Social Skills and Negative Life Events: Testing the Deficit Stress Generation Hypothesis.(Statistical Data Included)

People who possess poor social skills have been hypothesized to experience negative events and consequently become vulnerable to psychosocial problems. This is characterized as the social skills deficit stress generation hypothesis. Two studies were conducted to examine this hypothesis. In study 1,677 university students completed measures of social skills and negative life events that had occurred over the past three months. In study 2, 142 students participated in a 9 month, 3 wave longitudinal study that assessed social skills at times 1 and 3 and negative life events at times 2 and 3. Results of the investigations indicate generally negative associations between social skills and negative life events, but these associations were stronger concurrently than prospectively. Although social skills were predicted to be associated with negative life events that are social in nature, in most cases they were equally predictive of nonsocial negative life events. The associations between the social skills and life events were consistently small in magnitude.

Negative and stressful life events have been linked so repeatedly and pervasively to psychological, social, and physical problems that their causal or contributory relationship has achieved truism status. Researchers have typically, and perhaps legitimately, been mostly focused on the consequences or outcomes associated with the experience of negative life events. As such, negative life events are often treated as independent variables or predictors in epidemiological investigations, and their origins and occurrences are implicitly treated as random factors or issues of non-concern.

Like negative life events, poor social skills have also been linked to the experience of various psychosocial problems (e.g., Jones, Hobbs, & Hockenbury, 1982; Segrin, 1990; Wallace et al., 1980). Results of a number of recent studies converge to suggest that social skills are a vulnerability and/or resiliency factor in the development of psychosocial distress (Luthar, 1991; Vinnick & Erickson, 1994; Walker, Garber, & Greene, 1994). Across a variety of dependent variables, evidence indicates that those with poor social skills are at heightened risk, or vulnerable, for developing distress and problems when stressed. On the other hand, people with well developed social skills appear to be resistant or resilient to such negative outcomes after experiencing stressful events.

The role of social skills deficits as a vulnerability factor in the development of psychosocial distress can be explained well by the diminished social support available to those who possess poor social skills (e.g., Cole & Milstead, 1989; Riggio & Zimmerman, 1991). However, an additional, and perhaps more straightforward hypothesis suggests that poor social skills are a vulnerability factor because people with poor social skills experience more negative and stressful events. This is characterized as a social skills deficit stress generation hypothesis.

Lewinsohn's behavioral theory of depression provides a strong theoretical precedent for this hypothesis (Lewinsohn, 1974, 1975; Youngren & Lewinsohn, 1980). Lewinsohn defined social skill as the ability to emit behaviors that are positively reinforced and the ability to avoid emitting behaviors that are punished (Libet & Lewinsohn, 1973, p. 304). Conversely, people who lack adequate social skills are, by definition, those persons who will not be able to produce many positive and rewarding outcomes, and will not be able to avoid negative and punishing outcomes as a result of their behaviors. According to this behavioral theory of depression, it is lack of positive and presence of negative events that ultimately creates a state of depression.

In early presentations of this theoretical approach, Lewinsohn stated that "An individual is considered to be skillful to the extent that [s/]he elicits positive (and avoids negative) consequences from the social environment" (Lewinsohn, 1974, p. 171) and that "lack of social skill could be one of the antecedent conditions producing a low positive reinforcement rate" (Lewinsohn, 1975, p.41). This conceptualization explicitly predicts a negative association between social skill and the experience of negative events.

Some recent tests of Hammen's stress generation model in depression (Davila, Hammen, Burge, Paley, & Daley, 1995; Hammen, 1991) are consistent with Lewinsohn's prediction. Hammen found that the symptoms and behaviors of depressed people, who often exhibit social skills deficits (Segrin, 1990; Segrin & Abramson, 1994), tend to be associated with an increase in subsequent stressful events. It was further demonstrated in the Davila et al. (1995) investigation that poor interpersonal problem-solving skills were negatively associated with stressful events over a one-year span.