Navigating One’s Social Relationships to Thrive: Uncovering and Understanding the Divergent Effects of Supportive Social Relationships.

Abstract

Decades of empirical work indicate that supportive relationships play a vital role in human flourishing. For instance, people who have more supportive relationships have better mental and physical health, higher levels of subjective well-being, and lower rates of morbidity and mortality (e.g., Cohen & Wills, 1985; House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988; Thoits, 1995). However, despite a plethora of compelling evidence, how supportive relationships benefit individuals is not well understood (cf. Cohen & Janicki-Deverts, 2009; Feeney & Collins, 2015; Thoits, 2011). Moreover, a growing number of studies has begun to show that at times receiving support can lead to negative outcomes (e.g., Bolger, Zuckerman, & Kessler, 2000; Bolger & Amarel, 2007). Thus, a better understanding of the psychological conditions under which supportive relationships influence individuals is necessary. This three-paper dissertation investigates the mechanisms by which supportive relationships and interactions promote thriving. By thriving, I refer to an individual’s capacity to cope with stress or adversity, as well as learning, growing, and working to achieve goals. Chapter 1 uses experimental and nationally representative cross-cultural survey methods to demonstrate that supportive relationships promote personal growth. In addition, I show one mechanism—feelings of self-confidence—that helps explain the link between supportive relationships and personal growth. Chapter 2 investigates a novel hypothesis on the effects of how people think about their social support on their goal-pursuit. Four experiments demonstrate that participants who were led to think abstractly (vs. concretely) about their social support showed higher intent to pursue their goal and worked harder toward their goal. Chapter 3 examines one critical mechanism by which support-providers enable support-recipients to cope with their distressing personal events. Two laboratory experiments demonstrate that support-recipients who interacted with support-providers who facilitated them to reconstrue (vs. recount) their negative experience felt less negative affect and reported a higher sense of closure. Moreover, I show that these findings occur regardless of the support-recipients’ preference to receive a certain type of support. Collectively, the dissertation delineates different processes through which supportive relationships and interactions promote personal thriving, and also the conditions under which supportive relationships can impede thriving.