Project Details
Projekt
Social support as a stress buffer or stress amplifier - The moderating role of social motives
Subject Area
Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
Term
since 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 425213083
Social support as a stress buffer or stress amplifier. The moderating role of social motives Abstract Social support research showed that providing social support in socio-evaluative stress situations reduces participants´ stress responses (e.g., self-report, SNS-, HPA-axis responses). This stress-buffer effect of social support, however, does not hold for everybody and some studies even found a stress-amplifying effect of social support. Motive disposition research showed that social motives (affiliation and power) lead to differential and sometimes even opposing affective, behavioral and physiological responses to interpersonal interaction processes. In the present theoretical approach we integrate psychobiological stress research and motivational research in order to refine the stress-buffer hypothesis of social support. We hypothesize that participants with a strong affiliation motive benefit from social support in terms of lower psychobiological stress responses, because they interpret social support as an indicator of positive relationship quality, which is an important affiliation incentive (stress-buffering effect). In contrast, participants with a strong power motive are expected to respond to social support with an increase of psychobiological stress responses and lower performance (stress-amplification effect), because they experience social support by others as an indicator of their own inferior position. Further, we hypothesize that participants with strong affiliation and power motives respond to social support with an arousal of motive-specific affects and motive-specific reproductive hormone responses (affiliation: progesterone, power: estradiol, testosterone) and test effects of gender and gender role concepts. We use the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) to test the motive-dependent stress-buffering or stress-amplifying effect of receiving social support. Stress will be assessed with subjective (self-report) and objective measures (cortisol, alpha-amylase). Our theory-driven integration of the moderating role of implicit motives provides a much needed theoretical and empirical contribution to this line of research and might offer an elegant explanation for some inconsistent findings in this body of literature. This more faceted view on personality and on types of social support has direct implications for applied contexts as it provides a framework for tailored conceptualizations of social support programs.
DFG Programme
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