Latest / The XX Lab / Your Relationships Are Affecting Your Health More Than You Think | Dr. Rich Slatcher #20

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Your Relationships Are Affecting Your Health More Than You Think | Dr. Rich Slatcher #20 · The XX Lab

• speaker-0: Today on the XX Lab, I'm joined by Dr. Richard B. Slatcher. Rich is the Gail ⁓ Williamson Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Georgia, and he's one of the leading researchers studying relationships, stress, and health. In this conversation, we explore the profound effects that close relationships and social connection have on our physical and emotional well-being. We talk about why being around groups of other people at events and gatherings can leave us feeling energized and connected. The critical role that partner support plays in helping us cope with stress and the simple questions we can ask anyone that can help build intimacy and closeness surprisingly quickly. We also dive into why, despite the fact that so many of us crave community, making couple friends as adults can feel so unexpectedly hard. This is such a thoughtful, warm, and deeply practical conversation about connection, belonging, and what it really means to build closeness in our lives. If you want to better understand the science of relationships and learn how to create stronger connections in your own life, you're not going to want to miss this episode. This is the XX Lab. I'm Dr. Sarah Hill. Let's get started. Dr. Rich Slatcher, welcome to the XX Lab. speaker-1: Doctor Sarah Hill. Pleasure to be here. speaker-0: I'm so happy to see you. So you and I met in graduate school. We were both ⁓ PhD students at the University of Texas at Austin. And I was working with ⁓ David Buss, who of course is we had an evolutionary psychology lab there. And you worked with the incomparable Dr. Jamie Pennebaker, right? Who is most well known for his research on expressive writing, right? And I I was just wondering if you could tell the audience like what is expressive writing? Because I think that it's such a fascinating tool, ⁓ just because of how effective it is and and how easy it is for any of us to do. And then I'm just also wondering, like, is that what brought you to UT? Was it to to work on expressive writing and and better understand how we can impact our our health in in positive ways through the things that we do in in our relationships? speaker-1: That is a great question and one I haven't really thought about ⁓ in a in a long time. We we both ⁓ just to circle back on your original statement, we definitely both worked with legends in our time ⁓ in graduate school between David and ⁓ and Jamie. So it was a really exciting time to be in grad school. So very quickly, what expressive writing is. The basic idea behind this ⁓ that Jamie Pennebaker ⁓ pioneered was this idea that Writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings about the initial studies were done looking at traumatic experiences, showed a host of positive outcomes. ⁓ and especially intriguing to him and others were benefits for health. So that people, when they wrote about for like three days, 20 minutes a day about their deepest thoughts and feelings about traumatic experiences. experiences, it led to fewer physician visits, later on better immune system function, all kinds of health outcomes. That wasn't exactly what drew me to to working with him. I mean he he's kind of known for two big things, expressive writing and then language use. I was originally interested in studying ⁓ friendship and studying relationships. And I did a paper, I did not have ⁓ an undergrad degree in psychology. I I was ⁓ I thought I was gonna be an art historian, which is a whole other story. speaker-0: So is your undergraduate degree in art history? speaker-1: My undergrad degree ⁓ was in business administration with an art history minor, almost major, and it basically I'd had by middle of my junior year, I'd had all of my business classes out of the way. And I took in the fall of my junior year an art history class and then just took like a bunch and just really loved the subject and ended up working in the museum world for a while and yeah, didn't make my way down to Texas. ⁓ I moved to Austin on my thirtieth birthday. So I ha I did a bunch of stuff in between. speaker-0: Right. So what ultimately made you decide to work on your PhD in psychology? speaker-1: I think I kinda knew I wanted to be a professor. ⁓ I had ⁓ a mentor in art history where I went to undergrad at the University of Richmond and I don't know, it just seemed like a really cool lifestyle. You know, she was traveling to Paris doing research in the summer and ⁓ I just I don't know, it was like the first I I'd had some classes in high school that really got me intellectually engaged, not so much in the business classes. And yeah, it just seemed I I left college. You know, it just seemed like I could spend my life ⁓ being in this kind of an environment. You know, it's why I didn't go into art history. I mean you know, part of it was like I was intellectually really interested in it, but ⁓ at the time it was really focused focused on postmodernism, critical theory, ⁓ Foucault, Derrida, and I started reading the stuff and it was, you know, God bless people that that love reading that, but it It was like the driest thing I'd ever read. And it was very far from the the undergrad art history classes I took. So I ended up moving from the National Gallery of Art, ⁓ took a job at George Washington University, also in DC. My wife and I met in DC. And so I lived in DC for five years after college. I had been just so that I could get into the museum world, I was in the Office of External Affairs doing some fundraising, which like I kind of hated, but I was okay at it. And I moved to GW thinking, well, you know, I can take some classes for free here. That's part of the the perks of the job. I can work there and then, you know, kind of figure out what I want to do. And ⁓ my boss was my kind of big boss was the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. And I was just telling him, you know, psychology sounds kind of cool. My buddy Sean is ⁓ is getting his master's in psychology. That sounds kind of interesting. And he was a psych professor and actually it turned out had written an intro text. ⁓ that was in its seventh edition at the time, ⁓ Lester Lefton. And he's like the only Dean I've ever met that still taught. Like he taught a course a year. And so he's like, take my intro class. And he was this just dynamic lecturer. I mean, and and it was kind of like like love at first reading, which is funny because I actually took in college a a team taught intro site class in a huge lecture hall, hated it, got like a C plus or something. And but then when I took it, you know, at the second time, it was just I remember going home. I was so just kind of done with being a fundraiser and just reading through this intro psych textbook. Like for the first time, frankly, ⁓ because I had pretty severe undiagnosed ADD as a kid, like I could never get through textbooks. I could always go to class and and you know, I could kind of wing it in some ways. But this was like the first class that I remember like just really getting into the reading and like. having fun taking notes and highlighting and and it was kind of the the rest is sort of history in a way. So I was like, ⁓ this is cool. And then I took some more undergrad classes. These are all undergrad classes, you know, sticking in my mid-20s. And then I just thought, well, you know, I don't want to stick around and get a full like major in psychology. Maybe it'll give me a leg up if I take like a grad course or two. And I took this ⁓ course in ⁓ cross-cultural psychology with Professor Maria Cecilia Zaya. And had been starting being a volunteer in her j lab because I was starting to get interested in studying friendship. So this was sort of the seeds of that. I think I think it was in part driven by I I'd had great friends in in high school and college, but I had this really strong friend group that was a really cohesive friend group in in my twenties. And I was just really kind of intrigued by the psychology of of this group and why we were friends and Her lab studied friendship in a matter of sorts, sort of tangentially. She had a big NIH grant looking at when and how ⁓ Latino men who have sex with men came out about HIV diagnoses and to whom. And so this was the seeds of self-disclosure. She really studied self-disclosure. Why do people who have ⁓ a disease like this, which in the late 90s was still pretty darn stigmatized? And so I got interested in that that sort of as a process. And I took her cross-cultural psychology class. And I wasn't that inter I actually am interested in cross-cultural psychology now. It's kind of the irony, but I wasn't interested in sort of the traditional sense of cross-cultural psychology at the time, like comparing people from different countries of origin. I thought, well, it'd be kind of cool to study, you know, I'm fascinated learning more about self-disclosure, why guys are so not disclosing. There I there's a a a a phrase in the research world that ⁓ women's friendships are face to face and men's friendships are side to side, right? And that's essentially the lower level levels of self-disclosure in a nutshell. So I did this paper on this is a really long answer to your question, so you can edit a lot of this out. But I ended up taking ⁓ I you know taking this class and I wrote this paper. I got permission from from Maria Cecilia to write a paper. It Does not sound at all cross-cultural, but she approved it. Older men's friendships and the role of self-disclosure. ⁓ kind of comparing them to women's friendships, because I also was interested, like, you know, across the lifespan, like what happens, you know, when dudes retire and I'm like inching closer and closer. ⁓ I'm not retiring anytime soon, but like I'm closer to retirement than I am to the beginning of my career. So that kind of I in in writing that paper, I came across Jamie's stuff about self-disclosure. And You know, it just I I was kind of interested in this idea. I the the s expressive writing, that was cool and stuff. But there it turns out at the time at least, there are like very few social psychologists who study friendship. Most of them were in developmental psychology. I thought about being a developmental psychologist just so I could study friendship, but I didn't really want to study kids per se. I wanted to study adults. And so he was on my list. And then I went to APA, ⁓ the APA conference, which Didn't know at time, like no social psychologists go to. I was, I think, my first and last, literally, APA convention in like 2000. And I saw Jamie give a talk and it was like all over. I mean, you know, you've seen him speak before. He's an incredibly dynamic speaker. And he was starting to get into this work on language and sort of the social psychology of everyday word use. And it was kind of that, and him starting to use this device, ⁓ that that he and ⁓ Matias Mel, who we also went to grad school with, came up with the electronically activated recorder, which which listens in on people's everyday social lives. And it was sort of that, like the disclosure kind of got me hooked, but it was this method. Jamie's really a methods guy, and he's all about studying everyday life. And I was like, this sounds awesome. Like ⁓ it was just like this excitement that was in the air when he talked. And I was like, I want to. He is not a relationship researcher at all, really. I mean, he would probably say that he is, but he's not. Not in the traditional sense. And so I just thought, well, this would be cool to like apply these he these techniques that that he and his students are using to relationships. speaker-0: What's what's really