The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (53 page)

69.
Jeremy Laurance, “Addicted: Scientists Show How Internet Dependency Alters the Human Brain,”
The Independent
, January 12, 2012; Michael Kesterton, “Gamer Lives in Cafe,”
Globe and Mail
, April 5, 2013.

70.
One study that compared ADHD kids with a control group found that non-ADHD kids were more negatively affected by screen time. Excessive time spent watching television or on electronic media affected the cognitive processing and attention skills of the healthy kids, whereas the screen time had negligible effects on the ADHD kids. Ignacio David Acevedo-Polakovich et al., “Disentagling the Relation between Television Viewing and Cognitive Processes in Children with Attention-Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder and Comparison Children,”
Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine
160 (2006).

CHAPTER 8: GOING TO THE CHAPEL

1.
  Ninety-three percent of Americans state that having a happy marriage is one of their top objectives, while the number one aspiration of high-school seniors is “having a good marriage and family life.” Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher,
The Case for Marriage
(New York: Broadway Books, 2000).

2.
  
In the National Survey of Health and Social Life, which describes the romantic and sexual lives of 3,432 randomly selected American adults, about 68% of married couples met their spouses after being introduced by people they knew, while 60% met them in face-to-face social environments such as school, church, or social clubs. More recently, the 2005 Pew Internet Study found that 72% of married couples or those in a committed relationship had met their partners in “real world” settings such as work or school or through family and friends. Only 3% had met their partners online, though that figure may have increased somewhat since then. N. A. Christakis and J. H. Fowler,
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
(New York: Little, Brown, 2009); E. O. Laumann,
The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Eli J. Finkel et al., “Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science,”
Psychological Science
13, no. 1 (2012); M. Madden and Amanda Lenhart,
Online Dating
(Washington, DC: Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2006).

3.
  Chris M. Wilson and Andrew J. Oswald,
How Does Marriage Affect Physical and Psychological Health? A Survey of the Longitudinal Evidence
(Bonn: Institute for the Study of Labor, 2005).

4.
  Steven Stack and Ross Eshleman, “Marital Status and Happiness: A 17-Nation Study,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
, 60, no. 2 (May 1998).

5.
  Two enterprising British economists, Chris Wilson and Andrew Oswald, who surveyed all the longitudinal studies on marriage completed as of the mid 2000s, baldly summarized the terrain: “Intriguingly, unlike marriage, cohabiting produces few benefits.” Wilson and Oswald,
How Does Marriage Affect Physical and Psychological Health?

6.
  Wendy D. Manning and Jessica Cohen, “Premarital Cohabitation and Marital Dissolution: An Examination of Recent Marriages,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
74, no. 2 (2012).

7.
  Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig,
Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?
(New York: Hudson Street Press, 2012).

8.
  Beatrice Gottlieb,
The Family in the Western World from the Black
Death to the Industrial Age
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), quoted in Stephanie Coontz,
Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage
(New York: Penguin, 2005); Gottlieb,
The Family in the Western World
, chap. 9, “From Yoke Mates to Soul Mates.”

9.
  Matt Ridley,
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
(New York: Harper, 2010); Şevket Pamuk and Jan-Luiten van Zanden, “Standards of Living,” in
The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe
, ed. Stephen Broadberry and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Vol. 1,
1700–1870
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

10.
Christakis and Fowler,
Connected
; Tara Parker-Pope, “Is Marriage Good for Your Health?”
New York Times
, April, 14, 2010; Waite and Gallagher,
The Case for Marriage
; Tara Parker-Pope,
For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage
(New York: Dutton, 2010). By the early nineteenth century it was well known from hospital statistics that most inpatients were single (George Weisz, McGill Faculty of Medicine medical historian, personal communication, July 6, 2012).

11.
Christakis and Fowler,
Connected
; Frans Van Poppel and Inez Joung, “Long-Term Trends in Marital Status Mortality Differences in the Netherlands, 1850–1970,”
Journal of Biosocial Sciences
33 (2001); Mark Regnerus, “Say Yes. What Are You Waiting For?”
New York Times
, April 26, 2009; L. J. Waite, Y. Luo, and A. C. Lewin, “Marital Happiness and Marital Stability: Consequences for Psychological Well-being,”
Social Science Research
38, no. 1 (2009); Waite and Gallagher,
The Case for Marriage
; Parker-Pope,
For Better
; J. K. Kiecolt-Glaser et al., “Marital Quality, Marital Disruption, and Immune Function,”
Psychosomatic Medicine
49, no. 1 (1987); Stack and Eshleman, “Marital Status and Happiness.”

