Intrusive social support among Black and White individuals with type 2 diabetes: A "Control issue" or a sign of "Concern and love"?

Family members and friends play an important supportive role in the management of chronic illnesses like diabetes, which often require substantial lifestyle changes. Some studies suggest that there may be racial differences in the kinds of support people receive, though little research has examined this idea within a chronic illness context. The current research takes a qualitative approach to examining similarities and differences between Black and White individuals with type 2 diabetes in the dimensions of support received from their family members, with a particular focus on better understanding more intrusive forms of support, such as unsolicited and overprotective support. Semi-structured interviews were conducted (N = 32) to characterize differences in support received by Black and White individuals with type 2 diabetes. The results of the thematic analysis suggested that unsolicited and overprotective support were not universally perceived to be negative, as previous work on White populations seemed to suggest. Rather, if the support provided was perceived as inhibiting autonomy, it was generally undesired by participants from both racial groups-however, for Black participants, knowing that the support was provided out of love could make it more acceptable. The analysis also revealed several underexplored dimensions of received support, including the directiveness of support and the tone used to deliver support. The current study provides an initial step towards grounding social support theory in the experiences of marginalized populations and will inform further development of a culturally sensitive measure of social support for individuals with chronic illness.

You have to let go sometimes: advances in understanding goal disengagement

While research on tenacious goal pursuit and persistence has evoked a myriad of research efforts, research on goal disengagement has rather been neglected and has been focusing mainly on positive consequences of individual differences in goal disengagement capacities. In recent years, however, research on goal disengagement has seen an upsurge in studies, specifically addressing the conceptualization of goal disengagement, the processes involved, and factors facilitating or undermining it. However, many questions remain unanswered or only partly answered providing numerous opportunities for further investigation. With this special issue of Motivation and Emotion, we aim to stimulate such progress in research on goal disengagement. To this end, this special issue includes empirical studies with cross-sectional, prospective, longitudinal, and experimental designs with a wide range of personal and experimentally induced goals as well as invited commentaries from scholars across different psychological sub disciplines. In this introductory essay, we provide a brief review of the current state of goal disengagement research. We also provide an overview about the contributions to this special issue with reflections related to the current state of research and areas where further advancement in conceptualization and empirical studies is needed.

Don’t give up? It’s a little complicated: Action Crisis Moderates Consequences of goal support

Social support for goals can be beneficial for goal pursuit, but often has unintended negative consequences for the recipient. We propose that action crisis—the state in which an individual is considering disengaging from a goal they are currently pursuing—may result in people experiencing more ambivalent reactions to goal support. Drawing on both experimental and longitudinal methods, we show that action crisis increases negative consequences of goal support, but does not reduce positive consequences of goal support. In Study 1, we experimentally manipulated goal phase (action crisis, deliberative, or implemental) and had participants imagine support or neutral interactions. In Study 2, we measured experiences of action crisis and receipt of goal support in first-year pre-health students over the course of the academic year. Action crisis predicted more negative appraisals of support, but did not impact positive appraisals of support. Similarly, action crisis predicted more negative emotions and depressive symptoms among people who received goal support, but did not impact positive emotions. These results suggest that action crisis increases the extent to which support is received as a “mixed blessing”.

Negative Reflections About Positive Psychology: On Constraining the Field to a Focus on Happiness and Personal Achievement

“Positive” psychology has gained a dominant voice within and outside the field of psychology. Although critiques of this perspective have been rendered, including by humanistic psychologists, psychology scholars have offered minimum space for critical reflections of this movement in contrast to its critiques existing inside and outside the academia in other fields. Therefore, this contribution seeks to explicate emerging systematic critiques of positive psychology by scholars and practitioners from within mental health fields as well as from philosophy, medicine, education, business, and cultural studies and to highlight sociocultural discussions of positive movement by the culture critics. Last, we offer reflections on positive psychology as immigrant professionals from non-Western backgrounds with an emphasis on existential and humanities-based perspectives. We also highlight that the tenets and experiments based on “positive” psychological practices may have especially detrimental effect on marginalized individuals and communities. This contribution seeks to invite a critical dialogue in the field regarding positive psychology within and outside humanistic psychology and psychology in general.

