(ETX Daily Up) – Friends are a source of happiness and well-being, and synonymous with sharing, in good times and bad. These intimate relationships play an important role in mental health, but we are now learning that they could also have an impact on physical health. This is revealed by a group of international researchers, who establish a direct link between experiences in friendship or love and certain physiological changes.
Tell me if your closest social relationships bring you happiness, I’ll tell you if your blood pressure is high – or not. Although they have not succeeded in establishing an exact causal link between relational experiences and physiological effects, a team of international researchers has highlighted statistical associations between these two phenomena. To do this, they analyzed data from 4,005 people in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, who were subjected to daily checks via their smartphone or smartwatch. The goal? Provide data regarding their blood pressure, heart rate, stress and coping ability, combined with information about their experiences in friendship and love delivered every three days.
Published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, the result of their research, carried out between 2019 and 2021, suggests that a maximum of positive experiences in terms of social relations is associated with reduced stress, better coping skills, and better physiological functioning, such as blood pressure and heart rate responsiveness. And the opposite is also true, since negative relationship experiences were linked to elevated blood pressure, itself responsible for long-term health harms.
“It would be useful to examine other physiological states, such as neuroendocrine or nervous system responses, as outcomes of positive and negative daily relationship experiences, which could reveal different patterns of association,” says Brian Don, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Auckland, and lead author of the study, in a press release. It should be noted that the researchers specify that it is a question here of associations and not of a specific causal link.
According to the scientists, these results are particularly interesting in terms of the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic may have had – and still has – on social relations, and therefore a fortiori on physical health. Further studies are now needed to attempt to arrive at a more precise causal link between social interactions and physiology. A recent study published in the journal General Psychiatry also showed a link between the friendly circle and the development of long-term chronic diseases in women, testifying to a certain interest in this phenomenon on the part of the scientific sphere.