Why Words Can Hurt Us Social Relationships, Stress, and Health

Many students and other readers of this volume are familiar with coming down with a nasty cold or some other flu-like virus or bacterial infection around the time of final exams and having to spend a good portion of their holidays in bed recovering. The mechanisms by which increased susceptibility to pathogens and illness follow particularly stressful social periods, activities, and disappointments are precisely what Flinn explores in his longrunning research among children in a rural community on the island nation of Dominica. He emphasizes that not only can sticks and stones “break (our) bones,” as in the famous folk saying, but additionally, the unkind words that act as substitutes for sticks and stones can still make children sick. Flinn explores the underlying physiological changes that are associated with social processes and interactions and how they affect or are affected by the human immune system. For example, children he studied in Dominica are more than twice as likely to become ill during the week following a stressful event than children who have not recently experienced any significant stressors. In general, he found that elevated levels of cortisol in response to stress seem to be part of a generalized resistance-lowering response. He broadens his research questions to discuss how and why, from an evolutionary perspective, subjective feelings are often necessary and used to negotiate, sustain, appease, and integrate ourselves into our respective groups and subgroups. Flinn shows here why the long period of childhood (and vulnerability to stress) serves a purpose, along with family systems, to mediate a child’s responses to stress, illustrating why understanding cortisol production alone is an insufficient measure by itself to provide a true picture of the relationship of stress and illness. Accordingly, stress related to social situations is but one part of a much larger human adaptive system necessary for acquiring survival-related information and for gaining practice in building and refining the “mental algorithms critical for negotiating social coalitions”—abilities key to the success of our species.