Being Social & Healthy
Cohen, Brissette, Skoner, and Doyle provide interesting research for the idea that one's social network can affect one's health. Their research supports the existing theories associated with the idea that "occupying diverse social roles is beneficial to health" (p.10).
One idea that I found interesting in this article was the notion of "role strain" and how it can actually be beneficial for our psychological well-being (p.3). As we take on different roles in our lives, we are faced with obligations associated with those roles, and this can create both role conflict and role overload. However, the benefits of this "burden" far outweigh the costs since "role accumulation is more gratifying than stressing" (p.3). This idea made sense to me and caused me to pause and think about how this might relate to why medical schools are looking for such well-rounded candidates. A well-rounded person is someone who participates in many activities, therefore having many roles and obligations and in turn also having experienced stress associated with those roles. This exposure to stress is important to the future physician and gives him the experience he may need to handle stress in the future when someone's life is on the line. I've always wondered why it matters so much that these future physicians have these extra-curricular activities, but taking the concept of "role strain" into consideration, it makes a lot more sense.
Cohen et. al. also discuss how having social roles give people a sense of their identity and purpose in life, and also helps to impose behavioral expectations on people making, their behavior less deviant and more predictable (p.3). These are interesting insights and further add to the idea that having multiple social roles may increase an individual’s health.
Although it seems quite counter-intuitive to think that being around more people would make one more healthy, the authors make a clear distinction between an increase in risk of upper respiratory infection and an increase in resistance to these infections. In their study they are only interested in the latter (p.4)
I found it interesting that they could get enough people to actually sign up for this study, knowing they would be subjected to a virus. Although they mention possible flaws to the experiment (such as measuring the baseline at the beginning of quarantine when they might already be stressed - p.10) and various limitations to the experiment, they don't mention what type of incentive they gave to these people to get them to enroll in the study. What kind of effect, if any, would a payment incentive have on this experiment? What kind of people would they then be recruiting? Would these people be "risk takers" and how may this thwart their results?
Because neither of their proposed pathways predicted their results, they offered an alternative pathway of personality to consider (p.8-9). Why do you think that introversion-extraversion is associated with susceptibility to colds? Do you think it's more likely to be a cause or an effect?
Dickens et. al.'s article was rather depressing to read. The two main findings of the study are as follows:
1.) No association was found between "depression before MI and subsequent mortality or cardiac events" (p.521).
2.) "Having a close confidant approximately halved the risk of having a subsequent cardiac event, even after controlling for demographic and coronary risk factors, severity of MI, and discharge medication" (p.521).
In this study the researchers defined "social support" as whether or not a patient had a close confidant (regular contact with another person at least once a month and someone "with whom he or she could share sensitive personal information and gain support") (p.519). They also had patients complete a HADS questionnaire "to reflect the mental state in the week before the MI" (p.519). My question is, how did they know when the patient was going to have an MI? Maybe I'm just not understanding the way this study was conducted, but this doesn't quite make sense to me.
What I found interesting about the results was the fact that although "patients without a close confidant were more likely to be presenting with their second or subsequent MI... they did not have more severe index MIs" (p.520-521). This was really amazing to me especially considering the three criteria they used to assess the severity of the index MI (p.518).
I really liked how the authors noted the possible flaws to the experiment (a recall bias of the depression and the MI, and only including those who survived their MI until the time of the assessment - p.521), and also talked about what they would've done differently (measured depression one we after the MI to compare - p.521). These are important things to discuss for future experiments' sake and also for interpreting this experiment's findings.
Bearman, Moody, and Sovel examine the structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks using kids from an almost all-white high school in Jefferson City. Since it is the only public high school in the town, it is easier to study the entire network under these isolating conditions (p.53). They talk about different mixing methods, broadly categorized into random and nonrandom, and decide that partner-selection processes do play a role in their study. People "often prefer contact with those who are similar to themselves with respect to race, religiosity, sexual preference, activity level, and so on” (p.47-48). Later they discuss homophily more, noting that in their study homophily "does not extend to all characteristics, most obviously sex and age” (p.69). Basically what they mean here is that girls date boys and boys date girls and also that girls tend to date older boys and vice versa.
Although different models are discussed, the network structure they discover most "closely approximates a spanning tree" (p.52). This type of structure is considered "structurally fragile because a deletion of a single tie or a single node can break a large component into disconnected subgraphs" (p.61). One thing that I was wondering as I read this article was the importance of direction in this network structure. Do you think direction matters when considering STD contraction? Is it more likely that the central circle will contract the STD or people in the branching subgraphs? Does that depend on where the STD starts? At what starting point would the disease be most likely to spread to everyone?
I was surprised that only "less than one-quarter of all Jefferson students reported no romantic or nonromantic sexual relationship during the preceding 18 months," (p.57) especially since these kids were only in high school. That number seemed awfully high considering the high response rate to the in-school questionnaires and the at-home interviews. Another finding that surprised me was that "50% of the students at Jefferson were chained together through romantic and sexual relationships that could have involved the exchange of fluids" (p.60). It's also scary to realize that "STD risk is not simply a matter of number of partners" (p.60).
I also liked the analogy of the Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice situation. It makes sense why we might not expect to see certain relationships form despite the pressures to date homophilous people. Homophilous ties might not be extended to dating those who dated those we dated, or something like that anyway. There are definitely social norms we must take into consideration when looking at isolated networks such as these. And then again, small towns sometimes can't help breaking these norms because there are so few options of who to date.
All in all, their findings of the spanning tree explain "why the rates of bacterial STDs have been so high among adolescents in the past decade, and why most social policy, which focuses on high-risk individuals within the adolescent community, has failed to stem the flood of new infection" (p.81). These findings are important from improving STD education techniques.