Psy - Stress Can Be Reduced In This Loving Manner

Psy - Stress Can Be Reduced In This Loving Manner

How people can reduce stress by sharing it with each other.

Both emotional and physical closeness to loved ones can reduce stress, a new study finds.

Holding hands with a loved one, as well as being close by, both reduce stress.

In the study 66 adolescent girls had to give a spontaneous speech.

Sometimes their mother’s held their hand and other times not.

The psychologists wanted to see what the effect of emotional and physical closeness had on stress levels.

Ms Jessica Lougheed, the study’s first author, said:

“We wanted to test a new evolutionary theory in psychology called Social Baseline Theory which suggests that humans adapted to be close to other humans.

The idea is that individuals function at a relative deficit when they are farther away from people they trust.”

Researchers found the girls managed the stress better when their mothers held their hand.

Girls who felt emotionally closer to their mothers also coped better with the stress.

Ms Lougheed said:

“Our results suggest that we are better equipped to overcome challenging situations when we are closer — either physically or in terms of how we feel in our relationships — to people we trust.”

For mothers, though, the story was different:

“We were somewhat surprised to find that mothers’ stress did not vary by physical closeness — after all, it can be stressful for parents to watch their children perform, but being able to offer physical comfort might have lessened the mothers’ stress.

Thus, emotional load sharing in this context was not a function of the mothers’ stress level, and we expect that it occurred instead through the daughters’ perceptions of how stressful it was to give a speech.

That is, higher physical and/or relationship closeness helped the daughters feel like they could overcome the challenging situation.”