UCLA study on Female Friendships and how it helps Stress
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). The following
paragraph is, in my opinion, very, very true and something all women
should be aware of and NOT put our female friends on the back burners.
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 the m 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.
Taylor, S. E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R.
A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. Female Responses to Stress: Tend and Befriend,
Not Fight or Flight" Psychol Rev, 107(3):41-429.
Geary DC, Flinn MV. Sex differences in behavioral and hormonal response
to social threat: commentary on Taylor et al. Psychol Rev 2002
Oct;109(4):745-50; discussion 751-3
Cousino Klein L, Corwin EJ. Seeing the unexpected: how sex differences in
stress responses may provide a new perspective on the manifestation of
psychiatric disorders. Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2002 Dec;4(6):441-8.