Social support predicted subsequent subjective well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic: a prospective study – BMC … – BMC Public Health

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on peoples lives and mental health, leading to post-traumatic stress symptoms, confusion, financial loss, and increased rates of depression and anxiety disorders [1, 2]. To address these issues, recent studies have emphasized the importance of social support in mitigating the negative psychological effects caused by the quarantine [1], such as alleviated stress [3,4,5], lower loneliness [67], reduced anxiety [8, 9], and less depression [10]. The current paper focuses on the relationship between social support and subjective well-being (SWB) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although studies have revealed a positive association between social support and SWB after the outbreak of the pandemic [11, 12], their limitations warrant attention. Firstly, these studies adopted cross-sectional designs, which provide very limited information for causal interpretations. Secondly, these works failed to consider the underlying mechanisms through which social support predicts SWB. Lastly, the boundary conditions of the relationship between social support and SWB have rarely been investigated.

Therefore, in this paper, we adopted a prospective design to investigate the predictive effect of social support on subsequent SWB during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, in a sample of citizens living in the U.K., we tested the underlying mechanism of how perceived social support longitudinally predicted the cognitive component of SWB (i.e., life satisfaction) through the affective component of SWB (i.e., affect balance), after controlling for the baseline measure of SWB and other confounding factors such as personality traits. We also tested the boundary condition of when social support could predict future life satisfaction via affect balance by considering peoples household income.

Social support has been studied enormously in past decades considering its significance in coping with disasters or crises [13]. Social support includes a variety of social interactions between friends, family members, neighbours, and others [14], and is usually defined as the existence or availability of those people on whom we can rely, and of those who let us know that they care about, value, and love us [15]. Social support is also believed to be supplied by the community, social networks, and confiding partners [16].

In terms of its conceptualization, social support can be defined by both a main effect model and a buffering effect model [17]. The main effect model conceptualizes social support as the extent to which a person is integrated in a large social network, whereas the buffering effect model conceptualizes social support as the availability of interpersonal resources that are responsive to the needs elicited by stressful events. Embeddedness in a social network is conducive to well-being because it precludes negative feelings resulting from social isolation and induces positive feelings of stability, predictability, and self-worth. However, the mere existence of a social network may not be necessarily beneficial in the face of stress. Instead, coping with stress requires the social network to provide relevant means and resources. Considering the stressful pandemic during which our study was conducted, we conceptualized social support based on the buffering effect model.

In general, the availability of interpersonal resources can be measured in two ways: One is the available assistance perceived by individuals, while the other is what they actually receive. It has been found that the former had greater influence on peoples mental well-being [18]. Similarly, compared with received social support, perceived social support also has a more substantial effect on various physical health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease and mortality [19]. Therefore, although social support can be gained from multiple sources and providers, what really matters is how people perceive the support they have received. In this paper, we aim to investigate how perceived social support is associated with different components of SWB.

SWB encompasses both cognitive and affective aspects to measure an individuals level of well-being [20]. The cognitive component of SWB, often referred to as life satisfaction, represents an individuals overall evaluation of their life based on their personal values, priorities, and what the person deems important [21,22,23]. The affective component of SWB consists of both positive affect and negative affect. Positive affect includes a persons desirable or pleasant emotions, such as enjoyment, gratitude, and contentment, whereas negative affect contains unwanted or unpleasant emotions, such as anger, sadness, and worry [24]. The coexistence of positive affect and negative affect is referred to as affect balance, which is distinct from but correlated with life satisfaction [25, 26].

Importantly, affect balance is often considered as an important information source of life satisfaction, with substantial studies reporting the mediation role played by affect balance in the relationship between various measures and life satisfaction [27, 28]. When people judge life satisfaction, they need to consider various aspects of their lives. According to the affect-as-information hypothesis [29], people typically rely on their affect balance (i.e., the extent to which they feel good or bad) to evaluate their life satisfaction (i.e., the extent to which they are satisfied with their lives). That is, affect balance is one of the most critical inputs of life satisfaction judgment. In line with this reasoning, it has been found that affect balance could mediate the effects of many predictors on life satisfaction, such as emotional intelligence [30, 31], self-esteem [32], social capital [33], and positive life attitudes [34]. However, these results were mainly based on cross-sectional studies. It remains unknown whether affect balance could mediate social supports predictive effect on life satisfaction, especially in a prospective design.

The idea that social support has a positive effect on health and well-being is widely accepted. When it comes to SWB, it has been consistently found that social support is associated with better affect balance and higher life satisfaction, both before the COVID-19 pandemic [30, 35], and during the pandemic [11]. However, the designs adopted in these studies are cross-sectional, which limits causal inferences. Therefore, in the current study, we aim to adopt a prospective design to test whether the baseline measure of social support could predict future affect balance and life satisfaction after controlling for the baseline measures of affect balance and life satisfaction. Considering that people often rely on their affect balance to evaluate their life satisfaction and that affect balance could mediate the effects of many predictors on life satisfaction, we will also test whether future affect balance mediates the relationship between baseline social support and future life satisfaction. We propose the following hypotheses.

Baseline social support predicts subsequent affect balance.

Baseline social support predicts subsequent life satisfaction.

Subsequent affect balance mediates the relationship between baseline social support and subsequent life satisfaction.

Meanwhile, based on conservation of resources theory, the association between perceived social support and SWB might be moderated by household income. According to this theory, in order to protect themselves and cope with the challenges of daily life, individuals have to acquire and safeguard relevant resources, which include material resources such as money and properties, intrapersonal resources such as self-efficacy and growth mindsets, and interpersonal resources such as social support [36, 37]. Importantly, different types of resources can compensate for each other. For example, growth mindsets are particularly helpful in buffering against the deleterious effects of poverty on academic achievement [38, 39]. In our context, coping with stressful events such as the COVID-19 pandemic consumes resources, which in turn negatively affects well-being. However, such effect may vary depending on possessed material resources. Compared with rich people, those with low monthly household income tend to face more difficulties during the pandemic due to their lack of control in many domains of their lives [40,41,42], which makes them rely more on other types of resources such as social support. Therefore, we propose the following hypotheses.

Household income moderates the mediating effect of affect balance in the relationship between social support and life satisfaction, such that the mediating effect is stronger for people with lower household income.

In order to rule out the confounding effects of demographic and personality factors, we control for age, gender, education, and the Big-Five personality traits when we test this proposed model (both the mediation and the moderated mediation).

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Social support predicted subsequent subjective well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic: a prospective study - BMC ... - BMC Public Health