Giving Social Support to Others May Boost Your Health
upstart writes:
Giving social support to others may boost your health:
While researchers have long thought that receiving social support from others is a key to health, results from studies have shown mixed results. So researchers from The Ohio State University decided to see if giving support may also play an important role in health.
They found that on one important measure of health -- chronic inflammation -- indicators of positive social relationships were associated with lower inflammation only among people who said they were available to provide social support to family and friends.
In other words, having friends to lean on may not help your health unless you also say that you're available to help them when they need it.
Positive relationships may be associated with lower inflammation only for those who believe they can give more support in those relationships," said Tao Jiang, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in psychology at Ohio State.
Preliminary evidence in the study suggested that the link between health and the willingness to help others may be especially important for women.
[...] The study used data from 1,054 participants in the National Survey of Midlife Development in the U.S. These were all healthy adults between 34 and 84 years old.
Journal Reference:
Tao Jiang, Syamil Yakin, Jennifer Crocker, Baldwin M. Way. Perceived social support-giving moderates the association between social relationships and interleukin-6 levels in blood. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 2022; 100: 25 (DOI: 10.1016/j.bbi.2021.11.002)
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