Table 6.

Summary of associations found between social support and cognition by dimension.

Positive relationship		Results
Social support dimension	Cognition dimension
General social support	Global cognition	Pillemer and Holtzer, 2015; Kats et al., 2016; Frith and Loprinzi, 2017; Ge et al., 2017; Whitfield and Wiggins, 2003; Slykerman et al., 2005; Yilmaz et al., 2015; Zhu et al., 2012; Zamora-Macorra et al., 2017
	Executive functions and processing speed	Sims et al., 2011; Zuelsdorff et al., 2013, 2017
	Memory	Zuelsdorff et al., 2017
	Emotional face perception	Tanzer et al., 2013
Emotional support	Global cognition	Ellwardt et al., 2013; La Fleur and Salthouse, 2017; Seeman et al., 2001; Pillemer and Holtzer, 2015
Positive social interaction	Global cognition	Yeh and Liu, 2003; Kats et al., 2016
	Memory; executive functions and processing speed	Zuelsdorff et al., 2017
Instrumental or practical support	Memory; executive functions and processing speed	Dickinson et al., 2011; Sims et al., 2011
Availability	Global cognition	Dickinson et al., 2011; La Fleur and Salthouse, 2017
	Memory	Dickinson et al., 2011
Social support provided	Global cognition	Whitfield and Wiggins, 2003
	Executive functions and processing speed	Ayotte et al., 2013
Structural support	Global cognition	Kats et al., 2016; Frith and Loprinzi, 2017
Self esteem; belonging; appraisal	Executive functions and processing speed	Sims et al., 2011
Negative relationship		Results
Social support dimension	Cognition dimension
General social support	Global cognition	Wang et al., 2017
	Executive functions and processing speed	Ayotte et al., 2013; Sims et al., 2014
	Memory	Sims et al., 2014
Availability	Global cognition	La Fleur and Salthouse, 2017; Wang et al., 2017
	Language	La Fleur and Salthouse, 2017
Inverse relationship		Results
Social support dimension	Cognition dimension
Emotional support	Global cognition	Liao et al., 2016

This analysis used the dimensions of Figure 4, and it was developed regardless of sociodemographic characteristics.