A recent meta-analytic study looking at the effects of social relationships on health among some 308,000 participants found that self-reports of feeling socially integrated among, and connected to, other people (not merely living with them or being married to them) significantly predicted mortality. Perhaps most interestingly, the degree to which social connectedness predicted mortality in this analysis was equal to (or greater than) the degree to which obesity, diet, smoker status, and physical inactivity have predicted mortality in other investigations. Maybe primary care physicians ought to measures of social integration to their assessment procedures for patients, and take a more holistic view of “health risks,” eh? Read more at PLOSmedicine…
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Psychology
Researchers recently examined how young, middle-aged, and older adults emotionally react while watching films designed to elicit sadness, disgust, and neutral reactions. The researchers assessed participants’ physiological responding (e.g., heart rate reactivity, sweat responses on the fingers) while the participants watched the films, and collected participants’ self-reports of their emotional experiences after the films. Older adults reported greater sadness in response to all films and demonstrated larger physiological responses (e.g., increased heart rate reactivity, larger sweat responses) to the sadness film than did middle-aged and younger participants. These differences held after accounting for self-reported sadness prior to viewing films and self-reported personal experiences of loss. In sum, data suggested that reactivity to sadness increases with age. Read more in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience…