Friendship

Lydia Denworth (2020).?Friendship: The evolution, biology, and extraordinary power of life’s fundamental bond.?W.W. Norton & Company

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2-4?Lauren Brent … monkeys … macaques … What … are friends really for?

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4-5?We may be separate beings, but we are deeply bound … Our personal webs of connection include our family members, our romantic partners, and our friends.?

??Of these, three categories, the first two have been closely examined and much has been written about them … Yet by comparison … science has historically given friendship short shrift … Most of us are as guilty as scientists of failing to take friendship as seriously as it deserves

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6?more socially integrated people live longer than those who are less well connected

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6?friends are one of the great pleasures of life … But … There are biological and evolutionary foundations to friendships

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6?quality rather than quantity of relationships

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6?loneliness … is as deadly as cigarette smoking or obesity

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7?“As we think deeply about what friendships are, we’re starting to find them in other species,” Brent says

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7?Anthropomorphism, the sin of imputing human intentions and ideas to nonhuman creatures … Frans de Waal … anthropodenial … an unwillingness to believe in the extent of other species’ demonstrated capabilities

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7?neuroscientists can predict how likely … people are to be friends … our blood pressure and immune cells are strongly affected by how much we like the people with whom we spend our time

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8?we are social creatures

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8?The best friendships invite vulnerability

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13?monkeys … A male named Chester … strategy … Be good to females and they’ll be good to you.?Strong female allies help a male move up in rank in a group.?Other males … take a more aggressive approach, fighting their way up the hierarchy

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16?To ask why friendship works rather than how is to contemplate something more ancient and fundamental … Biologists speak of these two explanations – how and why – as proximate and ultimate causes for behavior.?They’re complementary

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16?This book considers the visible and the invisible aspects of friendship

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16?social connection is rapidly becoming an issue of public health

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17?evolutionary history … cooperation has been as essential as competition in creating who we are today

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19?friendship is not a choice or a luxury; it’s a necessity that is critical to our ability to succeed and thrive

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20-22?February 1954 … John Bowlby … Robert Hinde … the modern science of friendship has its roots in a friendship … To appreciate friendship, you must first appreciate relationships … Together these two ushered in a new way of thinking about the importance and evolutionary adaptiveness of connections between individuals.?Attachment … did not just matter for babies.?It also helped to explain the essential nature of friendship for people of all ages

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24?Aristotle … “a friend is another self.”

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24?Adam Smith … was one of the first to recognize empathy

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24-25?end of the nineteenth century … William James … recognized that social connection was not always nurtured as it should be

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25?In the same era … émile Durkheim … one of the first people to connect the bonds of friendship explicitly to mental health

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28?Ethology … Niko Tinbergen … four questions … two questions for how and two for why … are the basis of today’s new investigations of friendship

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29?[Robert] Hinde … arrived at a definition that considered a relationship – including those between friends – the result of repeated interactions between two individuals, each interaction building upon the last

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30?Harry Harlow … “If monkeys have taught us anything … it’s that you’ve got to learn to love before you learn how to live.”

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30 ?[John] Bowlby … Being loved matters

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33?“Where the experimental biologist predicts the outcome of experiments, the evolutionary biologist retrodicts the experiment already performed by Nature; he teases science out of history,” [Ed] Wilson

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34?[Stuart] Altmann … “… ants and primates, two groups of organisms that have the most complex social systems in the animal kingdom …”

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40?1966 … George Williams … “… an individual who maximizes his friendships and minimizes his antagonisms will have an evolutionary advantage …”

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41?Richard Dawkins … 1976 book The Selfish Gene … idea that genes rather than whole organisms could be the vehicle for natural selection

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43?To make a friend and then to be a friend is a complex undertaking

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44?The particular bond between mothers and babies is the special province of mammals, and it likely evolved as early as 225 million years ago

