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Simple games that can reduce stress levels and boost your confidence and self-esteem!
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Importance of Social Ties - Date : 2008-07-06I’d like to take some time to discuss the importance of strong social ties. It has long been considered that close friends and family can help mitigate the impact of stress or other negative influences in a person’s life and there is a lot of good scientific evidence to support this commonly-held belief.One study from a couple of years ago that I found particularly interesting examined the effect of holding onto a loved one’s hand in reducing feelings of stress. It was carried out with the aid of magnetic resonance imaging technology as well as the written personal responses of the participants. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technology, commonly called brain imaging or brain scanning, is a way of taking “photographs” of which areas of the brain are activated at any given time, and it is one of the central tools of modern studies focusing on brain activity. Where possible, such as in this study, the participant is often asked to provide written or verbal responses about how they are feeling at a given moment, so that this additional layer of information can be put together with the results of the scan (hopefully in support of the scan’s results). In this study the researchers found sixteen married couples in and around the greater Madison, Wisconsin area. They specifically screened for men and women who were involved in strong, committed relationships with the use of a standardized test called the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, or DAS (dyadic meaning “pertaining to a couple”). The Dyadic Adjustment Scale is 32 item measure of relationship adjustment. The scale has good reliability and has been used in many research studies with a wide variety of couples (married, co-habitating, homosexual, divorced). So all couples used in this study were in what can be considered better-than-average marriages, at least as far as such tests can indicate. (There is an interesting point about this later). The couples were brought into the lab and the wife of each couple was connected to the brain scanning equipment and asked to look at a screen where different symbols were shown randomly, over and over again. One of the symbols, a “threat” symbol, was periodically displayed to signal a 20% chance that the subject would receive a small electric shock to her ankle. Each woman went through three sets of this stressful procedure, in one case while holding the hand of her spouse, in another case holding the hand of an anonymous male stranger whom she could not see (on the other side of a board or curtain), and in the third set there was no one immediately present to comfort her. During this whole time her brain was being scanned with fMRI and, in between symbol presentations, she was also filling out a questionnaire about her personal feelings at the time. As expected, when shown the threat symbol, areas of the subject’s brain associated with pain, discomfort, and nervousness became activated, as did areas of the brain linked to physical stress reactions (the tensing of muscles, for instance). The written responses given by the participants mostly said that they felt much more relaxed with their spouse, but didn’t feel that much comforted by the stranger. This is really interesting when compared with the results of the brain scan, which showed that in fact although holding the hand of either the spouse or the stranger both had an affect on reducing activation in the parts of the brain associated with physical stress responses, only the spouse’s presence made a significant reduction in key parts of the brain that regulate negative emotional response. Most interestingly, the higher the DAS score, the more pronounced the stress-buffering effect of the husband’s presence, indicating a real and observable benefit of strong marital relationships on emotional health and stress response in the brain. This is just one study in a large literature showing that all manner of strong, positive relationships and friendships, not only marriage, can have a positive impact on your handling of stress. The full study, “Lending a Hand: Social Regulation of the Neural Response to Threat” by James A. Coan, Hillary S. Schaefer, and Richard J. Davidson, can be found on the researchers’ website here (Adobe Acrobat required) Click here to download the PDF article |
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