funny, I I can't believe that you and I haven't talked about our origin stories, but you know, I was actually an anthropology major as an undergraduate. And like you, I took a psychology class. ⁓ I took it, I think it was my sophomore year. Now, unlike you, I didn't get a C because I dropped it. Because I was like, this is like this is like the this is the dumbest stuff I've ever heard. Cause they started off with Freud, right? And like this doesn't account for human nature because I I was just really un like really interested in human nature. Right. And so like, why are people the way that they are? And so I ended up taking again, just like you, I ended up in anthropology because it seemed to get a little bit closer to the heart of it. And it was I I I really got into evolutionary biology. I thought it was super interesting and and it wasn't anything I really had any familiarity with from from high school. But when I went to college, I like was serious and ⁓ so I so I fell in love with evolutionary biology, but ultimately I was interested in why people do what they do. And so I took psychology. I'm like, ⁓ that doesn't, you know, that's and so drop that. And then I had to read a bunch of philosophy for these classes. And and and like you, I was like, well, this isn't right either. You know, I was like, and yeah, I was like Foucault and these structuralists like explaining the way that society sort of shapes you. And I'm like, that doesn't feel right to me. Like, I'm like, I don't, I don't, I'm not just a passive vehicle for the thrust of you know, culture and institutions. Like, I was like, I don't believe that either. And so I spent a lot of time just kind of trying to figure. out where the truth was in terms of understanding human behavior. And then I ended up accidentally somersaulting my way into a class called ⁓ human sociobiology and evolution evolutionary psychology. And that David Buss's textbook was what we read in that book, along with another book of edited, you know, sort of peer-reviewed journal articles. And then it was like, aha, you know, it was like the the light bulb went off. And so anyway, so you and I speaker-1: Were you not were you also not a psych major? speaker-0: Mm-mm. I was anthropology. And I actually I actually went to UT Austin to if you okay so here's here's my story. I'm gonna end up hijacking this episode and make it all about. speaker-1: No, I love it. I mean I love I mean I mean I y it it is easy to get me to to wax nostalgic about right. speaker-0: Yeah. I love it. Yeah. Yeah, no, I loved it too. It was like it was a time in my life and one of the times of my life, I should say. But what so it was so crazy. I actually moved to Austin. So I was actually set to go to grad school. I was gonna go to Columbia and my plan was to go to Columbia University, ⁓ New York. I love New York. I got in, I got a really nice scholarship. In anthropology. ⁓ Yes, in anthropology. And ⁓ and and UT Austin was on my list and I applied there and I also got in. speaker-1: Anthrop. speaker-0: ⁓ and they also gave me money. They didn't give me as much money as Columbia gave me. And ⁓ and I got a pair of of wool socks for my birthday from my cousin because I was gonna be moving to New York to go to Columbia. And it was in grad school decision time. And I grew up in Wisconsin. I went to my undergraduate institution was in Wisconsin, and I opened up these wool socks and I just started to cry. And and it was because the weather was miserable. And and it's, you know, in up in Wisconsin, the weather was always miserable. And I was like, I blew everybody's mind. I ended up turning down Columbia and I ended up going to UT Austin for anthropology. ⁓ just because I felt like I just needed a total change of pace. You know, I was like, it was like I was the cold and the gray and the I was like, I just need I just I just need to get out and do something totally different. And so I turned my Whole plans that I had for myself completely upside down. I moved down to Texas for anthropology. And then it turned out that anthropology was terri a terrible fit for me because it was more of the cultural construction, you know, everything is a a social construction and and sex differences aren't real. And it's just the you're just you've just bought into the patriarchy. And I was like, this is like I didn't buy into the pay, you know, it's like I didn't buy into the patriarchy, you know. And you were expecting No, I wasn't. And it was like in it and it was like this weird left-wing political group is what it felt like. And I was just like, I and I was like talking about biology and whatever. And so I was in a drop out. So here's my long saw software. So what year this this is 2000. I moved to Austin in the summer of 2000. I started graduate school in the fall of 2000 and ⁓ working in the anthropology department. speaker-1: What year is this? speaker-0: And ⁓ and all of this was happening, and it was the worst time of my life. And I remember you know at the library at UT, how they have ⁓ you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. It's like carved into stone, like above the library. I remember because I had like totally bought into this idea of of evolved psychology and that we've inherited these predispositions and all of this. And everybody was telling me that I was crazy and had been brainwashed by the patriarchy, you know, in the in the anthropology department. I remember seeing that sign and just like crying, like this is overly dramatic moments. But I didn't know that David Buss was there. And I had read his textbook as an undergrad. And it's it's what totally gave me the paradigm shift that led me ultimately to pursue the research I pursued. And I was going through the course offerings because I was gonna drop all my anthropology classes and move back to Wisconsin and then just figure out what I was gonna do next. And I so I was gonna drop my classes and just replace them with like pottery, you know, or like or like kite flying 101 or something. And so I was going through the course offerings to figure out what to take, and I saw his name there. And I sent him this like long, tearful email explaining my plight that I had been. Introduced to evolutionary psychology and it was the way I saw the world. And I was in this anthropology program because I'm interested in human nature and I thought it was going to be this and it ended up being that. And could I please sit in on your graduate seminar? And he let me do it. And then the rest was history. And I applied to get into ⁓ his lab the next year. So I started in the psych program in 2001, the year after I moved to Austin. speaker-1: I was trying 'cause I thought I thought we were like one year apart that I came a year later. You graduated in ⁓ six or ⁓ seven? speaker-0: ⁓ six. ⁓ six. But but December of ⁓ six. Yeah. So I actually I gr I defended my dissertation in December of ⁓ six and then I had my daughter, my oldest child, ⁓ two weeks later. speaker-1: Really? I don't think I realized that. I knew you had kids, but I actually had both of my kids in Austin. speaker-0: ⁓ did you really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I i it's so funny because I have ⁓ you know, so many so many of my PhD students are women and I'm I just tell them, like, look, if you wanna have kids, you just need you just need to do it. speaker-1: figure it out. I mean never there's never an ideal time, right? Really that's really interesting. I had no idea that we had Yeah. Similarity. Yeah. speaker-0: Mm. No. Yeah. Yeah. So you moved to you moved to Austin, you're working with Jamie, and you're gonna be applying his cool tools to better understand friendship. And since then, I mean, you have built a com this huge career on essentially, well, there's a lot of different avenues, but like a a lot of it revolves around the positive health benefits, right, of relationships that we have. One of the things that you're most well known for is this work that looks at the the relationship between the quality of the relationships that we have and then also the process of self-disclosure in relationships and then how that influences our health. And ⁓ and I think that for a lot of people who are listening, this might actually be one of their first introductions to this idea because most of the time when people think about health, right, they think about avoiding toxins and they think about the quality of their diet and they think about making sure that they're getting enough sleep. And ⁓ and they think about exercise, but they don't really think about the quality of their relationships. And so I want you to tell us like how do our relationships impact our health and just tell us a little bit about the research on on this. speaker-1: So I'll start with kind of the most compelling set of findings in the field. And that is when you look at all the the studies that have been done that have included measures of social connection in large epidemiological studies. And by that I mean, you know, these these large panel studies of thousands of people where invariably they'll have some social kinds of connection, sorts of measures in there. How many friends do you have? Are you married? That sort of thing. And a study came out in ⁓ 1988 by Deborah Uberson, who is ⁓ who was at UT at the time, and and James House, who's at University of Michigan, ⁓ came out on science and they looked at like 10 of these large studies, and they showed the ⁓ the links between ⁓ social integration, how socially connected people are, and mortality. And it was like every single one of these studies. all went in the same direction. The more socially integrated that you were, the longer you lived. About 10 years ago, Julianne Holt Lundstead, whose name you're probably familiar with, did this huge meta-analysis, essentially looking at the same thing, but in this case was like hundreds of thousands of people and is now I think one of the most, if not the most widely cited psychology paper like ever. She found the exact same thing. And it there the effects are huge. I mean when I talk about this, I have a a figure from from that paper of hers. And ⁓ I talked about this work. ⁓ a lot of our work ⁓ looking at relationships and health has been done using something called the MIDIS data set, which is actually housed at University of Wisconsin. And so I was I was there ⁓ giving a talk and there it's it's all different kinds of researchers, some like psychology, some health. And there was this physical activity exercise researcher that came up right before me. And she said that it is hard to overestimate. the effect of physical activity on people's health and longevity. So I came up next and I had this figure. And I'm showing all of these different ⁓ health behaviors like smoking or not smoking rather, ⁓ exercising, eating well, all these kinds of things, right? And and and exercising is up there. And I turned to the speaker from before me and I said, I don't mean to get competitive, but then I reveal this is the effect of social relationships on health. And it's like, double the size of all of those except for smoking, in terms of its, you know, it's an opposite effect. But so I have some doubts about some findings, ⁓ and we can talk about that in terms of like really getting a a a good handle on what the biological mechanisms are, but that finding I'm utterly convinced about. And it it there's a there are very strong links between social connection and health. And so that led me then to because I studied for for most of my career I've studied ⁓ intimate relationships and so I just started looking at I I did a postdoc so so you you you talked about how it it made you cry thinking about moving to New York. When I was dragging my wife across the country for graduate school right after we got married, I wanted to try to find places that both would