Your support touches my heart: testing a mediational model of receiving social support, culture, and ambulatory blood pressure

Social support is a reliable predictor of psychological and physical health. However, received social support can result in either improvements or detriments to health depending on contextual processes. The cultural facet of independence-interdependence â€" cultural variations in social orientation and self-schema â€" is a macro level of analysis that may determine when receiving social support results in benefits or costs to health. The current study examined whether solicited and unsolicited received support results in either health improvements or health costs. The study consisted of 148 participants in the United States and Japan who completed a 2-day ambulatory blood pressure and daily diary protocol. Multilevel modeling was used to account for the data dependence across repeated measures as well as to examine both effects of support at the individual and cultural level. Mediational bootstrapping analyses and moderated mediational analyses were used to examine whether changes to self-schema variables mediated the relationship between support and health and whether culture served as moderator of these indirect effects. No consistent evidence was found to support these hypotheses. However, some evidence for cultural differences and for the stress-buffering effects of social support on ABP were observed. Implications are discussed.