Abstract
While the benefits of social integration and support on well-being in later life are well-documented, research has largely focused on the perspective of the support-recipient. Growing evidence suggests parallel benefits for support-giving, but the psychological pathways remain unclear. We investigated whether a brief experimental manipulation of reflection regarding one’s support-giving or support-receiving behavior elicited distinct cognitive-affective states. 203 subjects age 55 and over completed a 30-minute online experiment in which they were randomly assigned to write about their roles as support-givers, support-receivers, or the previous day’s activities. After the writing manipulation, subjects completed assessments of feelings of social connectedness, positive and negative affect, and self-achievement. Written narratives generated in response to the writing manipulation were also analyzed with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software to assess expression of each cognitive-affective state. Those in the support-giving group had lower levels of self-reported negative affect, and higher levels of perceived social contributions (p<.05) and accomplishment (p<.05), compared to the support-receiving group. Text analyses show that those in the giving group had greater expressions of achievement and lower expression of negative emotion than those in the receiving group, while those in both the giving and receiving conditions had greater expressions of positive emotion, social connectedness and achievement than the neutral condition. Findings indicate that support-giving and receiving are associated with common, as well as unique, cognitive-affective states, suggesting shared and unique pathways through which each may be linked to well-being.