Bad Relationship = Bad Heart?
Posted by Brian Tyler on October 28th, 2007 |
Romantic relationships can fill you with happiness, but these same relationships can also be a significant source of stress in daily life. The results of a new study, recently published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, suggest that relationship difficulties can quite literally break your heart.
In examining data from a long-term cohort study of British civil servants, the authors find that negative interactions in close relationships increase risk for incident coronary heart disease. This relationship exists even when controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, biological and psychosocial factors, and health-related behaviors. The results suggest that negative interactions are more likely to occur in women and lower-income civil servants; however, negative interactions produce similar effects on heart disease regardless of sex or social position.
Does this interaction seem to you like a human universal, a product of our shared evolutionary heritage? Or is this more likely the product of Western society? In light of your recent readings on the interaction of stress, human biology, and culture, how might we examine Western notions of romantic love and the meaning of negative interactions in a cross-cultural comparison to explore these questions?
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3 Responses
That stress in social interactions /can/ be associated with negative biological outcomes (e.g. clogged arteries), assuming that the relationship is not spurious, seems to me a fairly obvious human universal, though a (causal) biomechanism would need to be identified and tested in a variety of settings for that claim to have any scientific worth.
That British civil servants are likely to be exposed to particular social stresses, to exhibit learned, patterned responses to them with iterative consequences on subsequent interactions, and to attribute significance (consciously or not) to certain aspects of those interactions –and thus ‘experience’ social interaction like British civil servants– seems an obvious cultural product with potential biological consequences vis-a-vis our hypothetical biomechanism.
A cross-cultural comparison of the relationship between social stress (in mate interaction) and cardiovascular health might focus on the relative importance and structure of social ties between mates (do mates cohabitate as a more-or-less independent economic unit? do they live together with kin? do they not live together or interact much at all?), the existence and access of other means of social support, and coronary outcomes (e.g. heart attacks, blood pressure), controlling for as many other factors known to influence those outcomes as possible (diet, level of activity, climate, etc.).
Based on my own understanding of the structure of social relationships in industrialized America as compared to those of the pre-capitalist or non-capitalist world I would say with fair confidence that we tend to invest relatively large quantities of time and resources in mate relationships and thus experience more negative consequences when they go badly — and that is testable.
Since the concept of love is an entirely western concept, I was very intrigued about this particular experiment that was conducted to obtain the results of bad relationship = bad heart. From what I have seen and experienced myself, we as a society, an industrialized western society in comparison to non western/industrial societies invest a lot more time, energy and resources in relationships. Thus it’s not surprising that we experience more negative consequences (bad heart) when things go sour in our relationships. But this is not to say that anyone who is going through a bad relationship or in a bad relationship all experience the same thing. One has to take into account the relationship between social stresses brought upon by relationships and heart problems through looking at other factors such as socioeconomic factors, diet, genetics, and climate, do they live together, and are they economically dependent upon each other and so on. And according to the study all this was looked at too and it still showed this relationship persisted even when controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, biological and psychosocial factors, and health-related behaviors. This I find very interesting and leads me to think that this interaction is a human universal, a product of our shared evolutionary heritage.
I agree with meena when she says that this interaction is a human universal, and a product of our shared evolutionary heritage. It is know that any kind of stress affects the body and affects everyone, though it might affect people differently. We as a society do invest alot of time, energy , and resources into relationships. It can even be seen on all these tv shows, like flavor of love, the bachelor, I love new york etc. They are all investing all this time and eneergy into finding “the one” Then when things dont pan out the way they want or expect they are all left heartbroken and sad. I do feel it is possible to get a bad heart from these kind of experiences and stress. I even feel that if the event is stressfull enough and too much for the person to handle, it could probably cause a heart attack. But going back, the fact that they did the experiment taking all of these factors into consideration and effects were still seen in people, this shows that this interaction is a human universal because everyone was still effected.