Invisible Support – Mental Health Matters

Introduction

Empathy-altruism is a form of altruism based on moral emotions or feelings for others.

Social exchange theory holds that in seemingly altruistic behaviour benefits to the altruist outweigh the costs the altruist bears and thus such behaviour is self-interested. In contrast, C. Daniel Batson holds that people help others in need out of genuine concern for the well-being of the other person. The key ingredient to such helping is “empathic concern”. According to Batson’s “empathy-altruism hypothesis”, if someone feels empathy towards another person, they will help them, regardless of what they can gain from it. An alternative hypothesis is “empathy-joy”, which states a person helps because they find pleasure at seeing another person experience relief. When a person does not feel empathy, the standards of social exchange theory apply.

Evidence

Debate over whether other-helping behaviour is motivated by self- or other-interest has raged between (approximately) 2000 and 2022. The prime actors in this debate included Daniel Batson, arguing for empathy-altruism, and Robert Cialdini, arguing for self-interest.

Batson recognises that people sometimes help for selfish reasons. He and his team were interested in finding ways to distinguish between motives. In one experiment, students were asked to listen to tapes from a radio programme. One of the interviews was with a woman named Carol, who talked about her bad car accident in which both of her legs were broken, her struggles and how behind she was becoming in class. Students who were listening to this particular interview were given a letter asking the student to share lecture notes and meet with her. The experimenters changed the level of empathy by telling one group to try to focus on how she was feeling (high empathy level) and the other group not to be concerned with that (low empathy level). The experimenters also varied the cost of not helping: the high cost group was told that Carol would be in their psychology class after returning to school and the low cost group believed she would finish the class at home. The results confirmed the empathy-altruism hypothesis: those in the high empathy group were almost equally likely to help her in either circumstance, while the low empathy group helped out of self-interest (seeing her in class every day made them feel guilty if they did not help).

Countering Hypotheses

Batson and colleagues set out to show that empathy motivates other-regarding helping behaviour not out of self-interest but out of true interest in the well-being of others. They addressed two hypotheses that counter the empathy-altruism hypothesis:

Empathy Specific Reward: Empathy triggers the need for social reward which can be gained by helping.

Empathy Specific Punishment: Empathy triggers the fear of social punishment which can be avoided by helping.

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Introduction

In psychology, invisible support is a type of social support in which supportive exchanges are not visible to recipients.

There are two possible situations that can qualify as acts of invisible support. The first possibility entails a situation where “recipients are completely unaware of the supportive transaction between themselves and support-givers”. For example, a spouse may choose to spontaneously take care of housework without mentioning it to the other couple-member. Invisible support also occurs when “recipients are aware of an act that takes place but do not interpret the act as a supportive exchange”. In this case, a friend or family member may subtly provide advice in an indirect manner as a means to preserve the recipient’s self-esteem or to defer his or her attention from a stressful situation. Invisible support can be viewed on both ends of an exchange, in which the recipient is unaware of the support received and the provider enacts support in a skilful, subtle way.

Background

It is known that perceptions of social support availability predict better adjustment to stressful life events; it has been found that the perception of support availability is inherently comforting, and can serve as a psychological safety-net that motivates self-reliant coping efforts in the face of stress. Although the perception of support availability is associated with better adjustment, the knowledge that one has been the recipient of specific supportive acts has often been unhelpful to effectively reduce stress. The knowledge of receiving help may come at a cost with decreased feelings of self-esteem and self-efficacy, because it increases recipients’ awareness towards their personal difficulties to manage stressors. People’s well-intentioned support attempts may also be miscarried, and their efforts could either fail or even worsen the situation for a person under stress. Since supportive acts benefit recipients but their actual knowledge of receiving support is sometimes harmful, it has been theorised that the most effective support exchange would involve one in which the provider reports giving support but the recipient does not notice that support has occurred. From a cost-benefit point of view, invisible support would be optimal for the recipient because the benefits of provision are accrued while the costs of receipt are avoided. Using the same idea, it also implies that the least effective type of support would be one in which the provider does not report providing support but the recipient reports receiving it.

The first investigation of invisible support involved a couples study in which one member was preparing for the New York State Bar Exam. Support receipt and provision were measured by having both couple members complete daily diary entries. Over the course of one month, stressed individuals who reported low frequency of received support (but whose partner ranked their own actions as highly supportive) rated themselves low on anxiety and depression compared to other individuals who reported high frequency of received support.

Compared to Visible Support

A substantial body of work has evidence to suggest that support is most effective when it is invisible or goes unnoticed by recipients. While invisible support has been shown to benefit recipients over visibly supportive acts in some cases, there have also been instances where recipients have benefitted from visible support as well. For example, greater observed support enacted by intimate partners during couples’ support-relevant exchanges have been shown to build feelings of closeness and support, boost positive mood and self-esteem, and foster greater goal achievement and relationship quality across time.

It has been recently suggested that acts of invisible support and visible support may be beneficial or costly depending on different circumstances. To investigate this idea, a recent study in 2013 compared the short-term and long-term effects of visible and invisible support reception during romantic couples’ discussions of each partner’s personal goal. It was found that either type of support was more beneficial depending on the emotional distress that recipients felt at the time. Visible emotional support (support through reassurance, encouragement, and understanding) was associated with perceptions of greater support and discussion success for recipients who felt greater distress during the discussion. In contrast, invisible emotional support was not associated with recipients’ post-discussion perceptions of support or discussion success. For long-term support effects, it was found that only invisible emotional support predicted greater goal achievement across the following year.

When put together, these findings suggest that visible support and invisible support have unique functions for well-being. When people are under distress, visible support appears to be a short-term remedy to reassure recipients that they are cared for and supported. These benefits are only present when recipients are actually distressed during the time that the supportive act takes place. On the other hand, while invisible support tends to go unnoticed by recipients, it seems to play an integral role in the long-term success of goal-maintenance. This increasingly complex view of the implications of support visibility is reinforced by a growing body of research suggesting the effects of invisible social support – as with visible support – are moderated by provider, recipient, and contextual factors such as recipients’ perceptions of providers’ responsiveness to their needs, or the quality of the relationship between the support provider and recipient.

Effects on Support Providers

Refer to Social Support, Psychology, Stress (Psychological; Eustress and Distress), Coping (Psychology), Self-Esteem, and Self-Efficacy.

The effects of invisible support on recipients have been extensively investigated, but the consequences of invisible support on providers are less known. One study in 2016 investigated the benefits and costs of invisible support on couple-members who enacted supportive behaviours by differentiating the processes of invisible emotional support (support through reassurance, encouragement, and understanding) from processes of invisible instrumental support (providing tangible aid such as sending money or childcare). No costs of support-giving were found for providers when they demonstrated acts of invisible emotional support. The effects for invisible instrumental support told a different story, where providers who reported high relationship satisfaction were unaffected, but providers who reported low relationship satisfaction were negatively affected by their acts of invisible instrumental support with an increase in negative mood. These findings suggest that emotional comfort may be a more central function to maintain close relationships than instrumental support. Therefore, providing invisible emotional support may lead to less perceptions of a costly inequity than providing invisible instrumental support on average. However, since invisible instrumental support did not incur costs for providers who reported high relationship satisfaction, it implies that high relationship satisfaction may buffer potential costs that would otherwise be felt by support-providers. The differential results between invisible instrumental and emotional support indicate that a solid distinction between instrumental and emotional social support may be useful to take into account when investigating effects of invisible support as a whole.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_support >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.