Social Support as a Buffer Against Existential Threat

Social Baseline Theory (SBT) proposes that access to social resources reduces metabolic demand and perceived difficulty of environmental traversal. Empirical work demonstrates that social resources can attenuate neural responses to threat (Coan et al., 2006), increase analgesia (López-Solà et al., 2019), decrease hill slant perception (Schnall et al., 2008), and other outcomes associated with lower energy expenditure (see Beckes & Sbarra, 2022, for review). To date, however, SBT has not been experimentally extended to threats arising from the internal psychological environment. Specifically, the mechanisms linking social support to existential threats (i.e., threats to meaning, identity, freedom, or existence) have not been examined in an experimental paradigm. This gap is especially notable given the positive association between existential concerns and anxiety, depression, and suicidality (Chavez-Baldini et al., 2024), as well as the positive correlation between social connection and positive mental and physical health outcomes (Holt-Lunstad, 2024). The present study aims to address this empirical gap by experimentally testing the causal impact of real-time social support salience on affective responses to existential threat. Understanding this mechanism may clarify how social resources regulate internal threat processing and may inform future preventative work. I expect that a) existential threat will cause an increase in negative affect, a decrease in positive affect, and an increase in state anxiety, relative to the control condition. Further, I expect that b) social support will moderate this impact causing less change between pre- and post- test measures, relative to participants in the control condition. Participants will be recruited using both Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk; Study 1), and a local online population recruited via on-campus methods (Study 2).