“For our study, we wanted to investigate how feeling stressed impacts the amount that we socialize with others,” says senior author Meghan Meyer, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth and Director of the Dartmouth Social Neuroscience Lab. “Our findings show that people who experienced more stress on one day, socialized less with others the next day. This effect may persist for up to two days later after someone has had a stressful day.”
Earlier research studies on the rodents have stated clearly that when animals are stressed the day before, they prefer avoiding interaction with their peers, a phenomenon known as “stress-induced social avoidance.” Researchers haven’t had the tools to effectively measure how stress affects real-world social interactions, so it’s been difficult to determine if humans engage in social avoidance because of stress.
Previous studies on the subject have relied heavily on participants’ self-reports of social behavior, which are notoriously skewed. Dartmouth’s study, on the other hand, relied on mobile phone sensing data (e.g. passive and automatic sensing data) obtained through the StudentLife app an app that allows students to keep track of their grades.
The study was based on the mobile phone sensing data (e.g. passive and automatic sensing data) obtained through the StudentLife app, which co-author Andrew T. Campbell had previously developed. Data on sleep, movement, and time spent at home were passively provided by 99 Dartmouth undergraduate students who agreed to participate in the two-month study via the StudentLife app.
There were 56 percent females and 44 percent males in the sample. The data was anonymized to protect the privacy of the participants. The StudentLife app also tracked how much social interaction participants had each day by using the phone’s microphone to detect human conversation.
Since this team had much more participant data collected over two months, they were able to run sophisticated analyses examining stress-social interaction patterns for each of the participants over such a long period, whilst other studies might only bring participants into the lab for an hour. The researchers used several models to assess how stress affects social interaction, and they investigated whether participants’ stress-social interaction patterns persisted even after controlling for other variables such as sleep, movement, and time spent at home, all of which were passively measured by the smartphones and have been connected to stress.
“By leveraging mobile sensing technology, our research is among the first to examine the temporal relationship between stress and socialization,” says co-author Alex DaSilva, Guarini ’21, a Ph.D. student in psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth. “Our findings showed that higher levels of stress on one day predicted decreased social interaction the next day while accounting for levels of movement, sleep, and time spent at home,” adds DaSilva.
The correlation proven to exist between stress and socialization did not appear to be moderated by gender. Spending more time at home was also associated with lower levels of movement and social interaction the next day, according to the findings. The opposite was also discovered to be true: more social interaction was linked to more movement and less time spent at home.
However, one striking feature of the findings was that when it came to the stress-social interaction relationship, stress only predicted less social interaction the next day. The opposite was not true: the amount of social interaction on one day had no bearing on stress the next day. This shows the linear relationship between stress and social interactions.
If you are more stressed then you remain stolid for the subsequent day. In the future, mobile sensing approaches and physiological measures may be sufficient to investigate the link between social interacting ability and stress, as well as possible biological stress responses.
Source: Medindia
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