People with multiple social roles and relationships cope better with stress

When it comes to coping with life's stresses, men and women from any culture may gain health benefits by having many social roles and relationships.

Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, researchers Dr Elizabeth Hardie, Dr Christine Critchley and former honors student Zoe Morris found that people with many social roles and lots of close personal ties, as well as a sense of their unique individuality, seem to have the best coping skills.

Their research assessed stress levels, coping styles and health outcomes in around 900 Australian and Asian students and has just received a prestigious Misumi award.

"We identified groups of people whose coping styles matched the ways they defined themselves," said Hardie.

"Some coping styles were linked to better health and some to poorer health. For example, people who defined themselves by their unique individuality tended to cope with stress by rejecting support from others and trying to solve their own problems. These independent people tended to have poorer health.

"It was also unhealthy to mostly define yourself through your connections with others. People whose sense of self was based on their social relationships tended to rely too much on others for support. This interdependent style limited their ability to cope with stress, so these people tended to have poorer health."

"People who had many ways of defining themselves - unique individual, trusted friend, workmate, loyal fan, good citizen, etc - had a very wide variety of coping skills. They were able to cope with all types of stress and had the best health. In contrast, people with limited ways of defining themselves seemed to have fewer coping skills and, consequently, their health suffered.

"Interestingly, these patterns were not associated with gender or cultural background, suggesting that men and women from any culture may gain health benefits from an expanded pattern of self-definition," she said.

"This research challenged the popular notion that people from western cultures are independent (individual), while those from eastern cultures are interdependent (collective).

"Instead, we found that men and women from all cultures define themselves, to varying degrees, in three important ways: as autonomous individuals, in close relation to significant others, and as members of social collectives.

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Hardie EA, Critchley C, Morris Z. Self-coping complexity: Role of self-construal in relational, individual and collective coping styles and health outcomes. Asian J Soc Psychol 2006;9(3):224-235.   [Abstract]