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This chapter focuses on social support effectiveness, which emphasizes the extent to which support attempts meet the needs of recipients in terms of their quantity and quality. They provide a framework for understanding what contributes to support effectiveness and report evidence for their model in the context of partner support in pregnancy.

This chapter examines those conditions under which mothers who were so weakly tied that no theorist would expect them to provide social support often provided such support anyway. It finds that centers both intentionally and unintentionally facilitated trust among parents and instituted obligations that the latter felt compelled to follow. These conditions at times generated a supportive network of acquaintances that mothers could call upon. This network, however, was only useful or important among mothers who were highly isolated or otherwise resource‐deprived.

This chapter examines the role of adolescent strain and social support in the etiology of persistent offending. After reviewing the literature on persistent criminality, strain theory, and social support, it presents some of the analysis, using National Youth Survey data. The data suggest that early adolescent strain is associated with young adult nonviolent criminality. The findings also suggest that social support experienced in early adolescence has a marginal, negative effect on both violent and nonviolent offending in young adulthood. In addition, social support appears to mitigate the effects of strain. For example, while there is a three-fold difference in young adult nonviolent offending between high and low strain individuals with low social support, those with high social support had low nonviolent offending regardless of the level of strain. The chapter is more tentative about the findings for violence. While the direct relationship between early adolescent strain and later violent behavior was not statistically significant, the interaction between strain and later social support was. The data suggest that individuals who reported low levels of social support and high levels of strain committed more violent acts in young adulthood than other subjects. The chapter recommend a program of longitudinal research on high-risk children to further examine the types of traumatic strain, intensity, and timing that may lead to very serious and chronic antisocial behavior.

Psychological experiments and other empirical data seem to show that good traits of character (even if real) are frail, rather easily overcome by some types of temptation, and are dependent on social context and social support (and thus on ‘moral luck’) for their development, continuance, and behavioural manifestation. It is argued that excellence is not incompatible with fragility, and that the excellence of virtue is no less valuable for being in large part a gift rather than an individual achievement.

This chapter presents an interdisciplinary study on the physiological mechanisms through which the sociocultural and socioeconomic environments, as well as personal social and psychological experience, affect health trajectories. Within this framework, the focus has been on understanding the protective effects of social and cultural factors on health and aging — especially the effects of social ties, social support, and psychological resources (e.g., beliefs about one's own efficacy and personal mastery). The first section outlines how a program of research evolved from an initial starting point within the tradition of social epidemiology into a broader research approach that encompasses aspects of neuroendocrinology and clinical geriatrics, as well as concepts from sociology and social psychology. The second section outlines major findings from this research. The third section discusses the story behind the interdisciplinary collaboration.

This chapter describes an attachment-based model of social support in couples, which emphasizes the interpersonal and transactional nature of support processes and focuses on the roles of both the care giver and the support seeker. The authors describe their ongoing programs of research on normative differences in care giving and seeking, as well as how individual differences in attachment security affect support processes.

Most definitions of health refer to physical, emotional, and social well-being. This chapter focuses on the social component and reviews measures of social adjustment, social disability, social interaction, and social support.

This chapter investigates the hypothesis that a support provider’s level of empathic accuracy—that is, his or her ability to make accurate inferences about the support seeker’s thoughts and feelings—contributes to the likelihood of support providers offering effective and welcome support to their support-seeking spouse. In a laboratory study, 40 couples provided questionnaire data and participated in a social support interaction and video review task. As expected, greater empathic accuracy was associated with higher levels of instrumental support—which consists of concrete offers of assistance, advice, and suggestions to the support-seeker. Also as predicted, greater accuracy was related to lower levels of unhelpful, negative support. However, accuracy was not significantly related to emotional support—which includes reassuring, consoling, and encouraging the support-seeker.

Intimate partners are a crucial source of support for survivors of traumatic injury, but partners may vary in the support they provide. When are partners most likely to provide support after a traumatic injury? To address this question, this chapter first reviews the consequences of traumatic injury and the role of social support in recovery. The second section summarizes existing models of social support provision, which highlight elements of the situation, relationship, recipient, and provider. The third section offers a critique of the existing literature, identifying limitations that prevent strong generalizations from previous work in other populations. The fourth section describes recent research that examines multiple predictors of support provision in a sample of trauma survivors and their partners. The final section explores the implications of studying couples that have experienced a trauma for understanding social support processes more generally.

Prior chapters have reported on alumni functioning in terms of physical and mental health; education; and employment and finances. This chapter focuses on the nature and quality of the relationships that alumni have with key groups of people such as spouses or partners, birth family, and former foster parents. Sources and types of social support available to alumni are examined, as well as child-rearing status, parenting, and placement of children of alumni in foster care.