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44?humans extend childhood far longer than any other species … human babies arrive in the world a little underdone … some pediatricians call the first three months of life the “fourth trimester.” … To be able to walk upright on two legs, the pelvises of human females narrowed.?Forty or so weeks of pregnancy produce a baby that’s at the upper limits of what a woman can pass through her birth canal

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46?the “social brain,” … “Social cognition, the business of being able to see, understand, interact with and think about other people is a huge part of what our minds and brains and our fundamental natures are all about,” … Nancy Kanwisher

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48?functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)

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50?Babies come into the world seeing through a fog … They also have no depth perception

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50?What’s in a face??Quite a lot.?They matter more than any other visual stimulus you see in the human environment

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51?six emotions are present at birth: fear, joy, disgust, surprise, sadness, and interest … children start to develop secondary emotions that depend on social interaction … pride, shame, guilt, jealousy, and embarrassment.?All show up on the face

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53?Kanwisher … made her name identifying a part of the brain called the fusiform face area … prosopagnosia, the loss of the ability to recognize faces

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55?across the first thousand days of life, there is a steady and robust process of neural specialization in the finer points of being social … Voices are as critical as faces

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56?of all the senses, touch is the most developed in a newborn

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57?a variety of nerve fibers and sensory receptors … One class of fiber, A-beta … sheathed in a fatty insulation called myelin … conduct the nervous system’s electrical messages rapidly … C fibers … are unmyelinated and carry information at a much more leisurely pace … there is one subset of C fibers that appears to be essential for our social lives.?Called C-tactile (CT) afferents

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60-61?theory of mind … is the landmark social development of the toddler years that allows young children to have friends.?

????Theory of mind falls under the larger umbrella of empathy

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61?empathy has three main components.?Emotional empathy … Cognitive empathy … And empathic concern, or compassion … Taken together, these components are fundamental elements of our social lives

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67-68?Beginning in 1948 … Framingham Heart Study … introduced the … term, “risk factor.”

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72-73?[Jim] House … social isolation roughly doubled the risk of mortality … House and his colleagues Debra Umberson and Karl Landis … 1988 … “These developments suggest that social relationships, or the relative lack thereof, constitute a major risk factor for health – rivaling the effects of well-established health risk factors such as cigarette smoking, blood pressure, blood lipids, obesity, and physical activity.”

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74?2010 … Julianne Holt-Lunstad … found a 50 percent increased likelihood of survival for those with stronger social relationships

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75?Gary Berntson … “… social status.?That’s where most of our stress comes from.”

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76?“Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty,” Mother Teresa

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77?loneliness … Statistics

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78?Louise Hawkley … “… we are bred to connectedness, we are bred in connectedness, that we cannot avoid it and that to the extent we have those needs thwarted we are going to pay the price.”

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78?physical isolation and emotional isolation are not the same thing … Paul Tillich … ‘loneliness’ … ‘solitude’ ... [John] Cacioppo… Loneliness is how you feel about your social life

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79-80?total peripheral resistance (TPR), one of the primary determinants of blood pressure … TPR was considerably higher in the lonelier students … Lonely older people had significantly higher blood pressure than those who were less lonely

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82-83?The diversity of your social world … proved protective.?Those with more types of social ties were less susceptible to common colds

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83-84?Michael Marmot found that social status was strongly correlated with health … “Autonomy … and the opportunities you have for full social engagement and participating are crucial for health, well-being, and longevity,” … 2004 book The Status Syndrome

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84?Bert Uchino … people who perceive high support in their lives showed less cardiovascular aging than people who didn’t … “They had blood pressure that was pretty close to someone who was 30 or 40 years younger,” … cellular aging.?Each time a cell replenishes itself, the protective caps on the ends of each DNA strand, called telomeres, shorten … biological age as opposed to chronological age.?In people with good relationships, telomeres were longer

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85?George Burns … “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”

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86?ambivalent relationships are bad for us

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86?the perception of support is more helpful than actually receiving support

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87?everything psychological is biological

