The effects of social support and social prejudice on emotional affect among drug users: the mediating role of resilience

ABSTRACTObjective Emotional affect plays an important role in the process of drug use. The aim of this study was to investigate how social support and social prejudice are associated with emotional affect among drug users in rehabilitation center, and to examine the mediating role of resilience.Methods 316 drug users were investigated using the subscales of positive affect, negative affect, social support, social prejudice, and resilience of the multidimensional psychological scale.Results The results revealed a significant link between social support and positive affect experienced by drug users. Moreover, resilience mediated the relationships between social support and both positive affect and negative affect. The results also demonstrated that there was a significant association between social prejudice and negative affect of drug users, resilience was found to mediate the relationships between social prejudice and both positive affect and negative affect.Conclusions Results have shown that social factors are closely related to drug users’ emotional affect. High levels of social support and low levels of social prejudice can improve their affective states, and resilience plays a mediating role in this process.KEYWORDS: Social supportsocial prejudiceresilienceemotional affectdrug users Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Tianjin Research Innovation Project for Postgraduate Students under Grant [2022SKY246], by The Postgraduate Innovative Research Projects of Tianjin Normal University under Grant [2022KYCX131Y], and by Gangnan drug rehabilitation centers in Tianjin under Grant [53WC2003].