Findings

1. The significance of family support in enhancing maternal parental self-efficacy and positively influencing mental health for first-time mothers at 6 weeks post-delivery: There was a significant association between informal social network (family and friends) support and maternal parental self-efficacy at 6 weeks post-delivery.
2. Significant relationships were found between: functional social support and postnatal depression; informal social support and postnatal depression; maternal parental self-efficacy and postnatal depression; and informal social support and maternal parental self-efficacy at 6 weeks post-delivery.

Limitations

• As this was a quantitative study, mothers’ in-depth perceptions and experiences of social support, maternal parental self-efficacy and postnatal depression have not been explored from their frame of reference.
• Non-random sample: A convenience sample was selected due to time constraints and in an effort to obtain a large number of respondents with consideration for tests of statistical significance. A random sample may have provided a group with differing support needs, maternal parental self-efficacy levels and rates of postnatal depression.

Findings

1. New mothers spent approximately three hours on the computer each day, with most of this time spent on the Internet—a significant proportion of time.
2. Findings suggested that frequency of blogging predicted feelings of connection to extended family and friends, which then predicted perceptions of social support.
3. This in turn predicted maternal well-being as measured by marital satisfaction, couple conflict, parenting stress and depression.
4. Conversely, unlike blogging, our results revealed that social networking was not associated with connectedness or social support.

Limitations

• Paper is exploratory in nature: This is one of the first studies to examine first-time, new mothers’ social media use, especially blogging and social networking, and the potential relationship between media use and maternal well-being.
• Correlational research cannot establish causation.
• Demonstrated effects may be reversed; for example, it may be that those mothers with stronger relationships tend to turn to blogging more to connect with extended family and friends. It is also possible that those with better well-being may be more or less likely to use media for social support.
• Sample was limited and consisted of mostly white, highly educated mothers.
• It is also important to note that blogging can be done in different domains. For example, some mothers may blog in order to connect with family and friends, while others may blog in order to connect with other parents on the Web. This study did not address this distinction.
• Measures of media use were limited (e.g., access to social media supports on the Internet via mobile phones and other devices was not examined).

Findings

1. Work role was found to be non-significant in relation to mothers' midlife satisfaction, whereas an authoritative parenting style was significantly correlated to this same variable.
2. Employed mothers did report being more stressed, especially when their children were younger, but maternal work role was not predictive of these women’s life satisfaction in midlife.

Limitations

• Retrospective: Asking mothers to recall retrospectively their parenting styles is a potential limitation in this study. Certainly social desirability effects or other biases in memory could come into play.
• Non-random sample: Sample was overwhelmingly Caucasian and Christian, so generalizations must be made with caution.
• Results, while significant, accounted for a small amount of variance and thus should not be over-interpreted.

Findings

1. Evidence at the animal level:
   1. Several different mechanisms of plasticity, including dendritic and synaptic turnover and neurogenesis, have been identified.
   2. The animal and human evidence is consistent in demonstrating that many forms of stress promote excessive growth in sectors of the amygdala, whereas effects in the hippocampus tend to be opposite.
   3. Whether critical or sensitive periods exist for plasticity in response to social influences has not been thoroughly addressed and more systematic developmental studies are required. The reversibility of structural changes following alterations in social and emotional conditions has not been systematically examined.
2. Evidence at the human level:
   1. Research is beginning to document the effect of explicit interventions designed to decrease stress and promote pro-social behavior and well-being on brain structure and function. These studies are consistent with basic research in demonstrating increases in specific sectors of prefrontal activation and decreases in amygdala activation.
   2. These functional alterations are accompanied by structural changes that show increases in prefrontal volume and decreases in amygdala volume.
   3. The precise differences among the various interventions that have been developed for this general purpose have not been systematically studied, nor has the relation between functional and structural changes been carefully documented.
   4. It is apparent that both structural and functional connectivity between prefrontal regions and subcortical structures is extremely important for emotion regulation and that these connections represent important targets for plasticity-induced changes.
3. The studies on interventions explicitly designed to promote positive emotional qualities, such as kindness and mindfulness, imply that such qualities might best be regarded as the product of skills that can be enhanced through training, just as practice will improve musical performance and produce correlated regionally-specific anatomical changes.
4. Whether these interventions simply modulate the adverse effects of stress or whether they result in a profile of neurobehavioral functioning that is better than normal will require considerably more evidence, although the available evidence points toward the latter possibility.

Findings

1. Associations of social support and volunteering with self-rated health are consistently positive across different cultural, economic and geographic settings. However, the magnitude of this association varies significantly.
2. The hypothesis that associations between health and social support will be stronger in non-Western countries as a result of their weaker social protection policies.
3. Results suggest no marked gender difference in the relationship between social capital and self-rated health.
4. Self-rated health was significantly associated with having social support from friends and relatives and volunteering. These associations are strikingly consistent across countries.
5. Results indicate that the link between social capital and health is not restricted to high-income countries but extends across many geographical regions regardless of their national income level.

Limitations

• Data do not allow cross-national or cross-regional comparisons of absolute levels of self-rated health and social contacts.
• Measures in the Gallup survey are dichotomous. There was no examination of whether there was a “dose response” association between social capital measures and health.
• The use of single items instead of a multidimensional measure of both health and social support
• While it is tempting to interpret these findings as evidence of causality from social networks and volunteering to health, it is likely that at least part of the association observed reflects the impact of health on these two forms of social capital (reverse causation).
• The extent of comparability of measures of social capital across different cultures and regions would also limit the interpretation of our results.

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