The Beatles were right. Love is all people need to thrive in every way, a new study claims.

Researchers claim that relationships help people cope with stress and adversity as well as helping them to learn, explore, achieve goals, cultivate new talents and find purpose and meaning in life.

But how someone provides support dictates how successful another person can become.

Scroll down for video

Researchers claim that relationships help people cope with stress and adversity as well as helping them to learn (stock image), explore, achieve goals, cultivate new talents and find purpose and meaning in life

Previous research has shown that people with supportive and rewarding relationships have better mental health and quality of life, and lower rates of morbidity and mortality.

The new study, published in Personality and Social Psychology Review, builds on this and says that people are most likely to thrive with well-functioning close relationships.

These relationships could be romantic or between friends, parents, siblings or mentors.

Dr Brooke Feeney, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Professor Nancy Collins, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, said ‘thriving’ involves five components of wellbeing.

These include 'hedonic wellbeing', such as happiness, 'eudaimonic wellbeing' - having purpose and meaning in life as well as progressing towards life goals - and 'psychological wellbeing', such as the absence of mental health problems.

They continued that 'social wellbeing' – provided by deep and meaningful human connections and positive interpersonal expectancies – as well as physical wellbeing is necessary to thrive.

Video courtesy of The Couple Connection

One expert said that relationships help people recover in bad times (illustrated with a stock image) and not only help people recover, but thrive afterwards

BUT ABUSIVE BOSSES CAN ‘INFECT’ OTHERS, STUDY CLAIMS Bosses who shout and send demeaning emails to employees can cause conflict throughout their team, researchers recently claimed. They say the abuse is 'toxic' and can spread through the workplace, leading to everybody suffering. The Michigan State University study, conducted in China and the United States, suggests the toxic effect of nonphysical abuse by a boss is much broader than believed. Study author Crystal Farh said supervisors who belittle and ridicule workers not only negatively affect those workers' attitudes and behaviours, but also cause team members to act in a similar hostile manner toward one another. 'That's the most disturbing finding because it's not just about individual victims now, it's about creating a context where everybody suffers, regardless of whether you were individually abused or not,' she said. The findings could likely be explained by social learning theory, in which people learn and then model behavior based on observing others, in this case the boss. Advertisement

Lead researcher Dr Feeney said: ‘Relationships serve an important function of not simply helping people return to baseline, but helping them to thrive by exceeding prior baseline levels of functioning.

‘We refer to this as source of strength (SOS) support, and emphasise that the promotion of thriving through adversity is the core purpose of this support function.’

She explained that relationships should support a person’s development by helping them seize opportunities and explore, grow and achieve.

This type of support is referred to as relational catalyst (RC) support.

And the social scientists found that support providers with certain characteristics can provide more meaningful support and the most important is sensitivity.

‘It is not just whether someone provides support, but it is how he or she does it that determines the outcome of that support,’ Dr Feeney said.

‘Any behaviours in the service of providing SOS and RC support must be enacted both responsively and sensitively to promote thriving.

‘Being responsive involves providing the type and amount of support that is dictated by the situation and by the partner's needs, and being sensitive involves responding to needs in such a way that the support-recipient feels understood, validated, and cared for.’

She warned that some support providers may accidentally do more harm than good, by making a person feel weak, needy or inadequate.