Giving and Receiving Social Support: Implications for Daily Stress and Cardiovascular Outcomes

Abstract

Social support is an essential component of emotional and physical well-being and has been implicated in cardiovascular disease risk as well as the experience of daily stress. This study primarily seeks to understand potential differences in receiving versus giving social support and their relationships with cardiovascular disease (CVD), along with an auxiliary focus on the relationship between daily stress and CVD. Through a secondary analysis of the Midlife in the United States study (Wave II), we examined the relationship between daily stress and CVD, the relationship between receiving versus giving social support and CVD, and how these two forms of social support interact in their links to CVD. We found that daily stress does not robustly predict cardiovascular disease, but both receiving and giving social support are associated with a reduced cardiovascular disease risk. However, giving social support ceases to confer protective cardiovascular health benefits on the giver when they receive high levels of social support. Moreover, receiving social support was consistently associated with a lower CVD risk, but the effect was greater when participants were giving a low level of support. These results illustrate that the effects of receiving and giving social support are not necessarily equivalent and should be considered distinctly and simultaneously, rather than in aggregate, in efforts to mitigate cardiovascular disease risk.