Positive and Negative Social Exchanges: Weighing their Effects in Later Life

I in how older adults' social relationships influence their health and well-being has a long history and has inspired a great deal of empirical work. In much of this work, older adults' informal social networks have been viewed as a source of support that enhances psychological well-being and facilitates adaptation to life stress. Central to this tradition of gerontological research (and to parallel literatures on other age groups) have been questions about the dimensions of social support, the effects of different kinds and sources of support, and the causes of and possible means of compensating for social support deficits. Without oversimplifying a complex literature, it seems fair to say that this work has gained credibility and momentum from studies of diverse age groups and populations that have converged in suggesting that social relationships often promote physical health and emotional well-being (House, Landis, and Umberson, 1988). More recently, however, researchers have urged greater attention to the negative, as well as the positive, side of informal social ties. The recognition that social relationships can be a source of strain is not new, but systematic attention to the nature and impact of conflictual interactions in the social networks of nonclinical populations is a more recent development. It has given rise to a small but growing literature that examines both positive and negative aspects of older adults' social relationships. A central focus of much of this work has been the question of whether positive or negative social exchanges have greater impact on older adults' health and well-being. Again, without oversimplifying the findings from this literature, many studies have yielded evidence of what has been termed a "negativity effect": evidence that negative social exchanges exhibit stronger or more reliable associations with well-being than do positive social exchanges (Rook, 1990). This work, too, has gained credibility from convergent findings in other literatures that have documented the potent effects of negative information and events (e.g., Cacioppo, Gardner, and Bernston, 1997; Taylor, 1991). In addition, "negativity effects" have emerged not only in studies of emotional health outcomes but also in studies of physical health outcomes, such as cardiovascular and immune functioning (Ewart et al., 1991; Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 1993). These different traditions of research thus create a paradox. On the one hand, social relationships appear to make important, perhaps even essential (Baumeister and Leary, 1995), contributions to emotional and physical health. On the other hand, when researchers examine both negative and positive aspects of relationships, the negative aspects often appear to be more consequential for well-being. Can these conflicting views be resolved? The article by IngersollDayton, Morgan, and Antonucci in this issue represents an attempt at exactly such a resolution and illustrates the kind of thinking that will move us forward in our efforts to grapple with the complexities of social network involvement in later adulthood. Ingersoll-Dayton and her colleagues extend previous analyses by presenting evidence that positive and negative social exchanges make contributions to congruent dimensions of well-being, or to positive and negative affect, respectively. They note that prior studies often have examined only a single, and typically negative, outcome, such as depression or negative mood. This may partly explain why negativity effects have emerged in previous studies. In addition, Ingersoll-Dayton, Morgan, and Antonucci propose that negative exchanges may be most potent when older adults are contending with other life stress. When the researchers divided their representative sample into groups of individuals who had experienced more versus fewer stressful life events, they found that negative exchanges had considerably greater impact on well-being than did positive exchanges among more stressed individuals; among less stressed individuals, however, the two kinds of exchanges had roughly comparable impact. Ingersoll-Dayton and her colleagues note that previous studies that have yielded evidence of negativity effects often have been based on small, nonrepresentative samples of individuals experiencing life stress. They conclude that the evidence for negativity effects in prior work has been overstated. This is a useful antidote to what might be viewed as a premature conclusion emerging from this literature that negative social exchanges have a greater impact on older adults' well-being (Rook, 1992). Ingersoll-Dayton and her colleagues have called attention to several factors that should be considered in future