UCLA

Social support has a strong influence upon positive mental health outcomes, including lower risk for depression and anxiety. This dissertation contains three papers that examined how social support may lead to more adaptive mental health outcomes regarding depression and anxiety by impacting emotion regulation. In Study 1, I addressed whether perceived social support may lessen misappraisals of symptom stressors and whether anxiety sensitivity – negative beliefs about somatic symptoms of anxiety – may influence perceived social support. I also explored whether cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) may influence these reciprocal associations. Analyses of 961 primary care patients with anxiety disorders revealed significant reciprocal associations between perceived social support increases and anxiety sensitivity decreases. Further, CBT influenced changes in each construct indirectly through changes in the other construct, suggesting that perceived social support or anxiety sensitivity may be suitable treatment targets.Study 2 addressed the question of whether experiences in close adult relationships – operationalized as adult attachment security – related to symptoms of depression and anxiety indirectly through cognitive reappraisal or expressive suppression tendencies. Longitudinal analyses conducted on data from 270 young adults indicated that higher adult attachment security predicted lower subsequent use of expressive suppression. Separately, both emotion regulation tendencies predicted subsequent symptoms of anxiety and depression. However, adult attachment security did not relate to symptoms indirectly through emotion regulation tendencies. Results suggest that close relationship experiences may influence future emotion regulation and emotion regulation may relate to future symptomology. In Study 3, I evaluated the influence of social support on cognitive reappraisal capacity using a reappraisal task in 121 undergraduate participants with elevated neuroticism. Results indicated that participants reported lower aversiveness, lower negative affect, and higher positive affect when they reinterpreted stressful images with a social support figure in mind compared to when they reinterpreted stressful images without that reminder. Results suggest that social support may enhance cognitive reappraisal and therefore may be a potential intervention target. Together, the three papers of this dissertation underscore the value of attending to the interpersonal influence on emotion regulation and resulting depression and anxiety symptoms, in addition to the potential for intervention to impact these associations.