12.
Ami Sedghi and Simon Rogers, “Divorce Rates Data, 1858 to Now: How Has It Changed?,”
The Guardian Datablog
, February 6, 2014,
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorce-rates-marriage-ons
; Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, “Canadian Divorce,” November 15, 2010,
http://imfcanada.org/fact-sheet/canadian-divorce
; United States Census Bureau, “Number, Timing, and Duration
of Marriages and Divorces: 2009,” May 2011,
http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p70-125.pdf
.

13.
Coontz,
Marriage, a History
.

14.
Kay S. Hymowitz, “American Caste: Family Breakdown Is Limiting Mobility and Increasing Inequality,”
City Journal
22, no. 2 (2012).

15.
Catherine E. Ross, John Mirowsky, and Karen Goldsteen, “The Impact of the Family on Health: The Decade in Review,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
52 (1990).

16.
Viruses:
Sheldon Cohen, “Social Relationships and Health,”
American Psychologist
(2004).
Chronic illness:
L. F. Berkman, “The Role of Social Relations in Health Promotion,”
Psychosomatic Medicine
57, no. 3 (1995).
Cancer, heart attacks and surgery:
J. K. Kiecolt-Glaser and Tamara L. Newton, “Marriage and Health: His and Hers,”
Psychological Bulletin
127, no. 4 (2001); Kathleen King and Harry T. Reis, “Marriage and Long-Term Survival after Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting,”
Health Psychology
31, no. 1 (2012).
Dying after cancer surgery:
James Goodwin et al., “The Effect of Marital Status on Stage, Treatment, and Survival of Cancer Patients,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
258 (1987).
Cancer and suicide:
Waite and Gallagher,
The Case for Marriage
; V. L. Ernster et al., “Cancer Incidence by Marital Status,”
Journal of the National Cancer Institute
63 (1979); J. S. House, K. R. Landis, and D. Umberson, “Social Relationships and Health,”
Science
241, no. 4865 (1988); J. K. Kiecolt-Glaser and R. Glaser, “Psychological Influences on Immunity,”
Psychosomatics
27, no. 9 (1986); Jack C. Smith, James A. Mercy, and Judith M. Conn, “Marital Status and the Risk of Suicide,”
American Journal of Public Health
78 (1988); Emile Durkheim,
Suicide: A Study in Sociology
(New York: Free Press, 1951).
Crime and jail:
R. J. Sampson, J. H. Laub, and C. Wimer, “Does Marriage Reduce Crime? A Counterfactual Approach to Within-Individual Causal Effects,”
Criminology
44, no. 3 (2006).

17.
Yin Bun Cheung, “Marital Status and Mortality in British Women: A Longitudinal Study,”
International Journal of Epidemiology
29 (2000); Lamberto Manzoli et al., “Marital Status and Mortality in the Elderly:
A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,”
Social Science and Medicine
64 (2007); P. Hajdu, M. Mckee, and F. Bojan, “Changes in Premature Mortality Differentials by Marital Status in Hungary and England,”
European Journal of Public Health
5, no. 4 (1995).

18.
Waite and Gallagher,
The Case for Marriage
; World Health Organization, “Maternity Mortality Ratio (per 100,000 Live Births),”
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/statistics/indmaternalmortality/en/index.html
; Yuanreng Hu and Noreen Goldman, “Mortality Differentials by Marital Status: An International Comparison,”
Demography
27, no. 2 (1990). The Canadian statistics are also from census data.

19.
Julianne Holt-Lunstad, W. Birmingham, and Brandon Jones, “Is There Something Unique about Marriage? The Relative Impact of Marital Status, Relationship Quality and Network Social Support on Ambulatory Blood Pressure and Mental Health,”
Annals of Behavioral Medicine
35 (2008).

