The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (54 page)

37.
W. Marcenes and A. Sheiham, “The Relationship between Marital Quality and Oral Health Status,”
Psychology and Health
11 (1996); Kiecolt-Glaser and Newton, “Marriage and Health”; A. J. Zautra et al., “An Examination of Individual Differences in the Relationship between Interpersonal Stress and Disease Activity among Women with Rheumatoid Arthritis,”
Arthritis Care and Research
11 (1998); S. M. Greene and W. A. Griffin, “Effects of Marital Quality on signs of Parkinson’s Disease during Patient–Spouse Interaction,”
Psychiatry
61, no. 35–45 (1998).

38.
Sarah L. Master et al., “A Picture’s Worth: Partner Photographs Reduce Experimentally Induced Pain,”
Psychological Science
20, no. 11 (2009);
Simo Saarijarvi, Ulla Rytokoski, and Sirkka-Liisa Karppi, “Marital Satisfaction and Distress in Chronic Low-Back Pain Patients and Their Spouses,”
Clinical Journal of Pain
6, no. 2 (1990).

39.
J. K. Kiecolt-Glaser, Jean-Philippe Gouin, and Liisa Hantsoo, “Close Relationships, Inflammation, and Health,”
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
35 (2010).

40.
O. Manor and Z. Eisenbach, “Mortality after Spousal Loss: Are There Socio-demographic Differences?,”
Social Science and Medicine
56, no. 2 (2003); J. R. Moon et al., “Widowhood and Mortality: A Meta-analysis,”
PLOS One
6, no. 8 (2011); F. Elwert and N. A. Christakis, “Wives and Ex-wives: A New Test for Homogamy Bias in the Widowhood Effect,”
Demography
45, no. 4 (2008).

41.
Amazingly, one study has found that married people tend to use higher-quality hospitals than those who’ve been widowed. They are more likely to be seen at teaching hospitals and to have shorter lengths of stay as inpatients, because their spouses act as their advocates and decision-makers as opposed to simply being health-care assistants. T. J. Iwashyna and N. A. Christakis, “Marriage, Widowhood, and Health-Care Use,”
Social Science and Medicing
57, no. 11 (2003).

42.
Moon et al., “Widowhood and Mortality.”

43.
F. Elwert and N. A. Christakis, “The Effect of Widowhood on Mortality by the Causes of Death of Both Spouses,”
American Journal of Public Health
98, no. 11 (2008); Manor and Eisenbach, “Mortality after Spousal Loss.”

44.
The impact of stress and distress on cardiovascular functioning is well known, but one study led by Robert Carels specifically documents my father-in-law’s experience: an emotional trauma had deregulated the rhythm of his heartbeat. Robert A. Carels, Holly Cacciapaglia, et al., “The Association between Emotional Upset and Cardiac Arrhythmia during Daily Life,”
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
71, no. 3 (2003).

45.
Charlie’s real recovery began when he joined a men’s aqua-fitness class at the YMHA one year after his wife’s death. The class gave his day structure, and the friends he met there—who all went out for
lunch after their swim class—gradually replaced the social network he had lost when his wife died. The exercise was good for his broken heart too.

46.
House, Landis, and Umberson, “Social Relationships and Health”; L. F. Berkman and S. L. Syme, “Social Networks, Host Resistance, and Mortality: A Nine-Year Follow-up Study of Alameda County Residents,”
American Journal of Epidemiology
109, no. 2 (1979)”; L. F. Berkman, “Social Epidemiology: Social Determinants of Health in the United States: Are We Losing Ground?,”
Annual Review of Public Health
30 (2009); K. Orth-Gomer, A. Rosengren, and L. Wilhelmsen, “Lack of Social Support and Incidence of Coronary Heart Disease in Middle-Aged Swedish Men,”
Psychosomatic Medicine
55, no. 1 (1993).

47.
Alain de Botton,
Religion for Atheists
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2012).

48.
Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson,
The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
(New York: Norton, 2009).

