Antecedents of perceived support: Is perceived family environment generalized to new social relationships?

Abstract

Cognitive models of social support hypothesize that relatively enduring expectancies about social support influence ongoing social information processing. Drawing from research that suggests that perceived support cognitions are generalized to novel social stimuli, we hypothesized that negative perceptions of the family environment would be generalized to perceptions of new social relations. Incoming freshmen who had moved away to college were assessed in the first week of their first semester on perceived family environment, psychological distress, and a variety of interpersonal person variables (i.e., social skills, agreeableness, and extraversion). Followup measures of perceived support at college were obtained at the end of their first semester. Controlling for social desirability, persons with negative perceptions of their family environments, higher distress, and lower levels of social competence, agreeableness, and extraversion developed lower levels of perceived support than their more fortunate counterparts. In addition, the relation between perceived family environment and developed perceived support did not appear to be mediated by psychological distress or the interpersonal person variables. Implications for understanding the processes by which perceived support is developed in new social settings were discussed.