Two experiments examined how the ways in which people mentally represent their personal networks affect perceptions of social support. Social support research often uses “name generators” in which individuals are asked to choose how many people they receive support from, resulting in cognitive networks that confound size and density. Taking a fixed size approach, Study 1 showed that the density of chronically activated networks predicted perceived support in both emotional and informational domains. Study 2 assigned participants to think of a dense or sparse personal network of equal size to test whether experimentally manipulated density can influence perceived support. Results indicated that thinking of a dense (vs. sparse) network led to higher perceived support, which in turn promoted more confidence in coping with life stressors. Collectively, these studies highlight how moment-to-moment changes in cognitive networks can influence social resources and explicate key psychological mechanisms tied to cognitive social structures.

两项实验研究了人们在心理上如何代表其个人网络的方式如何影响对社会支持的看法。社会支持研究通常使用“名称生成器”，其中要求个人选择他们从中获得支持的人数，从而导致认知网络混淆大小和密度。采用固定大小的方法，研究1显示，长期激活的网络的密度可以预测情感和信息领域的感知支持。研究2指定参与者考虑一个大小相等的密集或稀疏个人网络，以测试实验控制的密度是否会影响感知的支持。结果表明，对一个密集的（相对于稀疏的）网络的思考导致了更高的感知支持，从而反过来增强了人们对应对生活压力源的信心。总的来说，