be really good for me for grad school, also be places that ⁓ we would want to live. And it so happened that they were warm places. I I foolishly only applied to two places, ⁓ UCLA and which is known for kind of almost inventing relationship science in social psychology, and UT Austin. Didn't get into UCLA, got into UT Austin, but then ended up doing a postdoc at UCLA, who I hadn't realized at the time when I was applying grad school, also sort of invented health psychology. And so I did an NIH postdoc there. And just started thinking about applying the stuff that I'd been looking at in in in dating relationships and married couples. And I had started in grad school with Michelle Fellows, ⁓ who ⁓ was in our program looking at parent-child interactions in health. And so that kind of got me into, you know, it's it's social, and a lot of the same kinds of of positive interactions that adults have in other relationships also kind of apply process-wise to parent-child relationships. And so yeah, I just started do you know, learning about the immune system and psychoneuroimmunology and and all this and and it felt very sciencey. And they were also ⁓ getting a lot of grants. And, you know, I got a job ⁓ at Wayne State University where I was ⁓ I I loved my colleagues there. I actually really loved ⁓ Detroit. It was really a cool place to be ⁓ at that time when when it sort of hit rock bottom and then had this renaissance. But I found the weather soul crushing. And so, especially the the cloudiness, which you don't actually have as much on the other side of the lake. And so ⁓ at at Wayne State, they had a wonderful medical school. And so that really gave me an opportunity to really go full force into the health psych stuff. And I just kind of ended up doing mostly that for a while. I still kept a foothold in basic social psychology, but it really wasn't until I came ⁓ to to s the sunny south ⁓ to Georgia ⁓ in ⁓ Two thousand and nineteen, right about the time that you and I last saw each other, when I kind of I I I I I really started getting back to my roots of basic social psychology and relationships. speaker-0: I want to circle back to something that ⁓ that you said that I was curious about. And it was talking about the mechanisms linking social relationships and health. And you said that you you had some thoughts on that in terms of like what the mechanisms are and maybe what mechanisms potentially have been overhyped. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on mechanistically, like if you can walk listeners through like what are the usual suspects when people are are discussing these links? Like what do they think is ultimately driving the relationships between social connection and health. speaker-1: So here's the thing. There's no doubt that the immune system and other related systems like the system that produces the stress hormone cortisol, that those things are in some way implicated in the links between social connection and health. But about the same time that we in social psychology were having this reckoning about our findings not reproducing. Health psychology really, in a lot of ways, has yet to even have that reckoning. They've talked about it. I I'm finally seeing colleagues really starting to pre-register things. But I started having, and I don't know if you've talked about this on your podcast podcast, and I won't I won't dwell on it, but just it it started getting me concerned about the reproducibility of my own findings in health psychology because some of my samples were incredibly small. I remember back in graduate school, Prange Meta. I don't know it If you if you, you know, were friends with him at all in grad school, but he was my buddy. We were office mates for like three years. And I remember our first year, I almost said freshman year, our first year of grad school just talking about this like seeking truth, right? And which kind of touches on what you were saying about like not wanting to go into anthropology where they had the the sort of you know positional statements. You really wanted to just find the truth. And we would complain about. Like how you couldn't publish null findings even from a really great design study. And it's so heartening to see, at least in social psychology, you can publish in really good journals well-designed studies that don't have statistically significant effects. But that was impossible when we were in grad school. I mean, you just couldn't. It would just go in the dustbin, right? Forever. speaker-0: I've been really pleased with that too, that when you have a well-designed study and especially if it falls from a well-articulated theory and and then you can ⁓ publish the results saying like this didn't work. And it's and I think that it's so helpful, not only in terms of just like bringing moving science forward and making it more transparent and making sure that you know everybody's dotting their I's and crossing their T's the same way when they're trying to replicate other people's work. And it also saves you from how many. I mean, how many times have you probably and I know I've done this, I'm sure that I've run a thousand studies that ⁓ somebody else has also already run that I didn't need to run. It's just i you know, because it didn't work for me and it probably didn't work for them. speaker-1: And then you talk to them at a conference and they're like, Yeah, I did that. ⁓ yeah. Yeah, I tried that too. It didn't work out. Yeah. Like speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, that didn't work out. Yeah. Yeah. I know. That's no, that's yeah, no, I've had I've had that experience more times than I can count, where it's like we all come up with the same idea, we all test it, and yeah, it's like, well, it's really surprising, nobody's looked at this before. And it's like it turns out everybody's looked at it before. Right. And it's just that it never worked. And so and so it was wrong. And so it's I'd like I'm so glad. speaker-1: A lot of time and like just seeing my students, you know, being able to publish stuff for, you know, for the sake of their careers, but most importantly for the sake of science. And so so health psychology is just is still in a lot of ways like plagued by small samples. I have to say, some of the very best work in this area is is being done at UGA. I have some amazing c colleagues in health psychology that are getting big samples. ⁓ Justin Labner, Steve Beach. Katie Ehrlich, they're doing like interventions with like families of like three, four hundred, which is, you know, not the biggest sample, but like by intervention psychology standard standards, like longitudinal studies, like that kind of stuff. And that and that was why one of the reasons why I really gravitated to a MyDAS study and using that data set. I think we have, I don't know, 15, 20 publications or something using that data set was because they were big samples. So I thought, well, I'm less likely to just be. like that this is just smoke, that this is something actually concrete, something real. But you know, I did notice at at the time that I was noticing health psychology wasn't really reckoning with this. I also noticed that like in delving into the older research on biomarkers, that like health psychologists would hop from this biomarker to this biomarker to this biomarker. For a long time now it's been ⁓ Pro inflammatory cytokines. So you asked what I study. That's one of the things. It's it's a it's an immune marker of inflammation. It does a billion different things. Trying to even capture effects of social connection or disconnection on some biomarker that fluctuates a ton during the day, that is much more driven by something like what you ate than than probably my relationship. I studied ⁓ cortisol for a long time. I published a lot on ⁓ the circadian rhythm to to the stress hormone cortisol where we'll do studies of relationships in daily life and ⁓ look at say for four seven days the way that that cortisol cortisol is supposed to start high to get you ready for the day for energy mobilization and the decline throughout the course of the day and and basically the the the steeper the decline the the sort of quote healthier and so we found that partner responsiveness which is the the flip side of self-disclosure intimacy is driven by two key ingredients, self disclosure, opening up about yourself, and then how the other person responds. So I I really have kind of focused much of my career on that other side of the corn, on how responsive people are. Your head nodding, making eye contact, that kind of thing. speaker-0: So one of the big findings that that you have and that they publish on over the the years, as you noted, is this idea of partner responsiveness to self-d self-disclosure. And and and correct me if I misread this, but my reading of the literature that that a lot of which you wrote is that the positive health benefits that a person gets from self-disclosure are driven in large part by how it's taken by their partner. Is that right? So that if they're partner is sort of responding well to it, right? And that it's creating intimacy as it is ult ultimately usually the the the motivation of the person who's self-disclosing is that they're trying to build intimacy and that it's a lot of that depends on how it's taken by their partner. speaker-1: Yeah, I I think that's right. Yeah. I mean, if you're self disclosing and the person to whom you're self disclosing is is bored or, you know, looking at their phone or ⁓ critical of what you're saying, all there are all kinds of ways people be can be pursued perceived as excuse me, unresponsive. Yeah, and and we find that ⁓ yeah, that the more responsive partners are, the more responsive the parents are. This is one of the you know, the ways that I was able to sort of go back and forth between studying parent-child interactions and intimate relationships for a while because responsiveness is a super key ingredient to both, right? It's it's the basis of attachment theory, like the extent to which kids are attached to their caregivers and have secure attachment styles. And now because of TikTok, I don't even have to tell your listeners what attachment theory is because they know. So responsiveness in in in early in infancy of the of the caregiver, typically ⁓ the mom, ⁓ is associated with more secure attachment. And in our intimate relationships, it's a super, super important thing that leads to us feeling ⁓ more satisfied in our relationships, ⁓ better physical health, better subjective well being, all those things. speaker-0: So I think it's a great and and obviously ⁓ the the data are what the data are. But here's why I don't like it. Like here's what I don't like about that finding is that I feel like it puts so much ⁓ in the hands of another person, right? Like I feel like it like like like that's not very like agentic, right? I feel like I lose agency over my own health when I learn that one of the big sort of health benefits that I get from relationships is something that I don't really have a lot of control over. Right. I have control over what what I w if I disclose, right? I don't have control over ⁓ whether or not somebody ⁓ affirms me in the the way that I want them to or, you know, and so I guess I do have control over who I choose as a partner. speaker-1: Exactly. So like it comes back to your personality and your personality is going to be driving the kinds of people that you're attracted to and let's like small A attraction, like not just like intimate partners but like friends and it also ⁓ drives how you perceive that responsiveness. In in the way that Harry Reese sort of thought about responsiveness when he came up with this process model for intimacy, a really important thing that's often overlooked when people talk about but but gets at what you're saying. Is the filter through which we