UCLA Study on Friendship Among Women

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Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 04:49:17 GMT

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

Cousin Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of

Bio-behavioral 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

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 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

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

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

confidantes was as detrimental to your health as

smoking or carrying extra

weight!

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.