Stress & Friendship: Could this be why women live longer?

[RisiaSkye]

Recent research indicates that studies on the body's response to stress, more than 90% of which have been studies centered on men's bodies, have been missing something important.

Apparently, in women's bodies, stress invokes something besides the simple Fight/Flight reaction which has long been assumed to be the only biological response to stress or fear. Biochemically, it seems, women's bodies cope with stress by releasing Oxytocin, which Estrogen amplifies and Testosterone negates. The neurochemical actually encourages positive bonding experiences, nurturing and caretaking impulses, and other bodily calming behaviors. Check out the article below, which looks at the original UCLA study, and the follow-up Penn State work.

http://www.psu.edu/ur/2000/womenstress.html

 

[Cheyenne]

I admit I didn't take time to read the article, but it makes sense to me from what you said in your post.

At work, I've bonded with a few women that have worked with me now for years. We've been to hell and back together in a growth company. When times were the most stressful is when we'd lean on each other the most. I think that may also be why we seem to work as a team much better than men. Our goal was always to get through each crisis with everyone's sanity intact. Life has gotten easier the last year or so, but we still have the bond of shared history. A lot like here at Lit.

 

[MissTaken]

I read the article and it does make a lot of sense.

Women do tend to seek solace, find stress reducing activities i.e. hobbies etc and tend their children and loved ones when stressed.

"Tend and befriend"?

Hell, look at all the hug threads and solace threads that are predominantly perpetuated by women, regardless of the gender of the thread starter.

Something that occurred to me was some relief in having an explanation why "that infuriating male" will walk away from conflict and stressor, pissing me off as opposed to meeting in the middle, accepting hugs and nurturing from me.

How many times have we seen mean "shut us out" when stressed? Perhaps, here is a correlation?

 

[alexandraaah]

I too didn't read the article...but I will go back and do so.

I just wanted to add that the strongest bond among people is the female/female bond, usually it is even stronger than spousal relationships.

It seems this would serve to perpetuate the point made in your original post.


edited because i realized i posted an incomplete thought. coffee please.

 

[cymbidia]

Many of us have been through life-altering times with our women friends. We really do the "tend-and-befriend" behaviors when threatened and fearful, don't we? Men don't. They walk away. They ignore it. They don't bond over calamity as we do. It makes all the sense in the world that we're different in this way, biochemically, since we've evolved -women and men- in response to different cues. Men have faced big dangerous animals with their wits and spears; if they all huddled together, bonding, that animal would have killed them. We, on the other hand, had to discuss which of those plants would kill us, we had to sort and share and understand the burdens of childbirth and food preparation and clothing construction.

We had to evolve befriending needs during our evolution to survive.
They didn't.

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that there's a chemical basis for these different behaviors, should it? I tell you, the older i get, the more sure i am that we're just plain straight-out different species, women and men, locked together forever in some kinda symbiotic relationship.


From the article:
"This is the first new model to describe people's stress response patterns in more than 60 years and fills a gap in the stress response literature. Almost all the stress response studies in the past have been conducted on males and so, therefore, upheld fight-or-flight as the main response to stress."

This is interesting to me because so much of the bits of our daily lives is predicated on decades old studies of men's responses to common stimuli. For example and generally, women hear at slightly higher frequencies than do men. This isn't open for debate and is established scientific/medical fact.

In 1936, at the World's Fair in New York, a booth was set up in which volunteers were given audio signals at certain frequencies. They were to judge how loud those tone were with respect to other tones.

Example:
Tone #1 was 1 watt, 1 kilohertz while Tone #2 was 1 watt, 4 kilohertz. Most people percieve Tone #1 as "louder", always.

These researchers ended up with a "noise curve", a standard bell curve, that let them know the frequencies at which most people can hear.

Unfortunately, almost 100% of the participants in the original research done at the World's Fair was a man, and men and women hear at slightly different frequencies.

The 1936 study, on which all audio was based from then on (television, music, computer technology, everything that has an audio component) indicated that people hear most comfortably in the 20hertz to 20kilohertz range, when, in reality, it goes up to 28kilohertz for women.

What has this meant?

ALL pre-about-mid-90's CRT's, TV's, etc equipment, for example, had a pixel refresh rate of about 25 kilohertz. (Pixel refresh rate = how often the little pixels of color flicked on/off to refresh the picture. This is a visual thing, yes, but it carries an audio component cuz doing that, refreshing the pixels, makes a sound)

Therefore, most women heard those pixels refreshing as a constant irritating whine at the edges of our hearing. I don't know about you but i've been complaining to my father and then to my male partners forfuckingever that the TV drove me crazy with that buzz. Of course they, not able to hear the buzz, just thought i was bitching.

This problem has been fixed, of course, since the mid-90's but you can still hear it in older equipment. Well, if you want to.

Just an aside, and interesting, i thought, in light of Risia's dicussion of the diference in how we handle stress and oxytocin.

We're different species, women and men.
I'm just sure of it.

 

[Richard49]

Picking the wrong men?

I read the article and it does make a lot of sense.


Something that occurred to me was some relief in having an explanation why "that infuriating male" will walk away from conflict and stressor, pissing me off as opposed to meeting in the middle, accepting hugs and nurturing from me.

How many times have we seen mean "shut us out" when stressed? Perhaps, here is a correlation?

There is an expression "nice guys finish last"

I think this is true because women ... at lest a lot of them.....prefer to pick a guy that flights rather than discusses....
"my way or the highway type"

Richard

 

[Silverlily]

So how much of this is biology and how much is environment?

I grew up in a predominantly male world. When I am stressed, I withdrawl. At that time, any attempts at nurturing feel like smothering. My mindset is basically I have enough going on, I don't need anyone adding anything. But, on the rare occasions I do turn to someone, the bonding that occurs is deeper.

I realise there are exceptions to every rule, but where do those exceptions come from?

 

[erosman]

interesting research

I find it fascinating to see the design of our human bodies. And I find Richard's remark regarding the last place finish of nice guys appropriate too. Maybe women really don't want to bond with the male. Maybe they just want to use him for reasons of security and provision. That's why a guy who is more relational isn't the first choice of 'tend and befriend' women, and conversely, 'tend and befriend' men end up with more agressive 'fight and flight' type of women. Survival instincts?
For me, I find the stereotyping of my gender always an interesting insight into social and cultural structures.

One last thought, if the oxytocin is related to lactation in the female, can one get a boost of this through nursing?

 

[RisiaSkye]

*bump* for the night crowd.

 

[MunchinMark]

As another point, men are designed all round to be under more stress. We have to compete with our fellow males and women now too, for our careers and sexual partners, personal power and social position. Men are naturally highly compettitive. We can turn almost anything into a competition.

At all stages of life, the mortality rate is higher for men than for women. Even in the womb a male embryo has less chance of making it.

Male bodies run at a slightly higher temperature than women, as I am quite sure you have noticed. Muscles work better at higher temperatures, so men are biologically 'primed' for action all the time. The higher energy costs impose more stress on our bodies.

Even our sex organs rely entirely on high blood pressure (albeit locally) to work.

Men are stressed. It goes with the territory (another word that is associated with competition).

 

[LukkyKnight]

Very plausible - I read the article a little while back, and forwarded it to some friends. I can think of plenty of flippant reasons, too, but I like the research in this case.

 

[freescorfr]

This link is from Geordie land where serious work is being done on evolutionary psychology

http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/evolpsych.html