see other people's actions. And so the attributions we make about people and and like, you know, people who are are more anxiously attached, they're gonna they're gonna see less responsiveness than a person who's securely attached in the exact same situation. So there's certainly agency in it, but there has to be in the links between social connection and health, just by definition, there's a partner effect, right? There is something. somebody else is doing. It's not just you like acting in a vacuum. There's some lack of agency, but I think it's I I like to think of it more as dyadic, as a dance back and forth. speaker-0: Right. If you are have a romantic partner and you're trying to build intimacy in your relationship and you aren't feeling like your partner's responding in the way that you want or in in a way that is sort of affirming your disclosure, ⁓ do you have any recommendations about I mean, do people just need to find different partners? Or is there like are we is is there some sort of ⁓ training or is does does the way that our partner responds to us, does that get sort of does the effect of that, the positive effect of that get diluted at all if we have to train our partner to respond to us the way that we need to be responded to? speaker-1: So there's a lot of kind of little questions in there. It it does definitely depend, you know. I mean, like how long have you been with a partner? Are there lots of other great things about the partner? I mean, speaking from personal experience, I think I've worked at becoming a better listener just in general, but you know, especially with my spouse, my wife, ⁓ you know, who I love and care deeply about. And one has to be motivated to do so. So like it might come about because of ⁓ you know, the partner bringing this up. And and that leads me to the point, hard conversations are are hard to have, right? And so if it's like early in a relationship, you're not gonna be going to therapy for this. You you might fish and cut bait. If they're just if you know, I would say first, like bring it up and and and and this is good practice for having hard conversations. These are not easy things to bring up to your partner. Like you're kind of a shitty listener. You know, you can say it in like a In a nicer way than that. But like if it's further along and it's a a sort of a recurring problem, couples therapy is wonderful for this sort of thing. I mean, I've had all kinds of therapy in my life, including couples therapy and ⁓ you know, working at communication skills ⁓ i it's really useful for that, but one needs to be motivated to change. Therapy in any sense is only going to work if you are motivated to to want to change. speaker-0: Can you tell us about the strength and strain model of relationship quality? And like ultimately, like what does that tell us? Like, why why did you develop that model and how can we use those insights to make our own relationships better? speaker-1: Yeah, so the basic idea behind this, this is something that I developed with ⁓ my colleague Emory Silchuk at a Turkish university. And actually he's ⁓ he and his wife Gul Ganaiden are sending ⁓ a student of theirs to be a ⁓ in my PhD in in our PhD program as a as a student in my lab ⁓ starting in the fall, which I'm excited about. But he and I really worked on this idea. The idea behind it is that so a lot of the the earliest work ⁓ in relationships and health. ⁓ was done by ⁓ Sheldon Cohen ⁓ at Carnegie Mellon, a social psychologist who really, I mean, you can't he had such an enormous impact on this area of research. And he had this thing called the stress buffering hypothesis, the idea being that ⁓ social support ⁓ could buffer the negative effects of stress on your health. There'd been other work ⁓ showing that ⁓ conflict was bad for your health. That kind of came from clinical psychology. But then like nobody really I was kind of shocked to see when I was in my postdoc at UCLA, most of the people in this area studying relationships and health were in clinical psychology. Clinical psychologists tended to at the time really focus on conflict. You know, your your listeners might be familiar with some of the work of of ⁓ John Gottman, who studied couples in the lab and how they ⁓ resolve conflict predicts ⁓ whether or not they stay together or get divorced, but it also predicts ⁓ health. So a lot of the work had been done looking at at conflict ⁓ or like basic measures of of relationship satisfaction. But as a as a a trained experimental social psychologist, I there was this whole other world of relationship stuff that people had been researching for 40 plus years. And it was like these two areas weren't really talking to one another. And so that ⁓ Model was really an outgrowth of my basic training in social psychology and in basic relationship science. And then over here, all of the stuff that I learned as a postdoc ⁓ at UCLA. And the basic idea is that you have this group of stuff over here, relationship strengths, and that includes responsiveness, self-disclosure, commitment. Intimacy, lots of things. And then you have relationship strain on the other side, conflict, ⁓ infidelity, ⁓ attentiveness to attractive alternatives, you c you know, you name it. And it's just sort of tried to consolidate some of the things that we know about just basic things about relationships, but hadn't yet been studied in the context of physical health, to sort of try to give a roadmap for studying. how some of these things might play out. And, you know, there was some data for some of those connections, but then a lot of a lot of it was just conjecture based on what I know about just how relationships work. speaker-0: Right. So relationships can have like so this stress buffering idea, which has been around for a really long time. It's just this ⁓ this idea that our relationships, one of the primary ways that they h improve our health or are linked with positive health outcomes is that they can mitigate and buffer the negative, harmful physical effects of stress, right? Because we know that stress is bad for you know, it can cause exaggerated inflammatory activity and it can cause cardiovascular ⁓ events and all these other things. And ⁓ relationship partners sort of tap the brakes on that a little bit. And so our it sort of mellows the effects of the stress on us physically. And so what you're saying is that when you created this model, that it's essentially taking in all of the different factors that influence the c quality of a relationship. Am I understanding that? Like so like speaker-1: But then kind of dividing that up into the things that that ⁓ decrease quality ⁓ and then the things that increase quality. speaker-0: So d so is it like do the things kind of cancel each other out? So like if you've got like ten positives and ten negatives, I mean I'm sure that it's more complicated. speaker-1: No, I I'm I'm I'm sighing because it's like i i is a question we haven't figured out yet. One of the things that I'm working on now, the only gift of the pandemic I can think about is that it's led to ⁓ a wonderful set of collaborations that I've had ⁓ for the past we started in March of twenty twenty with Rhonda Balzarini who ⁓ studies ⁓ sexual satisfaction, sexual desire just up the road ⁓ from you, ⁓ at Texas State University. ⁓ and Julia Zapolot, who ⁓ is a a postdoc now, but was in grad school at the time in the Netherlands, student of Francesca Ruggetty, a social psychologist. And so we started studying COVID, but then have now just like kept our we could we we were just talking about this. We met yesterday. We're it's still we still call it like our COVID team, but it has nothing to do with COVID anymore. It's just like we love working together and we meet once a month and we we're developing collaborations. And one of the things that we're looking at is ambivalence in relationships. So that's kind of like how the positives and the negatives work in concert, which we're still sort of trying to figure out, like basically how, you know, it you can have high negatives and and that's usually associated with low positives. Now you can have high positives and that's usually associated with low negatives. But then sometimes you can have high both of those things, leading to feelings of ambivalence. We think that those things ⁓ act synergistically, but they're There's very few studies that I know that have looked at that. And the the issue, partly, I think, or my my hesitancy of doing some of that work is that any personality psychologist will tell me, Flatcher, you need like thousands of people to look r reliably look at this small effect on health in an interaction, which is basically how the positives and the negative interact with each other statistically. So You could do that though in a study like Midas or one of these really that that would be the perfect kind of data set, something where you have anywhere between two thousand, ten thousand people where you could test that. But but short answer, that was the long answer. Short answer is we don't know exactly how those things work together. speaker-0: Okay, but but but you you're guessing that they do. speaker-1: I'm guessing that they do. I don't think you know, I do think the the adage of I think this ⁓ was Roy Baumeister that f first said bad is stronger than good. I do think there's something to that, right? When things are you know, when something really bad happens, somebody has an affair, ⁓ you have a big fight, like that has that can have ⁓ a worse impact than than positive. So I think that's probably the case when it comes to speaker-0: It's really interesting, like because ⁓ I I think that that is absolutely gotta be the case, right? And and I I think it's like true in in natural it just like across the board, right? The negativity bias and it's like n losses loom greater than gains and and all of that. And I think that I think that that same pattern would also be guiding the way that ⁓ the different factors in our relationships like impact health. speaker-1: Pay more you we pay more attention to that. You I don't know if like the ⁓ I forget what the the ratio is. Barbara Frederickson has had talked about this, like ratio of positive experiences to negative experiences. I'm not sure, you know, that we have a a good handle on that, but speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. And the research that ⁓ that that Rich is talking about there is that there's a magic ratio of the number of positive to number of negative interactions you have to have ⁓ with your partner in order for it to be considered like a good or quality relationship. I've I don't remember what the ratio is. Is it I three three to one? speaker-1: Take three point one four out of pie. I don't know. speaker-0: Yeah, and that's like tie. Yeah. I'll I'll I'll put that in the show notes, folks, so that we can make sure that your ratios are not off. I wanna ask quick about sex differences in this because there is, you know, we know from ⁓ a great deal of research that there seems to be Yeah, no, well, no, but we know not not this is not my research, but like we know that ⁓ that w that men tend to reap the health benefits from relationships more than women do. And it's also the case that I mean when you look at just in terms of well being. So if we sort of move outside the speaker-1: By Dr. Sarah Hill. speaker-0: traditional domain of health and look also at just like wellness and well-being ⁓ and satisfaction that men tend to benefit more than women do ⁓ in a lot of different ways when it comes to their like sort of overall well-being and ⁓ in terms of their health benefits. And I'm wondering whether you have any thoughts on why that is and how women might be able to reap some more health benefits from their relationship. speaker-1: It's super interesting. And it really ties kind of together my