The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (48 page)

8.
  Ibid.; Heather Pringle, “Ancient Sorcerer’s ‘Wake’ Was First Feast for the Dead?”
National Geographic Daily News
, August 30, 2010,
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/08/100830-first-feast-science-proceedings-israel-shaman-sorcerer-tortoise/
.

9.
  Carol Vogel, “Stuff that Defines Us: The British Museum Chooses 100 Objects to Distill the History of the World,”
New York Times
, October 30, 2011; Neil MacGregor, A
History of the World in 100 Objects
(London: Allen Lane, 2010).

10.
J. Cacioppo and William Patrick,
Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection
(New York: Norton, 2008).

11.
Volkhard Knigge, Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau, and Jens-Christian Wagner, eds., “Forced Labor: The Germans, the Forced Laborers and the War,” companion volume to traveling exhibition, Jewish Museum of Berlin (Weimar: Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, 2010).

12.
The same forces are at work in the ugly anti-immigrant sentiment that came alive in the United States and Europe in the post-2008 financial crisis period. As people began to fear for their jobs and their pensions, hostility toward Mexicans in the U.S. and Turkish and North African
immigrants in northern Europe heated up. Chillingly, anti-Semitic incidents also increased, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Institute.

13.
Jared Diamond,
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
(New York: Penguin, 2012).

14.
Isabel Wilkerson,
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
(New York: Random House, 2010).

15.
Louise Hawkley, Kipling D. Williams, and J. Cacioppo, “Responses to Ostracism across Adulthood,”
Scan
6 (2011); Tyler F. Stillman et al., “Alone and Without Purpose: Life Loses Meaning Following Social Exclusion,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
45 (2009).

16.
Twice as high as girls’ rates, suicide rates for teenage boys have nonetheless dropped by a third since 1980, while those of girls have risen by the same proportion in Canada during that time (in the U.S. and the U.K. they’d increased for both sexes as of 2000). Robin Skinner and Steven McFaull, “Suicide among Children and Adolescents in Canada: Trends and Sex Differences, 1980–2008,”
Canadian Medical Association Journal
(2012); Ingrid Peritz and Karen Howlett, “High School Taunts Push Another Teenager to Suicide,”
Globe and Mail
, December 1, 2011.

17.
N. I. Eisenberger, M. D. Lieberman, and K. D. Williams, “Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion,”
Science
302 (2003); N. I. Eisenberger and M. D. Lieberman, “Why Rejection Hurts: A Common Neural Alarm System for Physical and Social Pain,”
Trends in Cognitive Science
8, no. 7 (2004); N. I. Eisenberger, “The Pain of Social Disconnection: Examining the Shared Neural Underpinnings of Physical and Social Pain,”
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
(2012); Carrie L. Masten et al., “Neural Correlates of Social Exclusion during Adolescence: Understanding the Distress of Peer Rejection,”
Scan
4 (2009); George Slavich et al., “Neural Sensitivity to Social Rejection Is Associated with Inflammatory Responses to Social Stress,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
107, no. 33 (2010).

18.
Atul Gawande, “Hellhole: The United States Holds Tens of Thousands of Inmates in Long-Term Solitary Confinement. Is This Torture?”
New Yorker
, March 30, 2009.

19.
Lisa Harnack et al., “Guess Who’s Cooking: The Role of Men in Meal Planning, Shopping, and Preparation in US Families,”
Journal of the American Dietetic Association
98, no. 9 (1998). An alternative explanation is provided by Richard Wrangham, who argues that the advent of cooking, approximately one million years ago, was one of the catalysts that sparked sexual divisions around food (I am grateful to my brother Steve for pointing this out). Richard Wrangham,
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
(New York: Basic Books, 2009).