49.
Nicholas Wade,
The Faith Instinct
(New York: Penguin, 2009); David Sloan Wilson,
Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); David Eagleman, “The Moral of the Story: Make-Believe Is More than Fun and Games,”
New York Times Book Review
, August 5, 2012. The wonderful phrase “the smartest, boldest, best guys that ever were” is Jonathan Gottschall’s, excerpted from the book that David Eagleman was reviewing: Jonathan Gottschall,
The Storytelling Animal: Why Stories Make Us Human
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012).

To read more about why humans evolved to have religious beliefs and rituals, see
Darwin’s Cathedral
, by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, and
The Faith Instinct
, by Nicholas Wade.

50.
Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman,
How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2010).

51.
Michael Inzlicht et al., “Neural Markers of Religious Conviction,”
Psychological Science
29, no. 3 (2009).

52.
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); Inzlicht et al., “Neural markers”; Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, “The Neural Correlates of Maternal and Romantic Love,”
Neuroimage
21 (2004).

53.
R. F. Baumeister and M.R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation,”
Psychological Bulletin
117 (1995); R. F. Baumeister and Michael McKenzie, “Believing, Belonging, Meaning, and Religious Coping,”
Religion, Brain and Behavior
1, no. 3 (2011); Jonathan Haidt,
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
(New York: Pantheon, 2012).

54.
Michael Inzlicht, Alexa Tullett, and Marie Good, “The Need to Believe: A Neuroscience Account of Religion as a Motivated Process,”
Religion, Brain and Behavior
1, no. 3 (2011); D. E. Hall, “Religious Attendance: More Cost-Effective than Lipitor?”
Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine
19 (2006).

55.
Wilson,
Darwin’s Cathedral
.

56.
Haidt,
The Righteous Mind
.

57.
Steven Morris, “Second Life Affair Leads to Real Life Divorce,”
The Guardian
, November 13, 2008; Sarah Boesveld, “No Online Sex Please, We’re British,”
Globe and Mail
, November 15, 2008.

58.
Michael Winerip, “His 50 First Dates,”
New York Times
, July 5, 2009.

59.
Finkel et al., “Online Dating”; C. L. Toma, J. T. Hancock, and N. B. Ellison, “Separating Fact from Fiction: An Examination of Deceptive Self-Presentation on Online Dating Profiles,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
34 (2008).

60.
I borrowed the example about wine from an interview with Dan Ariely: “Online dating sites assume that people are easy to describe on searchable attributes. They think that we’re like digital cameras, that you can describe somebody by their height and weight and political affiliation and so on. But it turns out people are much more like wine. That when
you taste the wine, you could describe it, but it’s not a very useful description. But you know if you like it or you don’t. And it’s the complexity and the completeness of the experience that tells you if you like a person or not. And this breaking into attributes turns out not to be very informative.” Dan Hirschman, interview with Dan Ariely,” “Big Think’s Guide to 21st Century Dating,” 2010,
http://www.bigthink.com
.

61.
Paul W. Eastwick, Eli J. Finkel, and Alice H. Eagly, “When and Why Do Ideal Partner Preferences Affect the Process of Initiating and Maintaining Romantic Relationships?”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
101, no. 5 (2011); Paul W. Eastwick and Eli J. Finkel, “Sex Differences in Mate Preferences Revisited: Do People Know What They Initially Desire in a Romantic Partner?”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
94 (2008).

62.
For more on why we’re so bad at predicting what will make us happy, read Harvard’s Dan Gilbert: Daniel Gilbert,
Stumbling on Happiness
(New York: Knopf, 2006).

63.
Finkel et al., “Online Dating: A critical analysis from the perspective of psychological science.”

64.
Matching personality traits do not predict the longevity of a relationship, according to a meta-analysis of 313 studies: R. Matthew Montoya, Robert S. Horton, and Jeffrey Kirchner, “Is Actual Similarity Necessary for Attraction? A Meta-analysis of Actual and Perceived Similarity,”
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
25, no. 6 (2008).

