Resource or Hindrance? The benefits and costs of social support for functional difficulties and its implications for depressive symptoms

ABSTRACT

Objectives:The impact of social support on the relationship between stress and well-being remains somewhat inconclusive, with work suggesting either null, buffering, or amplification effects. The current study investigated the conditions in which perceived social support is likely to act as a buffer or amplifier by considering individual differences in self-perceptions of aging.

Methods: Using data from two subsamples of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (graduates: 70–74 years, siblings: 40–92 years), we examined how perceived social support (emotional versus instrumental) and self-perceptions of aging (SPA) moderated the effect of functional limitations on depressive symptoms (DS).

Results: Although emotional support positively predicted DS, its effects did not depend on SPA. Instrumental support was associated with both increases and decreases in well-being that were dependent upon SPA. Functional limitations predicted more DS at both low and high levels of instrumental support when SPA were negative. However, when SPA were positive, low levels of social support were found to decrease depressive symptoms, and high levels were found to increase depressive symptoms.

Conclusions: The impact of social social may enhance or deteriorate well-being, depending on how it interacts with self-evaluative beliefs. Findings offer insights as to the boundary conditions associated with the (positive) effects of social support and SPA, and highlight the need for continued research on the mechanisms associated these effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Social support
• stress-buffering
• self-perceptions of aging
• well-being

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge Dr. Thomas M. Hess for his assistance and feedback during the development of this manuscript and Ling-rui Zhang for her initial contribution to discussions during the formation of this project.

Conflict of Interest

The authors certify that they have no conflicts of interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

Notes

1. Previous research indicated that a score of 25 or higher on the CES-D was an optimal cut-off for diagnosing major depressive disorder (see Haringsma, Engels, Beekman, & Spinhoven, 2004). In order to assess whether the inclusion of participants with clinical levels of depression impacted our findings, we conducted regression analyses excluding participants with a score of 25 or higher (graduates: n = 94; siblings: n = 161). Findings with and without the exclusion criteria were nearly identical and thus, we reported analyses from the full sample for both the graduate and sibling respondents.

2. We conducted exploratory analyses to assess whether the treatment of emotional and instrumental social support as either dichotomized or continuous variables affected the results. Analyses with the dichotomized variables revealed nearly identical findings as those with the continuous variables. Thus, we treated the support variables as continuous predictors in current analyses.

3. We explored age as an additional moderator in our analyses based on the notion that attitudes about aging increase in salience with older age (Levy, 2009). A significant Age x SPA interaction emerged indicating that depressive symptoms decreased as age increased, particularly when SPA were negative, but did not differ between middle-aged and older adults when SPA were positive. No other significant effects associated with age were observed and the inclusion of age did not change the general pattern of results. Therefore, we treated age as a covariate.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.