socialization Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Keep Your Friends Close and Your Cortisol Levels Low for Life

AHA Publisher — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 07:00:47 +0000

Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology via EurekAlert – Directing a meeting, dialing up an old acquaintance, dictating the perfect tuna salad sandwich across a drive-through window. For business and for pleasure, human beings are in constant communication. Our proclivity for socialization is lifelong, equally prominent in the lives of adolescents and adults. A recent study determined key differences in the ways that various age groups communicate, as well as one conversational component that stands the test of time: friendship. Specifically, bonds between individuals who identify as female. Led by former Beckman Institute postdoctoral researchers Michelle Rodrigues and Si On Yoon, an interdisciplinary team evaluated how interlocutors’ age and familiarity with one another impacts a conversation, reviewing the interaction’s overall effectiveness and stress responses generated as a result. The study, titled “What are friends for? The impact of friendship on communicative efficiency and cortisol response during collaborative problem solving among younger and older women,” was published in the Journal of Women and Aging in May 2021. Two hypotheses form the foundation of this female-focused study. First, the tend-and-befriend hypothesis, which challenges the traditionally masculine “fight-or-flight” dichotomy. “Women have evolved an alternative mechanism in response to stress,” said Rodrigues, who is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University. “In order to deal with stress, women can befriend female peers.” The team also tested the socio-emotional selectivity hypothesis, which postulates a social “pruning” as humans advance in age and pursue more intimate, higher-quality circles of friends. The introduction of age as a variable is novel in the field and stems from an interdisciplinary Beckman collaboration. “I was working with several different groups in several different disciplines, coming from the perspective of studying friendship but having previously done research on adolescent girls, but not older women,” Rodrigues said. She combined forces with then-Beckman-postdoc Si On Yoon, who was studying the cognitive mechanisms of natural conversation across the lifespan, including healthy younger and older adults. “My research program was focused on language measures in social interactions, and I was glad to work with Dr. Rodrigues to develop an integrative approach including both language processing and physiological measures to study social interactions,” said Yoon, who is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa. The interdisciplinary team merged both theories into a single query: Across women’s lifespans, how are the tendencies to “tend and befriend” as well as socially select reflected in their communication? They tested a pool of 32 women: 16 “older adults” aged 62-79, and 16 “younger adults” aged 18-25. Each participant was either paired with a friend (a “familiar” conversation partner) or a stranger (“unfamiliar”). The partnerships underwent a series of conversational challenges, wherein the participant instructed her partner to arrange a set of tangrams in an order that only the former could see. The catch? Each shape was abstract, their appearances purposefully difficult to describe. “You could look at one [tangram] and say, ‘This looks like a dog.’ Or, you could say, ‘This looks like a triangle, with a stop sign, and a bicycle wheel,'” Rodrigues said. This exercise helped quantify each conversation’s efficiency: partners who achieved the desired tangram arrangement in fewer words were considered more efficient, and pairs who needed more words to complete the task were considered less efficient. The researchers found that while the younger adult pairs communicated more efficiently with familiar partners than their older counterparts, they communicated less efficiently with unfamiliar partners; alternatively, the older adults demonstrated conversational dexterity, quickly articulating the abstract tangrams to friends and strangers alike. “A referential communication task like this requires that you see where the other person is coming from. It seems like the younger adults are a little more hesitant in trying to do that, whereas the older adults have an easier time doing that with strangers,” Rodrigues said. This was not predicted based on the socio-emotional selectivity hypothesis, which anticipated a correlation between age and social isolation. “Even though older adults choose to spend more time with people who matter to them, it’s clear that they have the social skills to interact with unfamiliar people if and when they choose to,” Rodrigues said. Rodrigues’ team also measured salivary cortisol to quantify and compare participants’ stress levels throughout the testing process. “When you experience something stressful, if you have a stress response system that’s working as it should, the result is an elevated amount of cortisol, our primary stress hormone, which then tells our bodies to release glucose into our bloodstreams,” she said. “That’s reflected in our saliva about 15 to 20 minutes after we experience it. If we see a rise in salivary cortisol from an individual’s baseline levels, that indicates that they are more stressed than they were at the time of the earlier measurements.” Across both age groups, those working with familiar partners had consistently lower cortisol levels than those working with unfamiliar partners. “A lot of the research on the tend-and-befriend hypothesis has only focused on young women, so it’s great to have these results that pull that out to the end of life. We can see that friendship has that same effect throughout the lifespan. Familiar partners and friendship buffer stress, and that’s preserved with age,” Rodrigues said. To read the original article click here.

