Functional roles of social support within the stress and coping process: A theoretical and empirical overview

This article reports four longitudinal field studies and one experimental study designed to shed light on the functional roles of social support within the stress and coping context. First, the enabling hypothesis is examined that assumes a facilitating effect of support on self-efficacy, which, in turn, promotes coping with the aftermath of cardiac surgery. Second, we discuss the support cultivation hypothesis that regards support as a mediator between self-efficacy and various outcomes, such as depressive mood, as illustrated by a finding on the experience of macrosocial stress during the East German transition. Third, support is highlighted as a coping resource by specifying provided partner support as a predictor of patients' coping with cancer. It was found that the direct effect of provided support on coping needs to be mediated by received support in order to become effective. Fourth, coping efforts of a target person are found to be predictive of support intentions of a potential provider. The better a victim appears to cope with various stigmas, the higher the likelihood that a significant other is willing to help. Fifth, in a dyadic study on coping with cancer, partners were found to provide high levels of support to patients, but received support was affected only at later points in time. Time-lagged partner effects may characterize resource transfer in asymmetric social situations in which only one element of the dyad is under severe stress.     

Phonological information in immediate and delayed sentence recall

Potter and Lombardi (1990) state in their conceptual regeneration hypothesis that immediate sentence recall is only based on conceptual and lexical information; phonological information does not contribute. As experimental evidence for this hypothesis, they reported that if a sentence is followed by a word list that included a lure word similar to one of the content words of the sentence (target word), the lure word frequently intrudes into sentence recall. We demonstrated that Potter and Lombardi did not observe any influence of phonological information because list presentation followed sentence presentation, and phonological information was discarded. We observed that phonological information influenced the intrusion rate if recall was not delayed by the subsequent presentation of a word list. With immediate recall, the lure intrusion effect disappeared in auditorily presented sentences. This shows that, if available, phonological information contributes to sentence recall.