Transactive-Goal-Dynamics Theory: A Discipline-Wide Perspective

Theories of goal pursuit typically conceptualize goal pursuers as isolated actors; in contrast, empirical research from diverse areas of psychology has demonstrated that goal setting, pursuit, and achievement are deeply embedded within social relationships. Because much of this emerging literature is developing within subfields with minimal cross talk, the potential for integration and advances to basic theory has not been realized. The present article leverages transactive-goal-dynamics theory in an effort to bring these literatures together. In doing so, it distills a common set of primary research questions toward the goal of promoting a cumulative, integrative, interdisciplinary field of research on the ways in which goal pursuit is socially embedded.

I-Through-We: How Supportive Social Relationships Facilitate Personal Growth

Personal growth is usually considered an outcome of intrapersonal processes-personal resources residing within the person. Comparatively, little research has examined the interpersonal processes underlying personal growth. We investigated how one interpersonal factor-people's relationships with others-influences personal growth. Study 1 showed that brief reminders of a supportive (vs. nonsupportive) other led people to choose a job that promoted personal growth over one that offered a higher salary. Moreover, feelings of self-confidence from thinking about a supportive (vs. nonsupportive) other mediated personal growth. Extending these results, Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that people's perceptions of how supportive their close others are predicted personal growth in two distinct cultures with varying emphasis on individual (vs. collective) growth. Consistent with Study 1's findings, the results were also mediated by feelings of self-confidence. These findings suggest that the link between supportive relationships and personal growth may reflect a general process.

Cultivating Effective Social Support Through Abstraction: Reframing Social Support Promotes Goal-Pursuit

Social support, in theory, should promote individual goal-pursuit. However, a growing number of studies shows that receiving support can undermine goal-pursuit. Addressing this paradox, we investigated a novel idea of the effects of how people think about their social support on their goal-pursuit. Four experiments showed that participants who were led to think abstractly (vs. concretely) about their social support showed higher intent to pursue their goal (Studies 1-3) and worked harder toward their goal (Study 4). The benefits of abstracting one's social support occurred over a variety of personal goals, support types, and support-providers, indicating the generalizability and robustness of our findings. These results demonstrate that how people think about their social support influences goal-pursuit and suggest ways in which support-recipients can maximize their social support.

Understanding the costs of support transactions in daily life

The benefits of close relationships for mental and physical health are well documented. One of the mechanisms presumed to underlie these effects is social support, whereby close others provide practical and emotional assistance in times of need. Although there is no doubt that generalized perceptions of support availability are beneficial, research examining actual instances of support receipt has found unexpectedly mixed results. Receiving support sometimes has positive effects, but null or even negative effects are common. In this article, we review our multimethod program of research that seeks to understand and explain the costs of receiving social support. We focus on reductions in the recipient's sense of relationship equity and self-efficacy as mechanisms of this effect and examine a number of other moderating factors. Although we have found that receiving support incurs costs on average, there is considerable variability yet to be explained. Using diary data from 312 persons preparing to take a challenging exam, we examined the potential of individual differences in neuroticism, agreeableness, and attachment insecurity to explain variability in experienced support costs. We close with new questions about why received support may be beneficial or benign in some situations while being especially toxic in others.

Interpreting a Helping Hand

Research has shown that Asians/Asian Americans are less likely to seek social support to deal with stressful situations than European Americans. Two studies examined the effectiveness of two types of social support: support that is sought directly (solicited support) and support received without prompting from the recipient (unsolicited support). It was theorized that receiving unsolicited support may reinforce social belonging and relational ties, whereas soliciting support may pose relational threats for Asian Americans. In contrast, European Americans may be less affected by type of support received. The first study examined culture (European American vs. Asian American) and type of social support (solicited vs. unsolicited) on stress responses to a task in a lab setting. The second study used vignettes of possible stressors with unsolicited or solicited coping techniques. Results supported our hypothesis, with Asian Americans reporting better outcomes from unsolicited support and European Americans showing little difference between support types.