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Exposing HOW Chronic Stress Destroys the Immune System

AHA Publisher — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 07:00:07 +0000

Joy Jensen via NaturalHealth365 – The vast majority of American adults say they feel anxiety or stress – every day. As one of the most stressed nations on earth, it’s time to start taking a serious look at the connection between (chronic) stress and the immune system. An overview of studies surrounding stress and the immune system shows a link between stress and how the immune system functions that goes back decades. When you’re feeling stressed out, depressed, or lonely, you shouldn’t be surprised if you end up getting physically sick. Turns out, your state of mind and how you respond to stressful situations does dramatically influence the development of disease or wellbeing. Chronic Mental Stress Is a Big Threat to Your Future Health, According to Many Studies Back in the 1980s, an immunologist and psychologist found it intriguing to see studies linking stress to infection. They went on to do their own study on medical students, discovering that the stress of three-day exams decreased the students’ immunity. Since then, hundreds of studies have been done on the links between stress and health. Those studies have revealed unique patterns. When people experienced stress for a significant duration of time, their immunity went downhill, leading to the conclusion that too much stress can wreak havoc on the immune system. Researchers also discovered that individuals who are already sick or older are at a greater risk to stress-related immune dysfunction. In aging adults, even mild depression may suppress their immune system. Some experts even believe that stress may be responsible for up to 90% of all diseases and illnesses, including the big ones like heart disease and cancer. How does stress affect your immune system? It triggers chemical reactions in the body, releasing the stress hormone cortisol, which can decrease white blood cells. Keep in mind, white blood cells are designed to help us with infections. Chronic stress also increases the risk of inflammation – which increases the rate of tissue damage and infection risk. The effects of stress tend to be cumulative, which means that every-day stress may eventually lead to serious health problems. Unfortunately, the only “solution” that Western medicine offers is a toxic drug, that only adds to stress – especially in the liver! Don’t Wait: Take Healthy Steps NOW to Reduce Stress in Your Life The key to combating the effects of stress on the immune system is to become more aware of daily stressors and find ways to eliminate them. Several steps you can take to reduce stress include: Get Social: Having a strong social support system can lower stress and is linked to better overall health and immune function. We can’t stress this enough. (Pun intended!) Be physically active: Exercise puts physical stress on the body but has big mental stress-relieving benefits. In fact, regular exercise helps to lower levels of cortisol; improves the quality of your sleep, and boosts self-confidence. All of this is great for your immune system. Experience relaxation: Relaxation techniques like guided imagery or meditation can strengthen the link between your body and mind. Using them regularly will keep the negative effects of stress at bay and help you to make better decisions in your life. Keep a journal: Writing down what you’re stressed out about can help you to work out anxiety and stress. In many cases, simply expressing your concerns on paper can provide that release to help you to “let it go.” As an added bonus: you may even gain additional insights to help you sort out what’s troubling you. Express more gratitude: Generally speaking, when you have a more positive attitude, things tend to work out better. But, beyond just thinking more positively, be sure to tell others in your life how much you appreciate them. Correct nutritional deficiencies: Never overlook the mental health benefits of a good (organic) diet. Simply put, consuming too many toxins will eventually lead to nutritional deficiencies and poor emotional health. Be sure to eat high quality (non-toxic) fats, plenty of vegetables (especially dark leafy greens) and, if necessary, look into the benefits of vitamin D, vitamin C, lemon balm, ashwagandha, holy basil, curcumin, St. John’s wort and valerian to help reduce the feeling of stress in your life. Editor’s note: If stress is making you feel depressed, read this NaturalHealth365 article for some helpful tips. Sources for this article include: PsychologyToday.com, APA.org, Healthline.com To read the original article click here. For more articles from NaturalHealth365 click here.

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Your Brain Shows If You Are Lonely or Not

AHA Publisher — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 07:00:41 +0000

Dartmouth College via EurekAlert – Social connection with others is critical to a person’s mental and physical well-being. How the brain maps relationships with other people in relation to one’s self has long been a mystery. A Dartmouth study finds that the closer you feel to people emotionally, the more similarly you represent them in your brain. In contrast, people who feel social disconnection appear to have a lonelier, neural self-representation. The findings are published in the Journal of Neuroscience. “If we had a stamp of neural activity that reflected your self-representation and one that reflected that of people whom you are close to, for most of us, our stamps of neural activity would look pretty similar. Yet, for lonelier people, the neural activity was really differentiated from that of other people,” explained senior author Meghan L. Meyer, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences, and director of the Dartmouth Social Neuroscience Lab. The study was comprised of 50 college students and community members ranging from age 18 to 47. Before going in an fMRI scanner, participants were asked to name and rank five people whom they are closest to and five acquaintances. During the scan, participants were asked to make trait judgements about themselves, the people they are closest to and the acquaintances that they had just named, and five celebrities. Participants were asked to rate how much a trait described a person (such as if the person is friendly) on a scale from 1 to 4 (from not at all to very much). The results showed how the brain seemed to cluster representations of people into three different cliques: 1) oneself, 2) one’s own social network, and 3) well-known people, like celebrities. The closer participants felt to someone, the more similarly their brain represented them throughout the social brain, including in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), the region associated with the concept of self. Lonelier people showed less neural similarity between themselves and others in the MPFC, and the demarcations between the three cliques was blurrier in their neural activity. In other words, the lonelier people are, the less similar their brain looks when they think about themselves and others. Meyer added, “It’s almost as if you have a specific constellation of neural activity that is activated when you think about yourself. And when you think about your friends, much of the same constellation is recruited. If you are lonely though, you activate a fairly, different constellation when you think about others than when you think about yourself. It’s as though your brain’s representation of yourself is more disconnected from other people, which is consistent with how lonely people say they feel.” The findings illustrate how loneliness seems to be associated with distortions in the neural mapping of social connections with others. To read the original article click here.

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