Social Support, Personal Control, and Psychological Functioning Among Individuals with Heart Failure
Year: 2005
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Heart failure, a serious and prevalent chronic disease, places a large psychosocial burden on patients and their families. The research presented in this dissertation focuses on the complex relationship between social support and personal control and two key psychological outcomes— depression and anxiety—in individuals coping with heart failure. Theoretically defensible models are developed, drawing on an integrative stress coping framework, and appropriate inferential statistical procedures are implemented to identify the importance of the proposed relationships in a sample of 242 adult men and women being treated for cardiomyopathy. Two structural models are evaluated. Model 1 examines the mediating influence of personal control between social support and depression, while Model 2 examines the mediating influence of control between social support and anxiety. Statistically significant estimates indicate that social support plays a key role in reducing psychological distress—depressive symptoms and anxiety. The mechanism whereby social support effectively reduces psychological distress is entirely through patients' perceived control. An additional objective of the study is exploration of gender differences in the two models. A series of empirical analyses, using path analysis and regression-based mediation models, indicate that among heart failure patients there are indeed statistically significant gender differences in the relationships between social support, control, and psychological functioning. These differences were contingent on the measurement of control included in the model. Evidence suggests that the role of social support is greater for women than for men in reducing psychological distress, as indicated by either depressive symptoms or anxiety.
Author: Melissa V. Taylor
Language: English
Subfield: Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1580730812