This chapter discusses recent research with prairie voles, rodents that live in a state of social monogamy similar to that of human beings. Knowledge of the relatively simple brains and neurohormonal processes of these animals helps to explain the origins of the human tendency to form strong, long-lasting social bonds and the emotions that accompany them. The chapter uses the term ‘social monogamy’ to distinguish the concept from that of sexual fidelity, which genetic testing has revealed to be exceedingly rare even in the apparently devoted prairie vole. Social monogamy refers to a way of living that promotes (but does not guarantee) sexual fidelity, shared parental care, and the reinforcement of social and emotional bonds. The chapter's research with prairie voles has identified two hormones — oxytocin and vasopressin — that appear to form the neural underpinnings of the social monogamy system. Interestingly, the physiological and emotional processes involved in social bonding and parental care are very similar to those that ensure wellness and survival (both hormones are important to healthy responses to stress and general coping). Increased knowledge of the ‘social nervous system’ of prairie voles will help us to understand why social support is so critical to human health and longevity. It may also explain why love and benevolence, which she sees as emotional reinforcements of social bonding, have healing powers.

This chapter discusses the impact of social support on health. It shows that social support has a wide spectrum of action on health, from influencing mortality at one end, through physical morbidity to psychological morbidity at the other end. Social support is a very personal matter and yet research shows that it is influenced by social structural imperatives and becomes more than the sum of the individual links of networks in terms of social cohesion. At the level of society, social cohesion can have a powerful effect on health which transcends that available from individual social relationships. This has implications for improving the health of communities.

Although social support is known to be beneficial in general, daily support receipt has been associated with negative effects on daily negative mood, unless the support acts are “invisible,” i.e. provided by partner but unnoticed by recipient. In this chapter, the timing of these effects is examined using structured daily diary reports of recent law school graduates (N = 312) and their intimate partners during a 5-week preparation period before the graduates sat for the state bar examination. Examinees reported mood at waking and in the evening. Using multilevel models, the authors checked if support receipt (reported by examinee) and provision (reported by partner) on one day were related to examinee’s mood on the same evening, the next morning, and the next evening. The authors failed to replicate the invisible support pattern, instead finding that provider reports of emotional support were associated with increased negative mood for all time lags. Daily emotional support receipt was positively associated with vigor in the evening on both same and next days.

This chapter reviews the research on the effects of social support and social control on health behavior in intimate relationships. The authors apply the transtheoretical model of change to account for variability in outcomes of support and control attempts. That is, the effectiveness of support and control attempts may be due, at least in part, to the accuracy with which the partner perceives the target spouse’s readiness to change and the extent to which the partner uses strategies consistent with the partner’s current stage of change. Exploratory quantitative and qualitative research is presented to support the proposed model.

Most students who are identified as being at risk of, or classified as having, an emotional disturbance, display social skills deficits. In fact, the current definition for emotional disturbance in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) contains two social skills problems: (1) an inability to build or maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships with peers or teachers, and (2) the expression of inappropriate behavior or feelings under normal circumstances. This chapter discusses how to locate, appraise, adapt, and apply empirically supported social skills interventions. It also demonstrates how to monitor the progress of students receiving social skills instruction, and how to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions employed using an evidence-based practice (EBP) perspective.

Chapter 7 argues that religion was a cultural adaptation. In its earliest form, religion was shamanism. A primary focus of shamanistic rituals was to bring about community and individual healing. Shamanism accomplished this by creating conditions that made placebo healing likely to occur. Shamanism brought together three important factors known to enhance placebo effects: confidence in healing power, highly suggestible mental states, and strong social support networks. Empirical evidence is reviewed supporting the notion that even today, religion continues to have positive effects on psychological and physical health, longevity, and reproductive success.

This chapter reviews theoretical and empirical work on self-regulation at the group level of analysis. We examine how groups exert control over their members and how members respond to these control efforts. The first section of the chapter focuses on groups as agents of control. Following a discussion of the functions that groups serve, we examine how groups use norms and roles to control their members. The second section of the chapter focuses on individuals as targets of control. Here we examine two opposing ways in which individuals respond to perceived group pressure: capitulation and resistance. We conclude by examining two implicit assumptions underlying our analysis of group control—that groups initiate control for their own ends and that members view such control as an unwelcome constraint. Using the example of social support groups, we discuss the relationship between self- and group-control when individuals seek group help in regulating their behavior.

This chapter presents a theoretical foundation from which to understand better the importance of nontraditional settings in community life. It begins with a discussion of the following concepts: social embeddedness, urban sanctuaries, free space, and social and natural support systems. Help-seeking patterns, types of services provided by nontraditional settings, the translation of theory into practice, and principles for collaborative practice are then considered. The four general approaches to identifying, assessing, mapping, engaging and collaborating with nontraditional settings; and staffing and organizational factors are discussed.