ABSTRACT
Until recently most of the literature on social support has been clinical, impressionistic, and speculative. This literature has been valuable in directing attention to the relevance of social ties to personal adjustment. However, there has been sufficient research that employs the careful controls and manipulations characteristic of experiments. This paper describes a series of laboratory studies dealing with behavioral and cognitive dimensions of social support. It is hoped that this approach will contribute to the specification of mediational processes that may be involved in the clinical phenomena that have been extensively described.
