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Associations between everyday social connection and emotional well-being across adulthood
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2025-08
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Psychology
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https://doi.org/10.34944/sebd-d631
Abstract
From the relief of relaxing with a partner after a stressful day to the joy of celebrating good news with a friend, those around us can strongly impact our everyday emotional processes. Prior research has shown myriad benefits of many forms of effective social connection for health and well-being across the lifespan. In this dissertation, I test whether perceived support (and strain) among family, friends, and partners is associated with later baseline positive and negative affect within a sample of relatively older adults via publicly available Midlife in the United States data. I next examine whether linguistic features used in conversation—specifically, average usages of linguistic valence, concreteness, psychological distancing, and coherence— differ by age group (i.e., younger or older), and whether age group and expression of these linguistic features are linked to feeling differently positively, negatively, or supported post-discussion. More perceived support from friends and family, and less tension with partners were associated with enhanced positive, but not lower negative, affective baselines; negative affectivity also tended to rise alongside greater neuroticism and lower conscientiousness, while positive affectivity rose with lower neuroticism and greater extroversion and conscientiousness. Furthermore, older adults tended to utilize more linguistic concreteness than their younger counterparts, but age group and use of linguistic features were not meaningfully associated with feeling differently positive, negative, or supported post-conversation. People tended to feel more positive, less negative, and more supported after engaging in discussions on average, and these outcomes varied considerably by individual and dyad. Across adulthood, perceived support in key relationships and everyday social interactions may similarly benefit emotional well-being, which may itself vary idiosyncratically.
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