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89?Cacioppo … [Steve] Cole … the effects of loneliness on human gene expression … In the loneliest people, genes that governed inflammatory responses were up-regulated, or more likely to be expressed, and those that handled antiviral responses were down-regulated or less likely

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94?five personality factors … openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism

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94?young children … Playing … is … how they need to spend most of their time for developmental reasons … “Play is a profound biological process,” … Stuart Brown

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95?Bob Fagen … bears that played the most, survived longest

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96?play … is vital

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96?Brown … prisoners on death row in Texas … in their childhoods … There was a notable absence of play

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96?[Jaak] Panksepp … named play as one of the seven primal emotions

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96-97?Marian Diamond … 1960s … Access to play stimulated brain development

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97?John Byers … play is most prevalent among species with big brains

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98-99?“Middle school is about lunch.” … it is the time in the day when these preteens have the most agency

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99?Denis Estimon … cofounded a club called We Dine Together … Club members spend the lunch hour wandering the cafeteria and courtyard of their … school in search of anyone eating alone.?Then they sit down with their own lunch and chat

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102?[Jaana] Juvonen … children with at least one other friend are less likely to get victimized or bullied

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102?adolescence is marked by experimentation and exploration, by risk taking and impulsivity

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107-108?Laurence Steinberg … A teenage driver who has other teenagers in the car is four times more likely to crash than one who is alone … Teenagers are more likely to commit crimes when they’re together.?Adults tend to be alone when they break the law … “peer effect.”

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110?adolescence … Instead of calling the phenomenon peer pressure, they began calling it “peer presence.”

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110?teenagers learn faster when they’re with their peers than they do by themselves

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118?Seven million years separate humans from the common ancestor we share with our closest relatives: chimpanzees and bonobos

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118-119?1976 … Nicholas Humphrey … argued that creatures are only as intelligent as their environments demand … “I propose that the chief role of creative intellect is to hold society together.”

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121-124?1993.?Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary … “Human beings … have a pervasive drive to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of lasting, positive, and significant relationships.” … Belonging … the “need to belong” theory … Their paper was published in 1995

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124-125?Shelley Taylor … 1998 … someone pointed out that the researcher they’d been listening to, as well as other animal researchers, only studied male rats … Fight-or-flight was not the only stress response … also “tend and befriend.” … The tending instinct is every bit as tenacious as our more aggressive, selfish side …”

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126?[Jeanne] Altmann … focal sampling … Focal sampling would ultimately allow the valid measurement of social bonds in a way never before possible

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128?[Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy] Cheney … “… social structure … It became clear that all the action was with the females.” … considerable brain power is devoted to thinking about relationships … each individual must predict the behavior of others and form those relationships that return the greatest benefit … in 1986 … Together with Barbara Smuts … social relationships and social cognition appeared to contribute to evolutionary success … “friendship”

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134?monkeys … [Joan] Silk … Having more and better “friends” was significantly related to reproductive success.?Furthermore, strong social bonds mattered more than rank … Logically, if natural selection has favored the ability to form friendships, then three things must be true: friendships must increase reproductive success, individuals must seek out friends (or try to), and they must have the kind of social intelligence necessary to select the best partners

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135?primatologists found that the quality of a relationship mattered most … Silk, Seyfarth, and Cheney … 2010 … females that had strong social bonds didn’t just have more babies, they lived longer themselves

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136?“There’s growing evidence that what natural selection is favoring is the formation of strong social bonds,” Seyfarth says … what kind of bond is required.?It must be strong, stable, and relatively equitable.?“That’s what friendship is: a long-term, positive relationship that involves cooperation.”

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137?the servicing of mutual social needs leaves you both better off.?And that’s the point of friendship

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139?At its best, friendship makes you feel valued and supported

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141?The thirties … are sometimes described as the decade where friendship goes to die, killed off by marriage, children, jobs, relocating … By the forties … we still don’t prioritize friends

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143-144?senior citizens … 1980s … Sarah Matthews … recognized three distinct styles of friendship: independent, discerning, and acquisitive … the discerning friendship was most common … based on … WEIRD societies … Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic

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144?the Passenger’s Dilemma

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148?“In adulthood spouses are the most important adult relationship,” says Bert Uchino … This is especially true for men, who tend to focus more of their emotional life on their wives and let other friendships fall away.?Women are more likely to maintain or develop other close relationships in addition to a spouse

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149?adage: “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.”

