Sustainable Supporting: Investigating Effects of Support Strategy on Supporters’ Emotional Exhaustion

Within a societal landscape in which mental healthcare support providers are categorically overstretched, the present study compared the effects of providing different kinds of support as an initial step to developing strategies for decreasing the cumulative emotional burden of support provision for support providers. While socio-affective support strategies are concerned with making support-seekers feel better, cognitive strategies are focused on problem-solving and providing logistical support. In the present study, participants completed a single-session online study to examine whether support strategy (cognitive versus socio-affective support) influenced emotional exhaustion from before to after providing support to multiple individuals who discussed negative life experiences. Participants were assigned to either a cognitive support, socio-affective support, or no support control condition; watched five videos from the Stanford Emotional Narratives Database of pre-recorded individuals talking about negative experiences they had had; and wrote short statements of support (or control statements) between each video. Participants completed the Emotional Exhaustion Questionnaire (EEQ) prior to and following the support task, as well as measures of individual factors, such as baseline empathy, positive and negative affect, and ‘interpersonal’ task factors, such as the relatability and emotional intensity of the support- seekers’ videos. While data analysis yielded no main effect of support strategy on emotional exhaustion from pre- to post-support task, there were significant positive relationships between emotional fatigue change (EEC) and emotional intensity; EEC and relatability; and participants’ baseline empathy (cognitive, affective, and overall) and EEC. Emotional intensity and relatability moderated the effect of empathy on EEC, suggesting that how emotionally intense and relatable supporters found support provision to be may have been a more important contributor to emotional fatigue than support strategy. The present study represents a meaningful preliminary step in investigating mechanisms for decreasing the prevalence and intensity of burnout via support strategies. Future studies should examine the role of support strategies and other individual and interpersonal factors in making support more sustainable for support providers.