UCLA
STUDY ON FRIENDSHIP AMONG WOMEN
A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships
between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to
be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our
marriage, and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may
do even more.
Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually
counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a
daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress
with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain
friendships with other women. It's a stunning find that has turned five
decades of stress research---most of it on men---upside down. "Until this
study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience
stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and
fight or flee as fast as possible," explains Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D.,
now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University
and one of the study's authors. "It's an ancient survival mechanism left
over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers.
Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire
than just "fight or flight". In fact," says Dr. Klein, "it
seems that when the hormone oxytocin is release as part of the stress
responses in a woman, it buffers the "fight or flight" response and
encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she
actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more
oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming
effect. This calming response does not occur in men", says Dr. Klein,
"because testosterone---which men produce in high levels when they're
under stress---seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin.Estrogen", she
adds, "seems to enhance it."
The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a
classic "aha!" moment shared by two women scientists who were
talking one day in a lab at UCLA. "There was this joke that when the
women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had
coffee, and bonded", says Dr. Klein. "When the men were stressed,
they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher
Shelley Taylor that nearly 90%of the stress research is on males. I
showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were
onto something."
The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after
another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and
Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists
had made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to stress differently
than men has significant implications for our health.
It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin
encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the
"tend and befriend" notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may
explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that
social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate,
and cholesterol. There's no doubt," says Dr. Klein, that friends are
helping us live longer."
In one study, for example, researchers
found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a
6-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year
period cut their risk of death by more than 60%.
Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses' Health Study from
Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely
they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely
they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so
significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or
confidants was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra
weight! And that's not all!
When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death
of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of
all, those women who had a close friend and confidante were more likely to
survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss
of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate.
Yet if friends counter the stress that seems
to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even
add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That's
a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., co-author
of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls' and Women's Friendships
(Three Rivers Press,1998). "Every time we get overly busy with work and
family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women,"
explains Dr. Josselson. We push them right to the back burner. That's
really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other.
We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can
do the special kind of talk that women do when they're with other women. It's
a very healing experience."
- Ellen Michaud, published
in Prevention
magazine
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