Social support as a moderator of the aftereffects of stress in female psychiatric inpatients.

This study was designed to assess the impact of social support on poststressor cognitive impairment, with the goal of providing a laboratory test of the buffering hypothesis of social support. High or low support was operationahzed as the warm or the neutral behavior of an interviewer, which preceded the experimental stressor, high or low task load Subjects were 32 nonpsychotic female psychiatric inpatients The predicted interaction was found on a poststressor anagram task. The performance of low-task-load subjects was not markedly affected by the interview condition, whereas high-task-load subjects performed significantly better in the warm interview condition. Heart rate data also supported the hypothesized buffering role of support.