UCLA Study about Women's Friendships

My dear sister friend Jackie sent me an interesting study done by two UCLA research professors. Laura Cousino Klein, Ph.D. and Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University has documented how when women get stressed they release the hormone oxytocin as part of their stress response.  It buffers the fight of flight response and encourages her to tend children and family and gather with other women instead.  When a women engages in this tending or befriending behavior more oxytocin is released which further counters stress and produces a calming effect.  The study states that this calming effect does not occur in men because of testosterone which men produce in high levels when they are under stress.  

This information makes me wonder...  I know many men who reach out to their friends for stress relief and I know many women who shut down when under stress...  Could this study be only partly correct (left brained so to speak?).  Maybe if as a society we begin to encourage our children to talk things out, and praise them for finding peaceful solutions to problems on the playground, we would begin to see, hum, I don't know, maybe more friendship (male and female) based on love and caring.   

So my thought is this - lets thank Mother Nature for our wonderful hormones that naturally occur in our amazing bodies, AND lets create ways in society that mimic the behavior that the hormones promote so that we get the benefits from environment and society.  What do ya say, are you in?!