COGNITIVE-PROCESSES IN PERCEIVED SOCIAL SUPPORT

This article describes 2 studies testing hypotheses that perceived social support operates in part as a cognitive personality construct. Both studies found that perceived support manifested a pattern of correlations more similar to cognitive variables than did support received from the environment and that the relation between perceived support and psychological distress was reduced substantially when the cognitive personality variables were controlled statistically. Study 2 also tested hypotheses generated from schema theory that perceived support would be related to the interpretation and recall of novel supportive behaviors. As predicted, low-perceived-support students interpreted novel supportive behaviors more negatively than high-support students and remembered a lower proportion of behaviors perceived as helpful.