Loneliness, social support and cardiovascular reactivity to laboratory stress

Social Isolation and Stress-related Cardiovascular, Lipid, and Cortisol Responses

“…Delayed post-stress recovery of systolic blood pressure was associated with social isolation. There have been few studies assessing the relationship between cardiovascular reactivity and social connectedness [11], and associations with poststress recovery have not been described. Previous findings linking social support with cardiovascular reactivity to stress have been inconsistent.…”

“…In a later study involving students, there was no main effect of perceived social support on cardiovascular reactivity, but an interaction with hostility, such that greater hostility was associated with larger BP reactions among individuals with high but not low social support [10]. More recently, Nausheen et al [11] showed no relationship between a measure of structural social support and BP or HR responses to the Trier Social Stress test, but satisfaction with support was inversely related to HR reactivity. To complicate matters further, Hughes [12] found that among female students, greater social support was related to lower BP reactivity, while in male students, the reverse effect was present.…”

Benefit of social support for resilience-building is contingent on social context: examining cardiovascular adaptation to recurrent stress in women

“…Attempts to manipulate the context of the stressor in previous research have tended to use different laboratory tasks, with mental arithmetic or writing often used as the asocial task (Nausheen et al, 2007) and speech used as the social task (Roy et al, 1998). These tasks, however, are conceptually very different and it is questionable whether cognitive load is identical for both tasks, with just the social context differing.…”

“…Self-reported social support is often referred to as perceived social support and identifies that support that a person perceives is available to them, when needed; usually measured by self-report. Social support has been linked to a range of health-promoting benefits, including positive associations with a range of cardiovascular outcomes in clinical samples (Frasure-Smith et al, 2000;Rozanski, Blumenthal, & Kaplan, 1999), less CVR in both healthy and patient samples (Craig, Lynch, Social Support, Context, Cardiovascular Adaptation 5 & Quartner, 2000;Nausheen, Gidron, Gregg, Tissarchondou, & Peveler, 2007), and with reduced resting cardiovascular function in healthy females (Hughes & Howard, 2009). …”

Psychoendocrine validation of a short measure for assessment of perceived stress management skills in different non-clinical populations

“…In contrast, social support has been suggested to maintain or even improve health by reducing psychobiological reactivity to stressors (Lepore, 1998;Christenfeld and Gerin, 2000). Indeed, various findings suggest that social support attenuates a variety of psychological and physiological stress responses (Seeman and McEwen, 1996;Uchino et al, 1996;Christenfeld and Gerin, 2000;Heinrichs et al, 2003;Uchino, 2006;Wirtz et al, 2006;Nausheen et al, 2007;Wirtz et al, 2009), whereas loneliness or social inhibition are associated with heightened psychobiological stress responses (Habra et al, 2003;Nausheen et al, 2007). Furthermore, poor anger regulation as indicated by higher aggression, hostility, or outwardly negatively expressed anger (anger-out) has been associated with heightened physiological reactivity to 4 mental stress, particularly of the cardiovascular system (Chida and Hamer, 2008).…”