Reviewed paper: Roberts, M. H., Klatzkin, R. R., & Mechlin, B. (2015). Social support
attenuates physiological stress responses and experimental pain sensitivity to cold pressor pain.
Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 49, 557-569.
Word Count: 1561
Whilst many people believe the benefits of relationships with others, such as social support, to
be beneficial, others, who find social interaction anxiety-inducing or even just cumbersome, may
feel differently. For them, creating strong social networks can seem more effort than it is worth.
However, there may be benefits to forging relationships, and the social support they provide,
that are not as intuitive as, for example, having someone to share your worries with. It may be
that if those who are averse to social interaction were aware of its potential further benefits, they
might be more likely to engage with others and build themselves a network of social support.
Social support and its relationship to overall health has been examined thoroughly in prior
research, and is the subject of a multitude of studies.The investigation into this relationship
began as early as 1964, when Egbert, Battit, Welch and Bartlett studied this relationship by
providing patients undergoing intra-abdominal operations ‘special care’ both before and after
their operation. This ‘special care’ involved ensuring that patients were thoroughly informed
about their operation, as well as offering patients advice and/or encouragement when required.
This was compared with a control group who did not receive this special social support at any
time. This study’s findings greatly influenced future research as they, like many that would
follow, found a positive relationship between social support and health (Rosengren et al, 1993,
Pennix et al, 1997).
Inspired by the work of Egbert et al (1964), Blazer conducted research in 1982, which examined
the relationship between social support and mortality. This study divided social support into
, three categories: perceived social support, frequency of interactions with others, and roles and
attachments available. All participants were over the age of 65. In the follow up study, which
took place 30 months after the initial data collection, 50 of the 331 individuals selected for the
follow up study had passed away. The results of the study found a low level of all forms of social
support to be more risky to participants than their age, sex, low economic resources, poor
physical health, symptoms of depression and cigarette smoking.
Whilst these findings further suggest a strong relationship between social support and health,
there are other ways in which the link between low social support and high mortality can be
explained. One of the possible explanations for this outcome is that those with low social
support may have been less likely to have people to contact when they were feeling unwell or
required assistance. Therefore, their low social support may not have negatively affected their
health, but instead left elderly individuals taking greater risks without the aid of loved ones.
Additionally, this relationship may have actually had the reverse causation from what was
interpreted. In other words, participants who died before the follow up study may have
developed or already possessed a terminal illness, and may have not felt well enough to
socialise, resulting in low social support. Therefore, it could be argued that there may be other,
potentially more accurate, ways to measure social support’s effect on health than mortality.
Whilst previous studies have used measures such as mortality to gauge the effect of social
support on health, more recent studies have examined this relationship by observing it’s effect
on physiological reactions. In 2015, Roberts, Klatzkin and Mechlin conducted a study that aimed
to examine social support’s effect on physiological reactions to stress.
The study involved 76 participants, all of whom were female undergraduate students, aged 18-
21. Each participant was made to complete a cold pressor task (CPT), in which one’s dominant
