You can direct a meeting, call an old friend, or dictate the perfect tuna sandwich at a drive-thru window. Human beings communicate constantly, both for business and pleasure.Socialization is a lifelong habit that we all share, whether we are adolescents or adults. Recent research has revealed key differences in communication styles among different age groups. It also identified one component of conversation that is timeless: friendship. Particularly, the bonds formed between people who identify as women.Michelle Rodrigues, a former Beckman Institute postdoctoral researcher, and Si On Yoon led an interdisciplinarity team that evaluated the impact of age and familiarity on a conversation. They also reviewed the interaction's effectiveness and stress response.The study was titled "What do friends do for?" In May 2021, the Journal of Women and Aging published the study "The impact of friendship on communicative efficacy and cortisol responses during collaborative problem solving among older and younger women."This study is female-focused and focuses on two hypotheses. The first is the tend-and befriend hypothesis. This challenges the traditional masculine "fight or flight" dichotomy.Rodrigues is an assistant professor at Marquette University's Department of Social and Cultural Sciences. She said that women have developed a different way to deal with stress. Women can make friends with female peers to help them cope with stress.The socio-emotional selection hypothesis was also tested by the team. This hypothesis proposes that people will "prune" their social relationships as they age, and seek out more intimate, better-quality friends.AdvertisementIt is a new field that has introduced age as a variable. This was the result of an interdisciplinarious Beckman collaboration.Rodrigues stated that she was working with several groups from different disciplines. She came from the perspective to study friendship, but had previously done research on older women and adolescent girls.She teamed up with Si On Yoon (Beckman-postdoc), who was studying cognitive mechanisms of natural conversations across all ages, including older and healthier adults.Yoon is an assistant professor at the University of Iowa's Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.The interdisciplinarity team combined both theories to answer one question: How do women's tendencies to "tend, befriend" and socially select are reflected in their communication across life spans?AdvertisementThe test included 32 women, 16 of whom were "older adults", aged 62-79 and 16 of whom were "younger adults," aged 18-25. Participants were either paired up with a friend (a "familiar") conversation partner or with a stranger ("unfamiliar")A series of conversational challenges was set up for the partners. One participant asked her partner to organize a set of Tangrams in a way that only she could see. What was the catch? The catch?One [tangram] could be viewed and said, "This looks like a dog." Rodrigues stated that you could also say "This looks like a triangle with a stop sign and a bicycle tire."This exercise measured each conversation's efficiency. Partners who reached the desired tangram arrangement with fewer words were deemed more efficient. Pairs who required more words to accomplish the task were deemed less efficient.Researchers found that the older adult pairs communicated with their familiar partners more effectively than the younger ones, but less with unknown partners. Alternately, older adults displayed conversational dexterity and were able to quickly communicate abstract tangrams with friends and strangers.Referential communication tasks like this require that you can see the source of the other person's message. Rodrigues stated that younger adults seem to be less receptive than older adults in trying to do this, while older adults find it easier to do so with strangers.This was not predicted by the socio-emotional selectiveivity hypothesis which predicted a correlation between social isolation and age.Rodrigues stated that even though older adults prefer to spend more time with those they care about, it is clear that they have the social skills necessary to interact with strangers if and when needed.Rodrigues's team also measured salivary Cortisol to compare stress levels of participants throughout the testing process.She said that when you are experiencing stress, if your stress response system is functioning as it should, there will be an increase in cortisol. This hormone is our primary stress hormone and tells our bodies to release glucose into the bloodstreams. It is reflected in saliva around 15 to 20 minutes after the event. A rise in salivary cortisol levels from a baseline level indicates that the individual is more stressed than they were when the previous measurements were taken.Both age groups showed that those who worked with familiar partners had lower levels of cortisol than those who were working with new partners."A lot has been written about the tend-and befriend hypothesis in relation to young women. It's great that there are results that extend that research to older women. It is clear that friendship can have the same effect across life. Rodrigues stated that friendship and familiar partners can buffer stress and this effect is preserved as we age.
