Social friction tied to inflammation
Negative interactions with others or stressful competition for another’s attention may have biological effects
By Nathan Seppa
Competing in vain for the attention of someone special or fretting over a mid-term exam may not be healthy. Such stress seems to boost a person’s supply of two proteins that cause inflammation, researchers report January 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
These inflammatory triggers have been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer and depression. The new results add to a growing body of research that links social stress with biological risks.
“We wanted to see how mental states such as optimism, or social relationships such as competition, get under the skin,” says study coauthor Shelley Taylor, a social neuroscientist at the UCLA School of Medicine. She and her colleagues looked at the relationship between day-to-day stress and two proteins that trigger inflammation in the body, called pro-inflammatory cytokines.
The researchers asked 122 young, healthy adults to keep a diary of all positive and negative social interactions for eight days, as well as descriptions of any incidents that involved competition. “We picked young adults with no history of heart disease or inflammation disorders or depression [because] we wanted to look at the biological processes in a population that was healthy,” Taylor says.