interest in friendship, which I still have in the study of friendship, and my interest in intimate relationships, which I still have. And it's it's a pretty robust finding. Men tend to benefit more from intimate relationships in terms of health and well-being. Why is that the case? Because I think to many it might seem counterintuitive. And the the simplest explanation that's been put forward, and I think it makes a lot of sense and there's data to back it up, is that women just tend to have a broader social network from which they can draw on. So if if ⁓ for guys, they tend to at least in in heterosexual relationships, they really tend to rely on their spouses a lot. For all of their emotional needs. Eli Finkel talks about, he doesn't talk about the sex difference, but he talks about this idea in his all or nothing marriage idea that in 21st century America, especially, we tend to rely on our spouses to like satisfy all of our like self esteem needs. And he doesn't really talk about gender much, but I think that is especially true for men who, you know, are lucky if they have like two or three good friends. For me, if I have some buddies that I can go see music with in Athens or go play golf with or go watch the dogs beat up on SMU and in football, I'm pretty low maintenance when it comes to that. I my I you know, I have my needs. And certainly it's great when my friendships get to that next level. And but I only have a few people like that that are really the kind of friends that like when something terrible happens in my life, I'm willing to disclose it to them and talk about it and and stuff. And so for the most part, all of that, you know, gets funneled to my wife. So this is a a very robust finding, but when when men are widowed, they marry much more quickly than than ⁓ when women ⁓ lose a spouse. ⁓ and it's not that ⁓ men are necessarily more heartless and get over it more quickly. It's that they really miss that social connection that having a spouse brings. speaker-0: Don't you think there's also some caregiving element of that too? Where I think that sometimes with ⁓ definite with men where they're like they want somebody to take care of them. And for women that they might be slower to do it because they're like, I'm not like I'm not picking up somebody else's socks. Like I like I don't need to do that again. speaker-1: Like like if my wife didn't remind me when I need to get my passport renewed, we'd be going to France and I'd be like, ⁓ my God, my passport expired six months ago. Like I'm screwed. Right. You know, like definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Sh I definitely get more out of the relationship in that way than she does for sure. in terms of the caregiving and that sort of just kind of taking care of stuff. Yeah. Absolutely. One of the findings in health is that men are much healthier when they're married than not. Women I I don't even know if there's if there's a there might be an effect, but it's much, much smaller. Women are just better at at getting their spouses to kind of go eat better. You know, part of that's you know, if if they they tend to do more of the housework and cook and there's all kinds of gender disparities in that regard still. But ⁓ men tend to benefit from those things and I'm not saying that women nag more than men do, but nagging can serve a a very useful purpose to get people to go to the gym and like, you know. speaker-0: Right. Well, yeah, it's so funny because it's like that definitely gets ⁓ I mean, the idea of nagging, it's it's the even the word is it's pejorative. It totally is. It sounds annoying. Even the word sounds annoying. It's like I'm annoyed hearing it. But if it didn't exist, then I think there's some men who would go to work without their pants on. Yeah. And and the dishwasher would never be emptied and nobody would get their annual physical done. And so I think men would benefit from ⁓ like taking a little bit more responsibility for their health, right? And I think that we can agree that that that would sort of pr prevent that problem to some extent. It would be great if women didn't have to remind men to do all of these things and then be the ones who have to bear the cost, you know, of being seen as a nag because you're like reminding somebody to do the things that they're supposed to be doing anyway in order to take care of themselves. But I do think that just being reminded of the fact that ⁓ that, you know, these ultimately ⁓ are changes that generally lead to better health and and better well being. speaker-1: Yeah, I mean and the longer you're with a partner, you know, hopefully, you know, you y you see that they have your your best it interests generally at heart in good relationships. Yeah, so I totally agree. speaker-0: you were quoted in a New York Times article about couple friends. And I want to talk to you about couple friends because they're so tricky and so many people want them. And like, you know, I see people's vacation photos with their couple friends on Instagram or whatever. And I'm like, you know, I want that in my life. And and there was a time in my life when I had that and then people moved away. And so it's like everybody wants to have the good couple friends, right? Because then their kids can play together and all these really great things. ⁓ but it can be so challenging. So I want you to tell me about what about couple friends and why it is that it's so challenging and what some of the benefits and drawbacks are of having these relationships. speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, ⁓ so so to sort of circle back to an earlier part of our conversation, sort of my origin story, so to speak, you know, I was really interested in studying friendship. Turned out there were a lot more people studying intimate relationships. So basically all the studies I did in grad school were intimate relationships, but sort of as an homage to our our really close friend group during our DC days, my dissertation was about couple friendships. And it was about like, you know, literally like two. two couples getting together, but w in designing that study, I really ⁓ it wasn't in my mind just about couples. It was like you could have we had ⁓ a a a couple close friends that the two of us, my wife and I, had together, who we would hang out with like individually, like the three of us, but like in designing a study, that can be complicated. When you have an unacquainted ⁓ couple meeting with ⁓ somebody they've never met before, could be a man, could be a woman or otherwise. And there could there's a when there's a possibility for like Spark, we didn't want that to kind of complicate things. But so I say that as a caveat to all this research that it doesn't just have to be couples with couples. I think it's this sort of basic friendship phenomenon going on here ⁓ that can happen with individuals and couples as well. ⁓ couple friendships ⁓ are really hard. It's hard to find good f individual friends. My wife will tell you that, so she's one of five girls. In her family. And she often says that, like every time, you know, you add one more person to into the mix, things get more complicated. Right. And so when you're talking about a couple friendship, you know, you're talking about four people interacting with each other in all of these different possible ways. Right. And so that means like for really a couple friendship to work well, all four people have to like every other person in that group. That's really hard to achieve. And so, ⁓ you know, we are lucky if we have one or two or three really good couple friends. I think it came out in that New York Times piece that came out, ⁓ I think either I misspoke or it was misconstrued that ⁓ and I didn't catch it, that I I said one or two couple friends like in one's lifetime. What I meant is like at a any given time, any point in your life. I feel like, you know, we have that in in Athens, we had some of that in in Detroit. And it's it's hard. You have to make compromises. You're gonna ask them speaker-0: ⁓ no, what I was gonna say is that like I find ⁓ that the thing that's so interesting about these kinds of dynamics when you're with your romantic partner and then you're going out with this other couple is that I think that it can set up all sorts of questioning of like, well well, you know, like it can make you self-conscious of yourself. It can make you self-conscious of your partner, it can make you like wonder, like, like, you know, if it's not clicking, like I think that it can that it can create, ⁓ that it can create issues where you second guess like wait like it's I I think that it can make you see the worst in your partner. It can make you see the best in your partner. And I'm sure that the r and and the reverse is true. You know, where it's like like if if these other people are really liking you, yeah, then your partner is going to think like, Wow, you know, I made a really great choice with my speaker-1: Totally. And that's exactly what what I had found in my dissertation was that when you looked ⁓ and there was a gender difference. I can't remember the specific thing, but basically the more responsive the other couple was to your partner, the closer you felt to your own partner after that interaction. When, you know, we used we used self-disclosure to basically build these couple friendships. We had them go through ⁓ Art Aaron has this thing called the fast friends that that everybody in our field ha has heard about. using that term, most of your listeners who are not psychologists would know about it because of the I forget how many questions there are, twenty-three questions, something like that, to fall in love. That I think was the that was the most shared New York Times ⁓ article ever. ⁓ but the basic speaker-0: I'll share a link in in speaker-1: Yeah, that that that's a that that we use that all the time in my class. It's it's it's a remarkably effective at building ⁓ feelings of closeness between people that have never met before. They're basically just like fun questions that the couples would go around and each one of the four would answer like, What's a what's a perfect day for you? And they would talk about some negative stuff, like, you know, kind of you know, what's the best memory of your life? What's the worst memory of your life? So they would get into some stuff and it it increases in self disclosure across forty five minutes and it was amazing. We had I mean, these people had never met before. And when we followed up with couples like a a month later, like a third of them had become friends in in real life. And that doesn't happen. You know, a third of the couples you meet, you don't become friends with right away. It's a fact. But that that's kind of speaks to the power of self disclosure, that it speeds up that process. And you know, and and then, you know, it was only through me self disclosing my origin story that we discovered that connection that we have and sort of somewhat similar origin stories, right? So yeah, so there's that reflection that we saw that you're seeing when they're rif responding in a positive way to your partner. I think what we're seeing is like, ⁓ they like my partner. That's cool. Like, yeah, my partner is pretty great. It kind of makes you reappreciate that. speaker-0: Right, but then d is the risk is there a real risk of the other thing as well, where if like y they're not jiving with your partner where you're speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If like if they're yeah, if they're not vibing with your partner, I think definitely that that has real potential to make you feel less close to your partner afterwards. I mean, that's essentially that effect, right? When you flip that effect on its head, the less responsive people are to your partner, the less close you felt after just immediately following