Research on women's friendship: A very healing experience

Research on women's friendship: A very healing experience

Female responses to stress: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-
flight. Psychological Review.
Taylor, S.E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B.P., Gruenewald, T.L., Gurung,
R.A.R., & Updegraff, J.A. (2000)
University of California, Los Angeles
107 (3), 411-429

Julia Suryakusuma
Contributor
Jakarta

Friendships among 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. But 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 finding 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 Cousino Klein, Ph.D., now an
assistant professor of biobehavioral health at Pennsylvania State
University in State College 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 researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral
repertoire than just fight or flight. In fact, says Klein, it
seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the
stress response 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 Klein,
because testosterone, which men produce in high levels when they
are 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 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 percent 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, 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 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 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 six-month
period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a
nine-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60 percent.
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 a close friend or confidante 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 impairment 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 is a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen
Josselson, Ph.D., coauthor 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
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."