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151?Two essential ideas underlie social network analysis: connection and contagion … Connection and contagion equal the structure and function of a social network

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153?[Nicholas] Christakis and [James] Fowler … Framingham Heart Study … The happiest people were those with the most social connections … happiness is slightly more contagious than unhappiness

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153?1973, Mark Granovetter … “the strength of weak ties.”

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156?[Mario Luis Small]?“The people who are really in trouble are … the people who are not running into anybody on a regular basis.”

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157?Jeff Hall … “We cultivate the complexity of our friendships,”

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158?a set of thirty-six questions … 1990s … Arthur Aron

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160?we are each faced with a major constraint when it comes to friendship: time

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160?What made people happiest was to be with both spouse and friends

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162?[Jeff Hall]?It isn’t enough to want friendships.?“You have to spend time investing in people … It’s important to keep it in mind as a priority …”

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164?[2010 … Tanja Hollander] project … “Are You Really My Friend?”

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166?For every study that finds a rise in loneliness, there is another showing an increase in connection

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167?Jeff Hancock … “Using social media …” … the overall effect on well-being … was “essentially zero,”

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169-170?“For older people, social media is a real avenue of connection, of relational well-being,”

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173?The flip side of friendship … is loneliness

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174?Digital technology may expand our networks, but it also disrupts more private moments

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174?Phones interfere with the connection between parents and very young children

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178?Teenagers send an average of sixty texts a day

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180?Be careful what you wish for

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185?epigenetics

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188?a short glossary of the terms of social network analysis.?“Centrality” … “Strength” … “Eigenvector centrality” … “Transitivity” … “Degree”

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188-189?Genetic factors accounted for nearly half of the variation in … how many friends people have … genetics also explained about the same amount of variation in transitivity – the probability that a person’s friends are friends with one another … 29 percent of a person’s centrality … can also be explained by genes … 2011 … Friends … resembled one another on a genotypic level

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190?Michael Platt … “What could be more interesting or compelling than understanding how our brains and bodies come together to form relationships – friendships, alliances, lovers, enemies, societies?”

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199?[John] Capitanio … Two animals are friends … if they hang out together happily, without conflict or aggression, more often than chance would predict

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199?Rhesus macaques and humans diverged about twenty-three million years ago

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200 Capitanio … “Different species, different scientists, different methodologies, but what do you know, social integration seems to be good for your health.”

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202-204?[Steve] Cole and Capitanio … It looked like they had uncovered at least one of the biological mechanisms that converts stress to disease … inflammation is like a generic fertilizer for just about every disease that afflicts us … which causes us to shut down our viral response and ramp up our defenses against bacteria in the face of stress … But today, in an era of chronic disease like metastatic cancer and heart disease, it’s the opposite of what we would wish for … “What we’ve learned about genes is mostly that your genetics matter not because they determine for sure what you’re going to be like but because they change your sensitivity to environmental influences, “… our social environment is just as critical an element as the physical environment … monkeys that seemed to yearn for more connection … there were clear signs of … immune system dysregulation.?Inflammatory genes were up-regulated and viral protection was down-regulated

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204-205?Greg Miller … older women caring for husbands dying of brain cancer … “… the signature of inflammation being up-regulated … and antiviral response being down-regulated …”

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205?conserved transcriptional response to adversity (CTRA) … Cole … “… loneliness … poverty, trauma, bereavement … Loneliness is one of the most effective ways we know to make a body feel threatened and insecure.”

