How do our closest relationships shape our health and well-being?

Social support is well established as protective against stigma and marginalization, but this work has developed largely apart from the broader science of close relationships. My research bridges the two, asking not just whether people have support, but what kind, and what it's for.

Drawing from the Thriving Through Relationships model, I carefully distinguish between two functions support can serve: source-of-strength (SOS) support — reactive support like comfort after discrimination — which helps people cope with and recover from adversity, and relational-catalyst (RC) support — proactive support like mentorship or encouragement — which helps people pursue goals and capitalize on opportunities. In a large study of sexually- and gender-diverse (SGD) young adults (N = 400), these two forms of support predicted distinct outcomes: RC support predicted greater personal growth and identity pride, while SOS support predicted greater self-integrity and felt security (Baron, Collins, & Feeney, 2026). Thriving, in other words, takes more than the absence of threat — it takes relationships that actively affirm growth and identity.

This distinction is especially consequential in young adulthood, when people are solidifying their sense of self and shifting who they lean on for support, often from parents toward peers and partners. For SGD young adults, that shift can be complicated if parental support, especially identity-affirming support, is inconsistent or absent. I laid out a broader theoretical model of these dynamics in a recent review (Baron & Collins, 2025), showing how identity-specific stressors and opportunities shape perceived support and social safety, and in turn, long-term thriving. While developed with SGD populations in mind, the model's core mechanisms generalize to other marginalized groups navigating identity-related stress and growth.

Friendship has historically received far less research attention than romantic or family relationships, despite playing just as vital a role in well-being. My dissertation asks: what makes someone an effective support-seeker?

Low support-seeking is often read as disinterest or self-sufficiency. My work instead treats it as something shaped by social safety — a person's general sense of reliable connection, inclusion, and protection — which is especially relevant for people who've learned, through experiences of marginalization, to expect rejection when asking for help. Using a 14-day daily-diary study of 120 young adults, I test whether socially safe individuals seek support more effectively — choosing the right friend to confide in, asking directly instead of hinting — and whether that, in turn, predicts higher-quality support and better daily well-being (Baron & Collins, in prep). Because the study tracks both stressors and personal goals, it also lets me test whether the same skills that help people cope with setbacks also help them make progress toward what they want.

The flip side of building support is understanding why it sometimes erodes. In collaboration with Dr. Jaimie Arona Krems (UCLA), I study friendship dissolution as a pathway linking sexual minority identity — bisexual identity in particular — to elevated loneliness and depression. In a nationally representative U.S. sample, bisexual adults reported significantly more friendship loss than both straight and gay/lesbian peers, and this loss statistically explained their elevated loneliness and depression (Baron & Krems, under review). Notably, this wasn't a story about limited access to LGBTQ+ social networks — bisexual and gay/lesbian participants reported comparable numbers of LGBTQ+ friends — suggesting bisexual friendships are less stable even when the surrounding network looks similar. Together with my dissertation work, this points toward an integrated question I'm excited to pursue next: can the skills that help people seek support also help buffer against losing it?