Item Details

title

LET’S AGREE TO AGREE: AN EXPLORATION OF AGREEING SUPPORT AND ITS MODERATORS ON WELLBEING

author

Clifton, Mona Anne Mathews

abstract

The present study assesses if and when low agreement expressed from a support provider to a support recipient is associated with more positive outcomes in a support seeking interaction. Traditionally, an agreeing perspective is considered the most beneficial type of social support, in order to increase well-being, while a disagreeing perspective is considered to produce negative outcomes. A previous Mturk study from this research program found preliminary support for the hypothesis that low agreeing support is not always bad for well-being. Using an 18-day long diary survey on undergraduate students, the current study replicated the main findings of the MTurk study. Results, through multilevel modeling, indicate a positive main effect of agreement on positive affect, such that higher levels of agreement made participants feel better after the interaction. Additionally, we found that perceived message positivity and accuracy individually moderated this relationship. Both perceived high message positivity and high accuracy made the negative effect of low agreement weaken. Contrary to the literature, but consistent with our previous study, we found that higher levels of agreement facilitated more reappraisal. Additionally, we found that accuracy moderated this relationship, such that when participants received support perceived as lowly accurate there was a large positive effect of agreement on reappraisal. However, when the support was perceived as highly accurate there was no longer an effect of agreement. Lastly, we found that desire for emotional support moderated this relationship as well, such that agreement encouraged reappraisal more when participants did not want emotional support. These results suggest that higher agreement is, in fact very beneficial to well-being. However, there are cases when disagreement may not be as detrimental as previously thought.

subject

Accuracy

Agreement

Disagreement

Messaging

Positivity

Social Support

contributor

Kammrath, Lara (committee chair)

Petrocelli, John (committee member)

Carter, Cheyenne (committee member)

Masicampo, E.J. (committee member)

date

2019-05-24T08:35:40Z (accessioned)

2019-05-24T08:35:40Z (available)

2019 (issued)

degree

Psychology (discipline)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/93933 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Thesis