20.
Bernard Chapais,
Primeval Kinship: How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Patrick Bélisle and Bernard Chapais, “Tolerated Co-feeding in Relation to Degree of Kinship in Japanese Macaques,”
Behavior
138 (2001). Details about this research project were also gleaned from Bernard Chapais (personal communication, November 11, 2011). Note also that “Hamilton’s rule” is apt in this discussion about sharing and tolerated co-feeding. In 1964 William D. Hamilton came up with a theory that was the precursor of modern sociobiology. Using a mathematical formula, it predicts that animals, including humans, will help other members of their species with food, assistance, or other precious resources according to their degree of relatedness. Thus, though an altruistic gift might decrease the odds of survival and prosperity for the donor, it will increase the reproductive fitness of the recipient—one reason why gifts often flow from grandparents to grandchildren. The seniors’ opportunity to reproduce may be long past, but their chance to increase the survival and reproductive odds of their children or their children’s children is very much in the present. Those who are more altruistic toward closely related kin will ultimately ensure that more of their genes persist and survive. For more on Hamilton’s rule, see David M. Buss, ed.,
The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005).

21.
Sue C. Carter and Stephen W. Porges, “Social Bonding and Attachment,” in
Encyclopedia of Behavioural Neuroscience
, vol. 3 (New York: Elsevier, 2010); S. E. Taylor, “Tend and Befriend: Biobehavioral
Bases of Affiliation under Stress,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
15, no. 6 (2006).

22.
The brain regions activated by such social behavior in women (as tested by the Prisoner’s Dilemma game) include the nucleus accumbens, the caudate nucleus, the ventromedial frontal orbital cortex, and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex. James Rilling et al., “A Neural Basis for Social Cooperation,”
Neuron
35 (2002).

23.
Eisenberger, Lieberman, and Williams, “Does Rejection Hurt?”

24.
Manos Tsakiris, “Looking for Myself: Current Multisensory Input Alters Self-Face Recognition,”
PLOS One
3, no. 12 (2008).

25.
For women’s sensitivity to others’ cues, see Geoffry Hall et al., “Sex Differences in Functional Activation Patterns Revealed by Increased Emotion Processing Demands,”
Neuroreport
15, no. 2 (2004); Turhan Canli and et al., “Sex Differences in the Neural Basis of Emotional Memories,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
99, no. 16 (2002); R. J. Erwin et al., “Facial Emotion Discrimination,”
Psychiatry Research
42, no. 3 (1992); David C. Geary,
Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences
(Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2010); M. L. Hoffman, “Sex Differences in Empathy and Related Behaviors,”
Psychological Bulletin
84, no. 712–22 (1977); M. R. Gunnar and M. Donahue, “Sex Differences in Social Responsiveness between Six and Twelve Months,”
Child Development
51 (1980); Susan Pinker,
The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women, and the Real Gender Gap
(Toronto: Random House Canada, 2008).

26.
Salvy et al., “Effects of Social Influence”; Salvy et al., “The Presence of Friends.”

27.
Trogdon, Nonnemaker, and Pais, “Peer Effects in Adolescent Overweight.” Interestingly, peers can also suppress eating in overweight teenagers, according to Sarah-Jeanne Salvy, who has shown that obese kids eat less when their normal-weight friends are around and more when they’re with other overweight kids or alone. S. J. Salvy, E. Kieffer, and L. H. Epstein, “Effects of Social Context on Overweight
and Normal-Weight Children’s Food Selection,”
Eating Behaviors
9, no. 2 (2008).

28.
Christakis and Fowler, “The Spread of Obesity.” The way wives’ waistlines affect their husbands’ belt size is indeed not all about who is doing the shopping and cooking, especially if you consider studies of couvade, or pregnancy-related symptoms experienced by the male partners of pregnant women. They show that somewhere between 20% and 80% of men experience some weight gain as their wife’s pregnancy progresses. One hypothesis is that the more empathic the man is, the more weight he puts on.

29.
Marla E. Eisenberg et al., “Correlations between Family Meals and Psychosocial Well-being among Adolescents,”
Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine
158 (2004); M. E. Eisenberg et al., “Family Meals and Substance Use: Is There a Long-Term Protective Association?”
Journal of Adolescent Health
43, no. 2 (2008); Susan K. Hamilton and Jane Hamilton Wilson, “Family Mealtimes: Worth the Effort?”
Infant, Child and Adolescent Nutrition
1 (2009); C. Snow and D. Beals, “Mealtime Talk that Supports Literacy Development,”
New Directions in Child and Adolescent Development
111 (2006); Debra Franko et al., “What Mediates the Relationship between Family Meals and Adolescent Health Issues,”
Health Psychology
27, no. 2 (2008); D. Neumark-Sztainer et al., “Family Meals and Disordered Eating in Adolescents: Longitudinal Findings from Project EAT,”
Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine
162, no. 1 (2008).

