AASRA - Asian American Support and Resource Agency

UCLA Study On Friendship Among Women: An alternative to fight or flight
by Gale Berkowitz

A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more. Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women. It's a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research--- most of it on men---upside down.Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible, explains Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study's authors. It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers.Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight. In fact, says Dr. Klein, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is release as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in men, says Dr.Klein, because testosterone---which men produce in high levels when they're under stress---seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it.

The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic "aha" moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded, says Dr. Klein. When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something.The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health. It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the "tend and befriend" notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. There's no doubt, says Dr. Klein, that friends are helping us live longer.

In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a 6-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%.Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses' Health Study fromHarvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or confidants was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight.And that's not all. When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend and confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate. Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That's a question that also troubles researcher RuthellenJosselson, Ph.D., co-author of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls' and Women's Friendships (Three Rivers Press, 1998). The following paragraph is, in my opinion, very, very true and something all women should be aware of and NOT put our female friends on the back burners.

Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women, explains Dr. Josselson. We push them right to the back burner. That's really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of talk that women do when they're with other women. It's a very healing experience.

Taylor, S. E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L, Gurung, R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. Female Responses to Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or Flight" Psychol Rev, 107(3):41-429.

Geary DC, Flinn MV. Sex differences in behavioral and hormonal response to social threat: commentary on Taylor et al. Psychol Rev 2002 Oct;109(4):745-50; discussion 751-3

Cousino Klein L, Corwin EJ. Seeing the unexpected: how sex differences in stress responses may provide a new perspective on the manifestation of psychiatric disorders. Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2002 Dec;4(6):441-8.

"Fire To Ice" - A Multi-Media Production incorporating dance, sculpture, video and live music.
Concept, Research, Script, Direction, Choreography, Art and Costumes: Sudarshan Belsare
Venue: Massachusetts College of Art
Followed by Panel Discussion including Anu Bandopadhay of AASRA.

Fire to Ice is a collaborative project with elements of Bharatanatyam (Classical Indian Dance form from the temples of South India), Western (Greek) theater and live Classical Indian, African and Classical Western music. The production uses an array of media, including puppets and video in an expressive and unique dance interpretation that examines provocative issues like gender and social values. Collaborators include Babson College Professor Lau Lapides and performer Abby Davis.

Society as collective unit exercises its control over every individual, objectifying and instructing along the way. This control often results in undesirable metamorphosis of an individual, which is mostly an irrevocable change. This control is many a time perceived as "oppression", often practiced through in a forced abidance of "rules of being and living". Inexorable Patriarchal Doctrines are one such means of oppression. The theme of this dance-theater celebrates the resurgence of the Primal Mother Goddess through eons of patriarchal oppression and the effect that this oppression has on the way we are expected to play specific roles in society.

The Goddess acts as a pivotal force behind this production. She is the timeless energy that manifests in both benign and fierce forms. People, particularly women through ages and more so in current times are subject to expectations of conforming to set patterns of appearance, conduct and demeanor. We internalize these subtle pressures and take on the role of oppressors ourselves. When our individuality is challenged, there is a stir in our inner beings, which can create havoc both within and without. According to the Indian epic Mahabharata, Draupadi is a woman who is given away as a possession by her five husbands in an unfortunate game of dice. In response to this patriarchal oppression, Draupadi transforms herself from a dutiful wife to a vengeful goddess. In the Mahabharata, Draupadi is born from a ritualistic pyre and freezes in ice at the end of her life. Fire to Ice is an attempt to capture the spiritual force behind this paradox. In Fire to Ice, Sudarshan Belsare creates a bridge between the fiery spirit of Draupadi and its contemporary relevance.

"Fire to Ice" is an endeavor on the interface of eastern and western theatrical concepts. This is based on the fact that myths and rituals are progenitors of theater. The production employs a glossary of terms by Robert Cohen used in traditional Western Theater as springboards for dance rendering of particular moods and situations. Draupadi is the second of three components in the performance. The first component explores the ritual of birth and its relation to the Mother Goddess. The third component involves the awaking of the spirit of feminine energy as a creative force in nature against destructive, manipulative and oppressive forces.

For more information on Sudershan Belsare, please visit http://babel.massart.edu/~sudarshan/

The Namesake: A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri
(Published by Houghton Mifflin Co)
Jhumpa Lahiri's follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies, documents her characters' quiet rebellions and random longings with great sensitivity. There's no cleverness or showing-off in The Namesake, just beautifully confident storytelling. Gogol's story is neither comedy nor tragedy; it's simply that ordinary, hard-to-get-down-on-paper commodity: real life. --Claire Dederer.

The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity. Great win from a brilliant South Asian woman writer.