Abstract
Social support is associated with positive health outcomes, and research has demonstrated that the presence, or even just a reminder, of a social-support figure can reduce psychological and physiological responses to threats. However, the mechanisms underlying this effect are unclear, and no previous work has examined the impact of social support on basic fear learning processes, which have implications for threat responding. This study examined whether social support inhibits the formation of fear associations. After conducting a fear-conditioning procedure in which social-support stimuli were paired with conditional stimuli during fear acquisition, we found that the threat of shock was not associated with conditional stimuli paired with images of social-support figures, but was associated with stimuli paired with images of strangers. These findings indicate that social support prevents the formation of fear associations, reducing the amount of learned fears people acquire as they navigate the world, consequently reducing threat-related stress.
Highlights
Research has consistently demonstrated a relationship between social support and positive health outcomes
We evaluated fear acquisition for both the social-support-paired and the strangerpaired conditions, and found that while participants did acquire fear for CS+s paired with strangers, t(19) = 4.86,p < .001, 95% CI[0.09,0.22], they did not acquire fear for CS+s paired with social-support figures, t(19) = .626,p = .539, 95% CI[-0.03,0.06]
Further examination showed that the effect of condition on fear acquisition was significant, t(19) = -3.80,p = .001, 95% CI[-0.21,0.06], such that fear acquisition in presence of a social-support figure image was significantly less than fear acquisition in the presence of a stranger image
Summary
Research has consistently demonstrated a relationship between social support and positive health outcomes. Within the social buffering literature, it has been shown that individuals who have larger social networks, higher quality social relationships, and more access to social support resources have better physical and mental health, enjoying advantages ranging from a lower susceptibility to the common cold to a decreased risk of disease and death [1,2,3]. While this literature has established the impact of social support as a buffer, little prior work has examined the mechanisms whereby social support reduces physiological or psychological responses to threat. The present research seeks to explore this relationship by testing whether social support inhibits the formation of fear associations, reducing fear responding and threat-related stress
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