Social support and cardiovascular reactions to active laboratory stressors

In order to examine the hypothesis that social support attenuates cardiovascular reactions to standard laboratory stressors. 60 male and 60 female undergraduates were first tested alone and then in one of three conditions: alone, or with a friend or a stranger present. Those tested with a partner, be it friend or stranger, displayed cardiovascular reactions of a similar magnitude to those who remained alone. Subsequent analysis following reallocation of subjects in the partnered conditions to groupings based on their ratings of how supportive or prying they found their partners did yield some effects. However, they occurred as interactive effects with sex, appeared on some cardiovascular indices but not others, and were modest in size, frequently failing to emerge as reliable on post hoc analysis. It was concluded that future tests of the social support-reactivity hypothesis need to be conducted in more realistic social settings.