30.
Guang Guo, Michael Roettger, and Tianji Cai, “The Integration of Genetic Propensities into Social-Control Models of Delinquency and Violence among Male Youths,”
American Sociological Review
73 (2008); Maggie Fox, “Good Parenting Overrides Bad Behavior Genes,”
Globe and Mail
, July 16, 2008.

31.
Stephanie Coontz, “Why Gender Equality Stalled,”
New York Times
, February 17, 2013.

32.
Barbara Fiese et al., “A Review of 50 Years of Research on Naturally Occurring Family Routines and Rituals,”
Journal of Family Psychology
16, no. 4 (2002).

33.
Snow and Beals, “Mealtime Talk.”

34.
Zehava Oz Weizman and Catherine E. Snow, “Lexical Output as Related to Children’s Vocabulary Acquisition: Effects of Sophisticated Exposure and Support for Meaning,”
Developmental Psychology
37, no. 2 (2001).

35.
Deb Roy, “New Horizons in the Study of Child Language Acquisition,” paper presented at the International Speech Communication Association Proceedings of Interspeech conference, Brighton, UK, 2009; Susan Pinker, “Someone to Watch Over Me,”
Globe and Mail
, December 13, 2008; Brandon Roy, research scientist and doctoral student in the MIT media lab, email received November 21, 2011.

36.
Weizman and Snow, “Lexical Output.”

37.
Roy, “New Horizons”; Janellen Huttenlocher et al., “Early Vocabulary Growth: Relation to Language Input and Gender,”
Developmental Psychology
27 (1991).

38.
Alison Gopnik,
The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

39.
In 2007 a nasty controversy arose when University of Washington developmental psychologists Frederick Zimmerman and Andrew Meltzoff, along with physician Dimitri Christakis, published an article in the
Journal of Pediatrics
showing that babies and toddlers under two who watched so-called educational videos and DVDs, such as Baby Einstein or Brainy Baby, had poor vocabulary skills on a standardized language development test. The researchers reported that for each hour of baby DVD/video watching, there was a decrease of six to eight words (out of the ninety words tested) in the baby’s vocabulary—a huge effect. “Although reading every day as opposed to less often is associated with about a 7 point increase in the normed CDI score [the standardized language test used], watching one hour per day of baby DVDs/videos as opposed to none is associated with about a 17-point decrease.” The authors asserted that the claims made by commercial baby DVD companies that their products boosted infants’ cognitive skills were not only unsupported by
the evidence but were contradicted by their study. One consequence was that Baby Einstein, owned by the Walt Disney Company, changed its publicity and offered a refund to any consumers unhappy with its products. F. J. Zimmerman, D. A. Christakis, and Andrew Melttzoff, “Associations between Media Viewing and Language Development in Children under Age 2 Years,”
Journal of Pediatrics
(2007).

40.
Social and emotional development has to be tied to the word
intelligence
for it to get any respect.

41.
Eisenberg et al., “Family Meals and Substance Use.”

42.
Neumark-Sztainer et al., “Family Meals and Disordered Eating.”

43.
Eisenberg et al., “Family Meals and Substance Use.”

44.
Eisenberg et al., “Correlations between Family Meals.”

45.
Family dinners early in life being linked to academic success later is an example of a positive correlation: when one factor goes up, the other one also rises. A negative correlation describes what happens when one factor rises and the other factor falls, such as more family dinners at age seven predicting fewer cigarettes smoked at age seventeen.

46.
Block parties and “traveling dinners”—where neighbors transit from one house to the next for each of four courses (appetizers, soup, main course, and dessert) in order to become acquainted with each other—are supplanting the role that church, extended family, and volunteering stay-at-home mothers used to play in helping people form social bonds. See Marcus Gee, “Toronto Woman Breaks Bread with Strangers and Finds a Community,”
Globe and Mail
, November 17, 2009.