Been meaning to point to this NY Times article from a couple of weeks ago about new discoveries they're making into how supportive relationships can affect us physically.
A positive example:
"Physical suffering aside, a healing presence can relieve emotional suffering. A case in point is a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of women awaiting an electric shock. When the women endured their apprehension alone, activity in neural regions that incite stress hormones and anxiety was heightened. As James A. Coan reported last year in an article in Psychophysiology, when a stranger held the subject’s hand as she waited, she found little relief. When her husband held her hand, she not only felt calm, but her brain circuitry quieted, revealing the biology of emotional rescue."An alternate negative example:
"But as all too many people with severe chronic diseases know, loved ones can disappear, leaving them to bear their difficulties in lonely isolation. Social rejection activates the very zones of the brain that generate, among other things, the sting of physical pain. Matthew D. Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberg of U.C.L.A. (writing in a chapter in “Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About People,” M.I.T. Press, 2005) have proposed that the brain’s pain centers may have taken on a hypersensitivity to social banishment because exclusion was a death sentence in human prehistory. They note that in many languages the words that describe a “broken heart” from rejection borrow the lexicon of physical hurt.So when the people who care about a patient fail to show up, it may be a double blow: the pain of rejection and the deprivation of the benefits of loving contact. Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon University who studies the effects of personal connections on health, emphasizes that a hospital patient’s family and friends help just by visiting, whether or not they quite know what to say."
But seriously, does any of this surprise you? Don't get me wrong, though, I think it's very cool that they're discovering actual physical evidence. (Described thusly: "The most significant finding was the discovery of “mirror neurons,” a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person.")
I'm just not surprised by it.
Here's the little twist I immediately thought of: People are always saying they believe one's own attitude can have a lot to do with how well or how sick we are. This always has the risk of taking on a blame-the-victim undertone. In other words: If you only had a better attitude. yo wouldn't die from cancer. Which can't be helpful.
With this new scientific validation of how our loved ones and their emotional states can benefit us if we're sick we can move straight on over to blaming our loved ones! If you had only done a better job of tending to me and had a better emotional state...then I would be better!
Mwa-ha-ha.
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