this interaction. speaker-0: Right. So it's sort of a risky it's a risky proposition, right? It can go all right or it can go all wrong. speaker-1: Yeah. I mean I think I think people are sometimes self absorbed and clueless about what other people think of them. So I think a lot of times people might not pick up on that. I mean you often will see like like, you know, one couple will want to hang out with another couple and the other couple is like, Are you crazy? Like, no, we're not gonna go out with them. Like, you know we had the same dinner, like why did they want to hang out again? You know? speaker-0: Yeah, it's like dude did we have the same What do you do when that when those w those people want to hang out with you? I mean speaker-1: Depend like you know, what's often the case is like it starts because one person in the relationship is is pretty good friends with a person in the other relationship, and they're like, hey, this would be really fun to get together with our spouses. and in that case, if it just doesn't click, I mean, there are a lot of different options. Is it just like this person is kind of annoying in a particular context? ⁓ that they talk too much, let's say, you know, maybe instead, ⁓ it turns out we all like basketball, let's go to a basketball game. Or or some activity that we like going go at to see a show together or something. It's a hard conversation to have. Usually, I imagine, I have I don't have data to speak to this. So this is more based on just life and intuition and observation that if you don't like a member of the other couple, your partner's gonna pick up on it and probably, in at least in some ways, agree with it, right? You know, if it's their friend, that could cause problems. But you probably would have met. their f y your spouse's friend before and maybe just not met the partner. Anyway, it's very complicated. speaker-0: I want to shift gears a little bit because I know that you have a graduate student who is working on how to make a good first date or whether, you know, like there's certain types of settings or context, like like how do you make for a good first date? What does a research show? speaker-1: This is my student Daisy Brand, who just ⁓ graduated, got her PhD and is gonna be an assistant professor ⁓ in starting in the fall at Lafayette College ⁓ in Pennsylvania. And so she ⁓ wanted to do a study on the effect of physical environment on first dates, like going basically like does a romantic setting impact ⁓ whether or not you really click with another person and want to ⁓ see them again. And so we had ⁓ Unaquainted ⁓ pairs ⁓ come into the lab for for whom there was a potential for romantic spark. So we if if you indicated that you ⁓ were ⁓ a men interested in men, we had yeah, you paired up with another you know, person, ⁓ a man who's interested in men, if you're ⁓ straight, having opposite sex, different sex dyads, ⁓ interacting. But other than that, it was totally random. And ⁓ we ⁓ randomly assigned them to one of two conditions. One, this lab that Daisy, like this is soon after I got to UGA. she just basically tricked out this this room in the lab. Just it was like really comfortable couches already in there that I gotten when I when I came to UGA. We have ⁓ cameras set up so you can kind of observe couples, but it's it's it's kind of set up like a nice living room. There's like nice art on the wall. She had like this nice Like lavender, those ⁓ those scented stick things that go in oil. I don't know what they're called. ⁓ Yeah, there you go. Yeah. ⁓ gender difference in knowledge about scent diffusion. ⁓ just did all these things. It was lovely. It was perfect. It like dim the light, you know, like ⁓ you know, turned down those like fluorescent lights that that I turned off those fluorescent lights you lights you have in in ⁓ psychology buildings and had some nice ⁓ you know, regular ⁓ lighting, kind of mood lighting. speaker-0: Like a scent diffuser. speaker-1: And then so people were randomly signed to either meet for the first time, going through the fast friends that we just talked about, these these kind of you know, 20 questions ⁓ to fall in love. So there was a lot of self-disclosure. And then in the other condition, I asked our department chair, I'm like, do we have any really unattractive, uncomfortable, dismal offices that nobody's using, cramped, that that ⁓ I could use for a study? And he's like, I think I have one in mind. And he Took me to this office and it was like it was like two feet by like eight feet. And it there was like a a two-way mirror in there, which was kind of weird. They had to like cover up with a curtain, like ⁓ a couple of filing cabinets, no windows. It was just, yeah, it was not, it was not, it was perfect. And so we had them go through the fast fast fronts in there or or the other ⁓ nice room. What happened was we didn't see an effect. We had a we had like over a hundred dyads, ⁓ You know, pairs of two, maybe upwards of 150. And so the take-home message of this was that don't sweat the environment. What you want to focus on is what you're talking about. And so this was such a powerful thing, getting people to self-disclose. People, what what this thing does, this fast friends does is it really speeds up the natural process. You say things, you're ask asking each other questions that you would never ask someone you had just met before. you know, really deep stuff. Like what happens with self disclosure, if you look at at ⁓ Nancy Collins has this wonderful meta analysis and she shows that self-disclosure is associated with liking to a point. But then when you like over disclose, the other person starts liking you less and less. And so you don't see that in the Fast Friends because it it it it it provides an atmosphere that makes it okay to self disclose. So you know What we found was that it was really the content of what people were talking about that mattered and led to that spark. So really focus on asking good questions, being a responsive listener. Responsiveness was huge in terms of predicting whether or not people were ⁓ wanting to have a date with this other person. Of course, physical attractiveness mattered and all that kind of stuff, but in terms of the the sort of dynamics of of the conversation. You know, the extent to which they were able to be open and especially the extent to which the other person responded to them really mattered most. speaker-0: That's so interesting. Did ⁓ do you know like what percentage of people like stayed in touch or got did anybody like actually get together to present that? speaker-1: question. People did and it was predicted by responsiveness, but we didn't we were so focused on the effects of physical environment that we didn't go too deeply into the follow-up data. But that's a a great question. We also have like like objective coding from we're doing a lot across the course of my career, we've done a lot of observational coding and I'm more and more committed to that, even though it's really a pain in the ass to do this kind of research. It's really time intensive. But there are all these papers coming out now that ⁓ when it comes to relationships, a lot of the self-reports that we use are all just basically tapping into the same thing, just like positive or negative sentiment about the relationship. And so trying to observe couples and getting like, you know, ⁓ coders to to examine these these conversations to try to get a a handle on actual behaviors, that sort of gets out of the way of of of this idea of if you answer one questionnaire, you're going to answer it very similarly another questionnaire that we think are different, but really they're just basically getting at how you think, positive or negative about. speaker-0: Yeah, d w do did you happen to look at whether or not people could tell whether the person was into them based on how they were responding? You said that ⁓ that people's responsiveness was kind of predicting whether or not they like them. Were people able to t are people able to tell? Like I'm just wondering whether we all carry around an implicit theory about liking that's related to responsiveness to disclosure. speaker-1: Great question. We did not look at that. That's like a ⁓ it's a perfect data set to look at that, you know, and and it's an underutilized one. Daisy published this this kind of main study. Yeah, and we have we have a a a few different studies that are like unacquainted pairs like this. Some like s same sex sort of friendship possible dyads, but then others like that's where where there's a possibility for romantic connection. Well yeah. The the honest answer is we haven't really ⁓ looked at that, but it'd be really there's lots of questions that you could ask ⁓ of speaker-0: Yeah, that's yeah, that's so interesting 'cause I think that some people are better at picking up on those cues than others. Yeah. Too. And speaker-1: People who have people that are more empathetic, people that just have ⁓ greater social awareness, social skills, ⁓ emotional intelligence. speaker-0: Yeah, it would also be really interesting to see whether you could train people on it, right? So you show somebody ⁓ like dyads, right? And you look at some of the things that you use to score people's responsiveness. So let's say that it's head nods or something like that, or tilting their head, and then whether you can use that to train people to be better at reading other people's responses. speaker-1: Definitely can. I mean, I know that just from like as a as a trainer of and as a and as somebody that works with my graduate students all the time to train undergrads. It's absolutely trainable. My and my grad students have become masters ⁓ at that. So you definitely can train people to notice certain things. They're sometimes called what we call coder drift, and you need to check in with them to make sure that if they weren't good at this before, that and you train them to be good, that they've remained being good. speaker-0: So just really quickly for people, so I I wanna like I'm sure that I've got some listeners who feel like they're really bad at picking up on social cues, right? They're bad at telling whether or not somebody is actually interested in what they're saying. If you were training them, like you were training a coder, like what would you tell them? Like what are some of the cues that somebody speaker-1: I mean, some of the things that you that you mentioned, you know, are they making eye contact? Are they ⁓ you know, nodding their head? Are they asking follow-up questions? I mean, those are the three really kind of big ones that we pick up on. We're finding so real quick, kind of the the newest study that we're doing in the lab that's really a a fun one. ⁓ there's this emerging idea that's really come out of the emotion ⁓ research world that that is now just Like the people that study intimate relationships and and just relationships generally like me are getting into. And that is this idea of what we call interpersonal emotion regulation, like how we help other people regulate their emotions. And so we're basically having ⁓ couples come in the lab and randomly assigning one of them to go through a massive stressor. ⁓ in this case, you're told that you're gonna be interviewing for your dream job and you have like five minutes, 10 minutes to prepare for it, and this is you know, ⁓ something you've probably heard of. They call it the trier social stress test. But it's like it was designed to reliably increase stress hormones. And it turns out public speaking is the most reliable way to do that. We have people go through this massive stressor and then during the stressor, ⁓ we we spring on them that they have to do like a math backwards math task where they count backwards and every time they mess up and it's really hard, they start some random high number like two