65.
The following assertion appeared on eHarmony’s website in August 2012: “Our compatibility matching models are based on 35 years of clinical experience and rigorous scientific research into which characteristics between spouses are consistently associated with the most successful relationships.” Yet their matching system—which is proprietary—has neither been shared with social scientists nor tested, and no evidence is provided to substantiate such claims.

66.
Bradley M. Okdie et al., “Getting to Know You: Face-to-Face versus Online Interactions,”
Computers in Human Behavior
27, no. 1 (2011); Harry T. Reis et al., “Familiarity Does Indeed Promote Attraction
in Live Interaction,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
101, no. 3 (2011).

67.
How and where you meet your mate matters, too. Couples who meet through people they know or through their community activities are more likely to feel buttressed by social support, and this may affect the longevity of their relationship. Couples who meet through the Internet, or other anonymous arenas, tend to feel less social support for their unions. There was a class difference; meeting through strong, face-to-face ties was more common among the middle-class, whereas meeting in anonymous cyber-settings or bars was more common among the working class. Sharon Sassler and Amanda Jayne Miller, “The Ecology of Relationships: Meeting Locations and Cohabitors’ Relationship Perceptions.
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
31, no 2 (2014).

68.
Read Tim Kreider’s “True Stories: Getting Offline” at
http://www.nerve.com/love-sex/true-stories/true-stories-getting-offline
, to get a feeling for online dating. His charming, self-deprecatory essay is also quoted in Finkel et al., “Online Dating.”

69.
Michael Kesterton, “His and Hers Faces,”
Globe and Mail
, April 24, 2012.

70.
Montoya, Horton, and Kirchner, “Is Actual Similarity Necessary for Attraction?”; Marian Morry, M. Kito, and I. Ortiz, “The Attraction-Similarity Model and Dating Couples: Projection, Perceived Similarity, and Psychological Benefits,”
Personal Relationships
18 (2011).

71.
Xun (Irene) Huang, et al., “Going My Way? The Benefits of Travelling in the Same Direction,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
48 (2012).

CHAPTER 9: WHEN MONEY REALLY TALKS

1.
  Anne Sutherland, “Bad Luck Brought the Victims of Earl Jones Together, and Together They Have Effected Change on How White-Collar Criminals Are Dealt With,”
West Island Gazette
, July 7, 2010.

2.
  Martin Patriquin, “ ‘We Trusted Him,’ ”
Macleans
, July 29, 2009.

3.
  
Earl Jones was released from detention after serving four years of his sentence, in March 2014, just as this book was going to press.

4.
  Paul Delean, “Did West Islander Pull a Madoff?,”
Montreal Gazette
, July 11, 2009.

5.
  Tu Thanh Ha and Les Perreaux, “How Earl Jones Found His Clients,”
Globe and Mail
, July 27, 2009.

6.
  Nicole E. Ruedy et al., “The Cheater’s High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior,” paper presented at annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Boston, 2012.

7.
  Drake Bennett, “Confidence Game: How Imposters Like Clark Rockefeller Capture Our Trust Instantly,”
Boston Globe
, August 17, 2008.

8.
  Edward O. Wilson, “Kin selection as the Key to Altruism: Its Rise and Fall,”
Social Research
72, no. 1 (2005); Steven Pinker,
The Better Angels of Our Nature
(New York: Viking, 2011).

9.
  Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby,
The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Pscyhology and the Generation of Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Frans de Waal,
The Age of Empathy
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009); M. J. O’Riain and J. U. M. Jarvis, “Colony Member Recognition and Xenophobia in the Naked Mole-Rat,”
Animal Behaviour
53 (1997).

10.
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).

11.
Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth,
Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

12.
David C. Geary,
The Origin of Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition and General Intelligence
(Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2005); D. E. Brown,
Human Universals
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).