(Press-News.org) Los Angeles, CA (December 15, 2010) Being a part of many different social groups can improve mental health and help a person cope with stressful events. It also leads to better physical health, making you more able to withstand—and recover faster from—physical challenges, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE).
Belonging to groups, such as networks of friends, family, clubs and sport teams, improves mental health because groups provide support, help you to feel good about yourself and keep you active. But belonging to many different groups might also help to make you psychologically and physically stronger. People with multiple group memberships cope better when faced with stressful situations such as recovering from stroke and are even more likely to stay cold-free when exposed to the cold virus.
Researchers Janelle Jones and Jolanda Jetten of the University of Queensland were interested in how group memberships might give people the resilience to face novel and aversive challenges. In one study, they asked a dozen soldiers undergoing ice-camp training to wear heart rate monitors while experiencing their first bobsled, luge, or skeleton runs—an exciting, but very stressful occasion. A trip down an icy course set everyone's heart racing, but the soldiers who said they belonged to many groups returned to their normal heart rate faster than soldiers who did not. People with many memberships recovered from the stress more quickly.
To find out if making people aware of their group memberships would improve their resilience, Jones and Jetten randomly assigned 56 college students to think about one, three, or five groups that they were members of, and to take care to describe why the group was important to them. Then all participants began a very challenging physical task—keeping one hand in a bucket of near-freezing water. The more group memberships the participants had thought about, the longer they were able to keep their hand in the icy water. People who were told to think about five groups were able to keep their hand in twice as long as people who were told to think of only one group. Because people were randomly assigned the number of groups to think of, the difference in coping with pain was due to thinking about group memberships, and it is not merely due to mental toughness.
"Group memberships are an important resource," the researchers said. "The identity that we gain from our group memberships helps us to develop a sense of belonging, purpose, and meaning. This gives us the psychological strength to endure and recover physical challenges." Encouraging people to think about their groups—and to join new ones—is a promising avenue to promote health and well-being with very few negative side effects.
###The article "Recovering from Strain and Enduring Pain: Multiple Group Memberships Promote Resilience in the Face of Physical Challenges" in Social Psychological and Personality Science is available free for a limited time at: http://spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/10/24/1948550610386806.full.pdf+html.
Social Psychological and Personality Science is a cutting-edge journal of succinct reports of research in social and personality psychology. SPPS is sponsored by a consortium of the world's leading organizations in social and personality psychology representing over 7,000 scholars on six continents worldwide. http://spp.sagepub.com
SAGE is a leading international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media for academic, educational, and professional markets. Since 1965, SAGE has helped inform and educate a global community of scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students spanning a wide range of subject areas including business, humanities, social sciences, and science, technology, and medicine. An independent company, SAGE has principal offices in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC. www.sagepublications.com
Contact: Janelle M. Jones, University of Queensland Email: j.m.jones@psy.uq.edu.au Phone: (61) 733654543
Members of the media qualify for free access to this and 560+ other SAGE journals. Contact Jim Gilden (jim.gilden@sagepub.com) for further information.
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Los Angeles, CA (December 15, 2010) When computerized neuropsychological testing is used, high school athletes suffering from a sports-related concussion are less likely to be returned to play within one week of their injury, according to a study in The American Journal of Sports Medicine (published by SAGE). Unfortunately, concussed football players are less likely to have computerized neuropsychological testing than those participating in other sports.
A total of 544 concussions were recorded by the High School Reporting Information Online surveillance system during ...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Sea-ice habitats essential to polar bears would likely respond positively should more curbs be placed on global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new modeling study published today in the journal, Nature.
The study, led by the U.S. Geological Survey, included university and other federal agency scientists. The research broke new ground in the "tipping point" debate in the scientific community by providing evidence that during this century there does not seem to be a tipping point at which sea-ice loss would become irreversible.
The report ...
Washington, D.C.—Scientists from all over the world are taking a second, more expansive, look at the car-sized asteroid that exploded over Sudan's Nubian Desert in 2008. Initial research was focused on classifying the meteorite fragments that were collected two to five months after they were strewn across the desert and tracked by NASA's Near Earth Object astronomical network. Now in a series of 20 papers for a special double issue of the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, published on December 15, researchers have expanded their work to demonstrate the diversity ...
A small area deep in the brain called the perirhinal cortex is critical for forming unconscious conceptual memories, researchers at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain have found.
The perirhinal cortex was thought to be involved, like the neighboring hippocampus, in "declarative" or conscious memories, but the new results show that the picture is more complex, said lead author Wei-chun Wang, a graduate student at UC Davis.
The results were published Dec. 9 in the journal Neuron.
We're all familiar with memories that rise from the unconscious mind. Imagine looking ...
Dolphins along coast of Argentina could experience a significant loss of genetic diversity because some of the animals that accidently die when tangled in fishing nets are related. According to a new genetic analysis published this week in the journal PLoS One, Franciscana dolphins that die as by-catch are more than a collection of random individuals: many are most likely mother-offspring pairs. This result, which suggests reduced genetic diversity and reproductive potential, could have significant implications for the conservation of small marine mammals.
"It has always ...
Polar bears were added to the threatened species list nearly three years ago when their icy habitat showed steady, precipitous decline because of a warming climate.
But it appears the Arctic icons aren't necessarily doomed after all, according to results of a study published in this week's issue of the journal Nature.
The findings indicate that there is no "tipping point" that would result in unstoppable loss of summer sea ice when greenhouse gas-driven warming rises above a certain threshold.
Scientists from several institutions, including the U.S. Geological Survey ...
New York, NY, December 15, 2010 – There is burgeoning public interest in possible wide-ranging health benefits from vitamin D, including cardiovascular health. In a study published in the December 2010 issue of The American Journal of Medicine, investigators found that there was no independent association between serum levels of vitamin D or parathyroid hormone and cardiovascular mortality in this prospective study, the first in a population of older community-dwelling adults with a low prevalence of vitamin D deficiency and a broad range of kidney function.
Researchers ...
Madison, WI DECEMBER 15, 2010 -- The manufacturing of nanomaterials has been steadily on the rise in the medical, industrial, and scientific fields. Nanomaterials are materials that are engineered to have dimensions less than 100 nanometers and have very unique properties as a result of their small size.
In a study funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a team of scientists from the University of Kentucky determined that earthworms could absorb copper nanoparticles present in soil.
One crucial step in determining the uptake of nanomaterials was discerning ...
MADISON — It's one of the more frustrating parts of summer. You check the weather forecast, see nothing dramatic, and go hiking or biking. Then, four hours later, a thunderstorm appears out of nowhere and ruins your afternoon.
Thunderstorms can bring intense rain, hail, lightning and even tornadoes, but "predicting them a few hours out is one of the great problems of meteorology," says Chian-Yi Liu, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And the consequences can be more serious than a rained-out hike — even major storms can be missed, Liu ...
New research findings appearing in the January Journal of Lipid Research indicate that compounds called oxysterols are not present in any significant amount in multiple sclerosis patients, contradicting a previous study that suggested that some of these cholesterol metabolites were associated with MS and could be used as diagnostic tools in the clinic.
Oxysterols are somewhat controversial in science; while some laboratory experiments suggest these steroid molecules may be biologically important, they are present in only trace amounts in the blood, and studies in living ...
