Cultural Differences in the Impact of Social Support on Psychological and Biological Stress Responses

Abstract

Social support is believed to be a universally valuable resource for combating stress, yet Asians and Asian Americans report that social support is not helpful to them, resist seeking it, and are underrepresented among recipients of supportive services. We distinguish between explicit social support (seeking and using advice and emotional solace) and implicit social support (focusing on valued social groups) and show that Asians and Asian Americans are psychologically and biologically benefited more by implicit social support than by explicit social support; the reverse is true for European Americans. Our discussion focuses on cultural differences in the construal of relationships and their implications for social support and delivery of support services.

Personal support and expressions of care for pregnant women in Soweto, South Africa

“…Pregnant women hoped for care that met their personal as well as practical needs, and this might be from a person, a social organisation, a public institution, or a combination of all entities. At the same time, while women emphasised that support came from diverse quarters, they thought that the partner – the biological father – should be present to support and care for them throughout their pregnancy [44]. Some women felt that their partners did not understand what kinds of support and care they needed during pregnancy; they explained this in terms of conventional ideas of masculinity that conflated ideas of what a man is ‘supposed’ to do: take care of everything financially, but not by providing emotional support [45–47].…”

“…Financial challenges [44] and marital status [46] were issues that we anticipated from our participants and other studies [14,41,54]. Many of the women interviewed had limited sources of income to sustain them, but although they spoke about their need for money, this was not the primary support that they identified they needed from their relationships and in pregnancy.…”

Nature, Nurture, and Their Interplay

“…Building on this finding, Taylor et al (2007) investigated outcomes of seeking different types of social support, focusing on cortisol response to an acute lab stressor. This study showed that experimentally instructing participants to explicitly seek social support increased cortisol responses (i.e., higher biological stress) to the lab stressor among Asian Americans, but such an increase was not found among European Americans.…”

“…Biological responses are no exception. Research finds cultural differences in neuroendocrine and immune reactions to an array of intrapersonal and interpersonal tasks (e.g., Cohen et al, 1996;Heejung Kim, 2008;Stephens, Townsend, Markus, & Phillips, 2012;Taylor, Welch, Kim, & Sherman, 2007).…”

Culture, distress, and oxytocin receptor polymorphism (OXTR) interact to influence emotional support seeking

“…This cultural difference emerges with both open-ended assessments and standard coping inventories (20). The effectiveness of support seeking also varies cross-culturally, as it can have a negative impact on the psychological and biological stress responses of Asians responding to laboratory stressors (23). This cultural difference occurs because Asians are more concerned about the potential negative relational implications of support seeking than are European Americans (20,21).…”