thousand forty six. They have to come count backwards by sevens and they always screw up and we have a very stern Experimenter dressed in a white lab coat that corrects them and like doesn't give any positive emotions at all. Totally unresponsive, like the ultimate unresponsive person. And it really stresses them out. So we have the the partner interact with the person giving the speech to help them prepare. And then afterwards, they meet with them to sort of help them decompress. We thought that the preparing was going to be the biggest, most important thing. And it's really after because people are just like it it's so stressful. I can't I can't convey until having seen these videos myself. Just like and the and the partner is actually watching on on video monitors from the other room. And like there were these times that like you could hear the partner like laughing because their partner was doing so bad at the tat. It was so brutal. Like brutal speaker-0: Have second hand cringe. I would just have second hand cringe. speaker-1: So these videos of them like, you know, getting back together, you see the whole gamut from people that are just the most responsive, caring, to like, wow, that was impressively bad. You know, like those it's say something like, you know, with that kind of sentiment. And so the responsiveness, you know, that we're picking up on really matters. And and you were so so I'm circling back to your point about what are the cues for responsiveness. I have this industrious undergrad research assistant who has looked at the videos that are all the exact same perspective. So we can we can like measure using a ruler on the video screen, the distance that people are sitting from one another. And the distance that the partners are sitting from each other is a behavioral marker of responsiveness that we didn't really know about. Just the the the we knew that touch was was important. But when we look at like the effects of of physical distance on the partners' reports of of how responsive they were That above and beyond like how much physical touch they're giving, like holding the partner's hand and stuff, it's just the sheer physical distance. And that's really, I think, you know, leaning in, you know, so ⁓ you know, looking at eye distance, like knee distance when they're sitting on the couch together. So there are there are all kinds of fun things that that we're just starting to get into in terms of what those behavioral markers are. I think behavioral studies of couples were like the original like couple studies in the 1980s by John Gottman. And I think what's old is new again is we discover. How self-report questionnaires are are are can be unreliable. And I hear in the back of my head, Jamie Penbaker, my PhD advisor, going, Yeah, Rich, I've been saying that ⁓ for for years. His favorite ⁓ line in you know in one of our lab meetings was, well, you know, I mean it's just self-report questionnaires, you know. So like, yeah, you were right. And I always like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but we had this cool finding. Yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓ speaker-0: It's so funny because like the the brain likes to tell itself stories, you know, and it's like we don't always like our our conscious brain can't always articulate exactly what it is that's going on and our body our body language is often a lot more a lot more accurate. speaker-1: ⁓ totally. And there's so yeah, I love the we haven't done it in my lab, but there's all this stuff on like implicit, you know, relationship cues that people are picking up on and things. Yeah, it's really interesting. speaker-0: So ⁓ just ⁓ w with that study that you did l looking at the truth, did you also measure the stress response of the partner? speaker-1: Great question. Like we didn't physiologically measure either person, although we are talking about doing I know, like we've really kind of gotten I away from some of that. We want to for a follow-up study to actually look at the actual stress response. This was just this paradigm kind of didn't exist for studying ⁓ interpersonal emotion regulation. So this was like a first study to see can we get this like to work? So we do have like the self-reported stress ⁓ of each person and I don't think we have looked at that. We basically had people fill out, you know, this scale that measures positive and negative emotions, the panis that I'm I'm sure you're familiar with. And stress is part of that. ⁓ so we can look at that, but we've been focusing mainly on the the the person going through the stressor. But yeah, that'd be interesting because in fact this has come up a couple of times in our lab meetings and when I've talked about this, that how how much the person, the partner who's not going through the stressor, how stressed they feel. like impacts the strategies that they use to help or or to to deal with the other partners' emotions because it's very negative emotions are very aversive, right? And so if your partner is really going through these negative emotions, that could easily transfer over to you. That often leads to ⁓ I think attempts at interpersonal emotion regulation from more like self focused rather than altruistic reasons. Like I hate feeling this way. I'm gonna help this person, my partner, deal with this so that I'm not feeling these negative emotions. speaker-0: Yeah, it's funny because when you first were talking about it, I was thinking about that you might predict that a partner who has a more intense emotional response to their partner flailing, you know, that that could potentially be a sign of ⁓ empathy and like that this could be really positive. But then on the other hand, I think that being somebody who like really trusts your partner and they're like having a tough time and being calm and cool. Right. And then when your partner comes, because you know that they're going to be relying on you, then I'm like, well, there's also something to that too. And so it would almost be like, I mean, it's it's it's our favorite thing that we say in science, like it's an empirical question. You know, like I don't yeah. I think that either either thing could be true. It could be true that like the the hallmark yeah of relationship quality is being cool because you know that you have to help your partner and that you trust that, you know, that this isn't too big of a deal. speaker-1: Hold on. Yes. And it's these like empirical questions, these novel questions that that keep me I I feel I feel I feel sad for for researchers that really have lost the love for research. I mean, I'm not cranking out first authored papers like I once did. My students are, but I still love the research process. And, you know, I think maybe from an outsider's view, it might look that I've taken a few left turns, you know, in terms of what I study. But it's really all about essentially s social connection. It's just that, you know, some grad student, you know, or or you know, will come in with like this, like, hey, we should look at this. That's an empirical question. And like, yeah, that sounds cool. Let's do that. You know, and I love those, you know, this sort of areas of of social psychology that don't have much research in them. It's it's it's a bit terrifying sometimes to embark on a new line of research like that. But it's also so fun and stimulating. In intellectually. speaker-0: I couldn't agree more. I I think that every day I still am surprised that I get paid to do this. Yeah. It's awesome. It's like the best. It's it's a great it's a really great job. And I I think that it's really, you know, I I was talking to ⁓ Jamie Krems, who's a friend of mine and and who's a professor at UCLA and who studies friendship. And it's really amazing. speaker-1: One of few people, by the way, like in social psychology now, Bill Chopuk is another that study friendship in a really great way. That there weren't many of those people. speaker-0: Yeah, what I was gonna say is that it's it's still so understudied. And we know that this is like one of the biggest health resources that we have is is our friends and our close relationship partners and ⁓ and that it has all of these really, you know, positive effects on health, whether it's by, you know, the decreasing ⁓ the inflammatory response or whether it's decreasing the cardiovascular response or whether it's, you know, any of these other processes ⁓ buffering the stress response, you know, all these different avenues by which our friends can support our health and our relationships support our health. And yet no one really has been studying ⁓ these relationships until very recently. You started out early in your career and having to go into a lab where that wasn't even the focus of of study ⁓ to try to get at that. I want to quickly before before we go, I want to circle back to something you talked about at the very beginning with the friendship. And You said that one of the things that you were really interested in was about this idea of like women and the face-to-face relationship, you know, which is like that women have tend to have closer friendships in a lot of ways because they do more self-disclosure. There's more face-to-face and providing, you know, pr personal information and then they get personal information back. And then you sort of build a relationship that way. And that men is more side to side, which generally that what the research suggests anyway is that it's Men doing shared activities, right? So you're like fixing a car or you're playing pick up basketball or you're playing pickleball. Is that true? Do men need to learn from women's relationships a face to face? Or is it like the way that men do things just as beneficial to men as the face to like have we because sometimes you know when you when you hear about this? So I'm just I'm I'm I'm gonna give you the explanation for my question before and then I'm gonna rephrase it for you. I've heard a lot that, you know, women's friendships are closer because they do all of this face-to-face disclosure stuff and you know, and and that men that they have tend to have more sort of loose relationships because they do this side to side activity. And so my question, is that okay? Like is the way that men do friendship, ⁓ that's that's no less valid than the way that women do friendship, right? I mean, or is it? speaker-1: Boy, that's such a hard that's a great question, but a really hard one to answer. And I feel like it's come up a lot in society, you know, around ⁓ questions of gender. We, you know, with the implicit idea that men's friendships should look more like women's friendships in terms of the closeness. I'm not sure y what my intuition would be. First of all, I don't know about any like you'd want to have some longitudinal data about this. 