social support, is a very beneficial thing it helps people to cope with the stresses that they face but we should still be aware of these potential negative effects, whether these are occurring in tight-knit religious communities or any other groups that we’re a part of.

Okay I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!