Facilitating and motivating support: How support‐seekers can affect the support they receive in times of distress
Amanda L. Forest, Rebecca Walsh, Kori Krueger
Abstract
Abstract When people seek support in times of distress, receiving high‐quality support is critical to personal and relational well‐being. A rich body of work has examined support processes, but the role that support‐seekers play in eliciting support has received surprisingly limited attention. Yet, theory and research indicate that seekers’ behavior prior to and during support transactions shapes the support they receive. In the present paper, we summarize the literature on support‐seeking, describing how particular behaviors that seekers enact (deliberately or incidentally) affect their support receipt. We describe how each behavior facilitates (or hinders) providers’ ability to provide effective support and/or motivates (or demotivates) providers’ support provision efforts, and we consider why some people fail to enact certain support‐eliciting behaviors. Finally, we discuss the implications of our facilitate and motivate approach and identify important directions for future research. This work represents a promising springboard for examining a surprisingly underappreciated perspective in support transactions.