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209?(medial temporal lobes, fusiform gyrus) … (superior temporal sulcus [STS], temporoparietal junction [TPJ], anterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex) … (ventromedial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, ventral striatum) … (dopaminergic midbrain, striatum, anterior cingulate cortex [ACC], and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex)

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210?Edith Wharton once said: “There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul.”

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215?[Michael] Platt … Primates are very visual creatures … “One of the first things that seems to fall apart in autism is attention to others …”

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216?[Wei Song] Ong and Platt … cooperation activated cells in a brain region linked to strategic thinking

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217?the happiness hormones: oxytocin, endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin … (surges in oxytocin bring on both labor and lactation)

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219-220?There appears to be a sweet spot for oxytocin levels.?It is possible for the brain to be overwhelmed … by oxytocin … In certain professions, such as medicine and law enforcement where exposure to human suffering can be constant, too much personal distress gets in the way of doing the job.?Physicians, for example, suffer from excessive burnout and are at higher risk than others for death by suicide … In our good friendships, however, the levels of oxytocin, endorphins, and the other happiness hormones seem to be calibrated just about right

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222?similarity has been recognized as a hallmark of friendship since at least the Ancient Greeks … indeed, people are more likely to befriend others of the same gender, age, ethnicity, and so on

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224?What comes first??Are friends with similar brain patterns drawn to each other??Or do their neural responses change because they’re friends and spend time together??So far, we don’t know

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225?Emma Templeton … conversations rated more fun by the speakers are marked by rapid turn-taking

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226?Joy Hirsch … “If you are looking at a real face, the really neat thing that happens is that elements of language system are activated,”

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230-231?she joined a program called Generation Xchange, which brings her into … an elementary school … the brainchild of … Teresa Seeman … the program is intended to get older adults out and moving.?It targets cholesterol and blood pressure, weight loss, and increased mobility.?As an intervention for loneliness, it is designed to foster connections and build friendships

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233?For those under sixty, marital status had the most significant effect.?In other words, being unmarried in midlife put people at greater risk of dying earlier than they otherwise might have been … For those who were over sixty, close ties with friends and relatives mattered more than having a spouse … And you can keep making new friends throughout your life

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238?while loneliness and other forms of adversity increase susceptibility to inflammation and viral infection, social integration and feeling fulfilled seem to have the opposite effect, improving the immune system’s ability to fight off those ills … Being part of Generation Xchange has improved these older adults’ health right down to the level of their genes … The friendships appear to be a critical piece of the program but … they are engaged in a meaningful endeavor designed to bring them together with a shared goal

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239?For most of us, life actually improves after the age of fifty.?“The most surprising thing is that age tends to work in favor of happiness, other things being equal,” Jonathan Rauch, author of The Happiness Curve told the Guardian

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240?Laura Carstensen … 1990s … while social networks do get smaller as we age, that narrowing is in large part intentional.?People choose to spend time with those they really care about: they choose quality over quantity

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241?[Julia] Fischer … “Hug each other more.”

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242?loneliness … is the mismatch between what people want and what they get, socially

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243?2017, William Chopik … valuing friendships became increasingly important with age

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243?In the United Kingdom, there is even now a Minister of Loneliness!

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244?Julianne Holt-Lunstad … whose 2010 meta-analysis … revealed the critical fact that social connection decreased risk of mortality by 50 percent

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246?[Lisa] Berkman and [Teresa] Seeman … found that geographic proximity to close friends and family is what really matters

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248?[Joan] DelFattore … “study after study reported significant differences in treatment between married and unmarried patients,”

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248?We must make friendship a priority and factor it in to the way we plan our time – and our children’s time … choose friendship – embrace it, invest in it, work at it.?Put time and attention into building quality relationships

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250?2008 … George Vaillant … “… the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

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250?Robert Waldinger … 2015 … “… Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.?Period.” … three main lessons.?First, that social connections are really good for us and that loneliness kills … The second lesson is that quality matters as much or more than quantity … The third lesson is that good relationships don’t just protect our bodies, they protect our brains

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251?“Relationships are messy and complicated …” … put in the time?