'Cause you can look at experiments and sort of see what what happens in the short term. But a thought that I have is like to what extent, you know, are these things, and this is a question, you know, that that your field of psychology brings up all the time, which is like to what extent are these things hardwired versus cultural, right? Like to what extent can you even sort of like shift men in that direction? ⁓ just because they don't necessarily feel close to as many people doesn't mean that they don't find those friendships equally satisfying just in a different way. speaker-0: Right. And and I don't think that it necessarily means that that you're not reaping the same health benefits, because I'd be willing to bet that men who have these friendships, that again, you know, these side to side friendships, ⁓ that they're still reaping the positive health benefits of those relationships. And my guess is that if a man needed his friend, right, because something was happening in his life where he needed social support, that his friend would help him. speaker-1: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And that's you you get at w with that last statement. A really important part of this, which is that perceptions matter. So if the guy feels like he has close friends, that's I'm not gonna say that's all that's enough, but like that really matters. And that definition ⁓ of of having a close friendship varies widely, not not just between genders, but obviously within within genders. And like when you when you you a a similar sort of phenomenon, when you ask people about how many friends they have, yes, that that predicts like happiness and well-being. But more important are perceptions of whether or not you have enough friends. And and the perception of loneliness ⁓ matters much more than just kind of number counting of how many friends you have or or even how many friends you have that you disclose to. It's really sort of like, are these friendships meeting the needs that I have. Are there like some hidden needs that that people don't know about that like, well, you'd be even happier if you knew that you could get this out of friendships by opening up and self disclosing. I don't know if that's n necessarily the case. I also think that a lot of us guys sort of have accidental disclosure that just happens over time. Like it just happens, I think, more slowly. I mean, I was just thinking about a a a guy, I'm an empty nester now. Both my kids are in college. And so I'm having a little bit more free time, especially during the summer, to ⁓ do things like play golf. And so I've been playing more golf with with I I have like a few colleagues in psychology that that I do this with. And so we have like a group of of like, you know, four or five guys that that will regularly play ⁓ together. Definitely open to women in our department who wanna play it. Just haven't found any ⁓ women ⁓ who who are that interested. And so Like this one guy, he he he and I went on a little bit like a mini road trip up to play in Atlanta the other day. It was like an hour and a half. And it was amazing. I I played golf with this guy at least a dozen times. But like having that time together, we're now like kind of comfortable enough around one another. We really had like like we touched on some like deep topics sort of accidentally. It wasn't like I was like, ooh, now's my chance to like, you know, like either tell this person everything that I want to tell them or like dig for information. It just sort of happened. You know, but like after that I'm like, wow, that was like like pretty powerful. speaker-0: I I feel like that's like raising children. You know what I mean? Like like I ⁓ especially I think about this, I've got teenagers and ⁓ my teenage son in particular, it's like the all of the really important deep conversations with him happen when I'm driving him somewhere. Interesting. Right. And so like he's like not looking at me. It's like we try to look at him and have a conversation. speaker-1: Like this is where Freud maybe was right, where he would have he would be out of view, right? Like you're not looking at right. It's like ⁓ and and those studies where there you're like in the dark, you actually disclose more than like when you're in a lit room. Like when you're not looking right at the person, it's you're less vulnerable. speaker-0: Yeah. And I think that sometimes ⁓ when you're not focused on, you know, creating the moment, then the moment just happens. speaker-1: Yeah, that's interesting. I was gonna say I think it's especially true for men, but you're right, like for parents, and I don't think there's a probably a big gender difference in terms of the children, in terms of like how effective that is. 'Cause like I ⁓ you know, we have two boys, but you know, speaking with friends that have girls, it can be equally as hard to get the girls to tell them anything as the boys. speaker-0: I think that it diffuses the situation not to have to look into somebody's eyes. And so like with both of my with both of my kids, that's where all the magic happens. So I want to know whether the you know, I learned a lot from you. And I think listeners have learned a lot from you too. I'm wondering, is there anything that we didn't talk about that you want to talk about? Whether it's about relationships or health or the importance of ⁓ disclosure or speaker-1: So just very briefly, yeah, there's there's one thing that, you know, since the pandemic, I've been really interested in studying going beyond intimate relationships and studying the things that we lost during the pandemic. So one of those things was interacting with strangers. I've really gotten into Nick Epley's work on on the benefits of interacting with strangers. And we're starting to one of my new students, this this Turkish student I ⁓ mentioned earlier. ⁓ is ⁓ gonna be studying interactions ⁓ with strangers, but also going to events like live events was something we totally missed out, especially like that first year of the pandemic for most people. And so we have this study that I did ⁓ that that my student Daisy Brand, ⁓ the one who did the good room, bad room, the failed first date study looked at. We we paired, we, we partnered with Eventbrite. The ⁓ the ticketing. ⁓ yeah. Everybody, a lot of your listeners probably have Eventbrite on their phone, you know, to to get tickets like to concerts. And so we ⁓ received some funding from them. ⁓ this was ⁓ in in collaboration with my friend Julianne Holt Lundstedt, ⁓ who's done a lot of amazing work in health psychology and relationships. But but ⁓ so she turned to me because I I, you know, of the two of us is is sort of the most like basic social psychologist, and we looked at At I think we had like fifteen hundred people who were going to various kinds of of ⁓ event bright events. And they have a lot more events than I kind of knew about that they have ticketing for, including free events that you just kind of signed up for, like yoga classes, like wine tastings, book readings, all kinds of stuff. And so we looked at ⁓ the different ⁓ aspects of ⁓ events that led to feelings of social connection. We talked to them before they went to the event and then right after. So we really found that that these attending to these events was really beneficial for social connection. And so I think kind of getting outside, you know, touching grass as they say, getting off your phones and just getting out into situations where you're interacting with people that you might not know that well can be incredibly beneficial. speaker-0: What were your endpoints in the study? Like what were you looking at? speaker-1: The the main endpoints were basically just various measures of like how connected people felt socially to the world. speaker-0: Did it matter whether they went to the event by themselves or whether it's speaker-1: So there were a few so great question. There are a few predictors that characteristics that predicted ⁓ feeling more connected. One of them was going with other people. ⁓ but it didn't have to be. That didn't explain. We used machine learning, you know, kind of fancy AI to really separate the predictors. The the biggest predictor of whether or not people felt connected at the event was how active they participated, like engaged they were in the event. with the people around them. There was a boost of an effect when they went with with ⁓ friends that they had. So that that kind of gets into this sort of shared experience when people went to recurring events. So like like let's say a wine ⁓ a wine club or something like that. You know, that happens like once a month. Those sorts of events gave you another boost. And I think that is a very social thing. You're getting to know people, book clubs, similar kind of a deal, right? Those were sort of the big things that are coming to mind of that. But ⁓ Yeah, it's really fun work. speaker-0: I think that's so important. Did you did you look at aroused like is it arousal? Do you think that it's just like the experience of physiological arousal? speaker-1: Great question. Shira Gabriel up at at ⁓ I think she's at ⁓ University of Buffalo studies this ⁓ thing called collective effervescence, this like like positive emotions that you feel that are it's almost they they refer to it as almost sacred. Like going to a ⁓ a huge SEC football game, going to ⁓ see, you know, you two live in concert with fifty thousand people. It's this feeling of This collective ⁓ energy that leads to like off the charts positive affect. I think that is happening. We didn't get it. This was like retrospectively reported 24 hours ⁓ later. We definitely found increases in positive affect. I think if we were like at the event there, I think those effects would be even bigger for certain kinds of events. speaker-0: Yeah, and especially when you have like shared identity. Like you do, like when you have, you know, it's it's a team or like we're all we're all fans of this band and and so you and then you have this like collective effervescence moment. Totally. I think it's really I think I think it's so cool that that you get positive effects even for something like I don't know, like goat yoga or whatever at the par. You have people showing up individually to get ⁓ these responses. I think that's so much, you know, I I as I've mentioned before, I've got speaker-1: Totally. Exactly. speaker-0: Teenagers and and one of them, ⁓ my well, I guess I have a 19 year old and then a a 16 year old. And the 16 year old is a boy. And for him, you know, the his mental health is so much better when he's like going out, right? And doing things. And and he has to be like going and doing things. And even if there are things that I feel are a little bit, you know, kind of make me hold my breath a little bit until he gets home. ⁓ because you know, I don't he's out running around with his friends and and, you know, getting into 16-year-old mischief is so beneficial to mental health. And I think that so many of us, because it's so easy to get caught scrolling and, you know, sort of get stuck in your living room and looking at screens and that sort of thing, I think that we underestimate just how important those types, like just going out and being with others and having that nervous system activation. You know, I think that like cortisol, we talk about it all the time as being this bad guy. Like people talk about cortisol as this bad thing. all the time, but having like regular bursts of that, right, is is so healthy. speaker-1: Absolutely. And that's why I like it it it it's really complicated how these things are are related the social stuff with the biological stuff, because I I I agree with you one hundred percent that it can be beneficial. speaker-0: Yeah, flatlining cortisol. I mean, it's like your life would feel meaningless. It would it would just feel completely meaningless. And so having bursts of of sympathetic response and bursts of cortisol is just like it's all a beautiful part of the way that our brain registers that we have a meaningful life and that we're connected with other people. And and I'm so yeah, thank you. And I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing on this and and these other topics that we've talked about during our time together. speaker-1: It's been so fun to to be with you and to and to catch up and ⁓ yeah. Just have a great speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. So where can my listeners learn more about you and your work? Where can we find you? speaker-1: So pretty easy, just go to my name's Rich Slatcher, S-L-A-T-C-H-E-R. So it's just rich slatcher dot com and all of the stuff can be there. speaker-0: All right, great. And I'll have links ⁓ to the papers that we talked about in our discussion today in the show notes. Wonderful. Thanks so much, Rich. Great to have you. speaker-1: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.