Warrior
Priestess
Articles
UCLA
Study on Friendship Among Women
By: Gale Berkowitz
A
landmark UCLA study suggest 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. The UCLA
study suggest 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 released
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.
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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 increase 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 a 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 confidant 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
Pleasure 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.
Taylor,
S. E., Klein, L. C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung,
R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. (2000). Female Responses to
Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or Flight" Psychological
Review, 107(3), 41-429.
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