Reconciling the Benefits and Costs of Providing and Seeking Support: The Importance of Contextual Factors and Attachment Avoidance

Abstract

The support literature is marked with an interesting paradox. Perceiving partners as supportive has health and relationship benefits, but receiving direct, visible support direct can threaten recipients’ coping and efficacy. Furthermore, although seeking direct advice from others elicits greater support, seeking reassurance often triggers greater rejection. Three articles aimed to reconcile the mixed costs and benefits of support provision and support seeking by examining important contextual factors and characteristics of support recipients that should determine whether support provision and support seeking leads to positive outcomes. Chapter Two investigated whether the mixed benefits and costs of visible forms of support depend on recipients’ contextual needs. The results demonstrated that during couples’ support-relevant discussions, partners’ visible support can boost both felt support and confidence about goal success when recipients are highly distressed and need overt comfort, but can be costly to goal-related confidence when recipients are not distressed and do not require overt support. Chapter Three explored how partners’ support can also be beneficial when it is responsive to recipients’ chronic needs related to attachment-related insecurities. The results across four dyadic studies examining the provision of support during couples’ support-relevant discussions and daily life demonstrated that the impact of partners’ support on recipients’ outcomes is represented by a unique curvilinear pattern for recipients high in attachment avoidance. As partners provided low-to-moderate levels of practical support, highly avoidant recipients exhibited increasing negative outcomes, but as partners’ practical support shifted from moderate to high levels, highly avoidant recipients experienced more positive outcomes. Lastly, Chapter Four examined whether the costs of reassurance seeking depend on the context in which it is sought and who is seeking support. Three dyadic studies found that reassurance seeking behaviors do not uniformly elicit rejection from partners when enacted during support-relevant discussions, and actually elicit greater responsive support when enacted by highly avoidant individuals who tend to minimize dependence in their relationships. Taken together, these studies demonstrate how a contextual framework that takes into account the needs and dispositions of support recipients can reconcile the mixed effects of support provision and support seeking in relationships.