UCLA
STUDY ON FRIENDSHIP AMONG WOMEN
By Gale Berkowitz
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.
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