Culture, Social Support, and Managing Stress

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Social support is a resource that allows people to live healthier and more productive lives; it becomes especially important in times of rapid change. Change creates stress with which people need to cope, and they often turn to others for advice, information, and understanding. Social support has long been known to promote psychological health and to protect against the adverse health effects of stress. Yet, in conceptualizing social support, researchers have inadvertently adopted a Western definition that emphasizes explicit efforts to extract or provide help or comfort. The proposed research builds on several preliminary studies showing that Asians and Asian-Americans are significantly less likely than European-Americans to seek such explicit social support for coping with stress, because their social relations may be disrupted by so doing. Using multiple methodologies, such as survey and physiological measures, the proposed studies will examine the use of explicit versus implicit social support (which we define as drawing on the awareness and/or company of supportive others without explicitly requesting or receiving support vis-a-vis a specific stressful event) and explore cultural differences in their use and physiological/psychological impact on managing stress. The intellectual merit of the proposed research stems from its ability to 1) broaden our conceptual understanding of social support by exploring the stress-reducing benefits of implicit as well as explicit social support and 2) broaden our understanding of cultural differences in how social support is extracted, experienced, and utilized to reduce adverse physiological and emotional responses to stress. The broader impact of the work stems from its challenge to existing Western conceptualizations of social support and its potential to enlighten the social support experiences of currently under-represented populations. As such, it has the ability to inform social support interventions with multicultural populations.