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There’s new evidence thatgetting along with others is more than a key to pleasant humaninteraction. It also appears

to be good for your health. Researchers who studied a survey of almost 700 older adults found thatthose who got along with their relatives, friends and neighbors were lesslikely to report health problems and physical limitations.The findings don’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship between sociallife and health. Still, “the take-home message is that conflict in yourlife may have important impacts on your physical health,” said study leadauthor Jason T. Newsom, associate professor at the Portland StateUniversity School of Community Health in Oregon.There’s nothing really new about a supposed link between attitude andhealth, but Newsom said his study was unique, because it lookedspecifically at interactions between people. Newsom and his colleagues looked at the results of a multi-yearnational survey of people aged 65 to 90. A total of 666 people completedthe survey, in which researchers asked them questions about their livesand their health.Many of the questions were designed to reveal whether the studyparticipants were prone to have “negative social interactions” with otherpeople, Newsom said. The questions asked whether “people have interferedor meddled in your personal matters, have they acted unsympathetically orbeen critical of you. We asked them in a very general way,” he said.The survey didn’t ask whether the participants were the instigators ofnegative encounters — by being crabby or cranky, for instance — or thevictims of others who made their lives difficult.The researchers found that those who reported more negative socialencounters suffered greater declines in health. “What we suspect is that there’s some impact on the immune system, butthere are other kinds of things that might be happening as well,” Newsomsaid. “It may be that when there’s a great deal of interpersonal conflictgoing on in someone’s life, they’re not able to take care of medicalconditions as well.”The findings were published in the journal HealthPsychology.The study authors noted that their research had limitations. It onlylooked at senior citizens and relied on their own estimates of theirhealth status instead of physical examinations, for one, and only examinedchanges over two years. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, director of the Ohio State University College ofMedicine’s Division of Health Psychology, said the new study came from “agroup of excellent investigators.” But, she added, she would like to haveseen more analysis of whether the study participants were depressed. “When people are blue, they tend to be overly sensitive to negativeinteractions, to feel that others are often unsympathetic — and then theybehave in ways that tend to elicit even more negative behaviors fromothers,” Kiecolt-Glaser said. “They’re cranky and critical andcantankerous. If you’re seeing the world through dark-colored glasses,you’re more likely to focus on how unsympathetic or insensitive otherpeople act toward you, and there’s a big element of self-fulfillingprophecy.”Newsom acknowledged that it’s no easy task to make people get alongbetter. But, he said, studies have shown that one approach –conflict-resolution training — actually works. To learn more about conflict-resolution training, visit the University of Wisconsin.

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