20.
W. Troxel et al., “Marital Happiness and Sleep Disturbances in a Multi-ethnic Sample of Middle Aged Women,”
Behavioral Sleep Medicine
7, no. 1 (2009); W. Troxel et al., “Attachment Anxiety, Relationship Context, and Sleep in Women with Recurrent Major Depression,”
Psychosomatic Medicine
69 (2007).

21.
Kiecolt-Glaser and Newton, “Marriage and Health”; Berkman, “The Role of Social Relations.”

22.
Robert A. Carels, A. Sherwood, and J. Blumenthal, “Psychosocial Influences on Blood Pressure during Daily Life,”
International Journal of Psychophysiology
28 (1998).

23.
Ibid.; Holt-Lunstad, Birmingham, and Jones, “Is There Something Unique about Marriage?”; J. Holt-Lunstad, Brandon Jones, and W. Birmingham, “The Influence of Close Relationships on Nocturnal Blood Pressure Dipping,”
International Journal of Psychophysiology
71 (2008).

24.
K. Appelberg et al., “Interpersonal Conflict as a Predictor of Work Disability: A Follow-up Study of 15,348 Finnish Employees,”
Journal of
Psychosomatic Research
40 (1996); K. Orth-Gomer et al., “Marital Stress Worsens Progrnosis in Women with Coronary Heart Disease: The Stockholm Female Coronary Risk Study,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
284, no. 23 (2000).

25.
Vicki Helgeson, “The Effects of Masculinity and Social Support on Recovery from Myocardial Infarction,”
Psychosomatic Medicine
53 (1991).

26.
Ibid.; J. H. Hibbard and C. R. Pope, “The Quality of Social Roles as Predictors of Morbidity and Mortality,”
Social Science and Medicine
36, no. 3 (1993).

27.
J. K. Kiecolt-Glaser et al., “Marital Stress: Immunologic, Neuroendocrine, and Autonomic Correlates,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
840 (2006).

28.
A telephone survey conducted by Mental Health America in 2008 found that men are more likely than women to turn to their spouse for emotional support, while women are most likely to turn to other family members. Mental Health America,
Social Connectedness and Health
, May 2008.

29.
J. B. Silk et al., “Strong and Consistent Social Bonds Enhance the Longevity of Female Baboons,”
Current Biology
20 (2010); J. B. Silk, D. S. Alberts, and J. Altmann, “Social Bonds of Female Baboons Enhance Infant Survival,”
Science
302 (2003); Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth,
Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Joan B. Silk et al., “The Benefits of Social Capital: Close Social Bonds among Female Baboons Enhance Offspring Survival,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences
2009, no. 276 (2009); Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney, “The Evolutionary Origins of Friendship,”
Annual Review of Psychology
63 (2012).

30.
Silk et al., “Strong and Consistent Social Bonds”; Natalie Angier, “The Spirit of Sisterhood Is in the Air and on the Air,”
New York Times
, April 23, 2012.

31.
Angier, “The Spirit of Sisterhood.”

32.
J. Lehmann, K. Andrews, and R. I. M. Dunbar, “Social Networks and Social Complexity in Female-Bonded Primates,” in
Social Brain, Distributed Mind
, ed. R. I. M. Dunbar, C. Gamble, and J.A. Gowlett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); R. M. Wittig et al., “Focused Grooming Networks and Stress Alleviation in Wild Female Baboons,”
Hormones and Behaviour
54 (2008).

33.
When I asked Janice Kiecolt-Glaser what might motivate people to participate in such an invasive, time-consuming experiment, she replied that each couple was paid $1,000 for two hospital stays and daily follow-up visits to examine their blisters and draw blood for hormone analysis. It was the couple’s responsibility to make those appointments (Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, personal communication, August 5, 2012).

34.
S. Carrère and J. M. Gottman, “Predicting Divorce among Newlyweds from the First Three Minutes of a Marital Conflict Discussion,”
Family Process
38, no. 3 (1999); Parker-Pope,
For Better
.

35.
J. K. Kiecolt-Glaser et al., “Hostile Marital Interactions, Proinflammatory Cytokine Production, and Wound Healing,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
62, no. 12 (2005).

36.
Ibid.; Lisa M. Christian et al., “Psychological Influences on Neuroendocrine and Immune Outcomes,” in
Handbook of Neuroscience for the Behavioral Sciences
, ed. Gary G. Berntson and J. Cacioppo (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009).