In the journal PLoS Medicine, BYU professors Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Timothy Smith report that social connections — friends, family, neighbors or colleagues — improve our odds of survival by 50 percent.

Here is how low social interaction compares to more well-known risk factors:

Equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day
Equivalent to being an alcoholic
More harmful than not exercising
Twice as harmful as obesity

“The idea that a lack of social relationships is a risk factor for death is still not widely recognized by health organizations and the public,” write the PLoS Medicine editors in a summary of the BYU study and why it was done.

The researchers analyzed data from 148 previously published longitudinal studies that measured frequency of human interaction and tracked health outcomes for a period of seven and a half years on average.

Because information on relationship quality was unavailable, the 50 percent increased odds of survival may underestimate the benefit of healthy relationships.

“The data simply show whether they were integrated in a social network,” Holt-Lunstad said. “That means the effects of negative relationships are lumped in there with the positive ones. They are all averaged together.”

Holt-Lunstad said there are many pathways through which friends and family influence health for the better, ranging from a calming touch to finding meaning in life.

“When someone is connected to a group and feels responsibility for other people, that sense of purpose and meaning translates to taking better care of themselves and taking fewer risks,” Holt-Lunstad said.

In examining the data, Smith took a careful look at whether the results were driven primarily by people helping each other prolong their golden years.

“This effect is not isolated to older adults,” Smith said. “Relationships provide a level of protection across all ages.”

Smith said that modern conveniences and technology can lead some people to think that social networks aren’t necessary.

“We take relationships for granted as humans — we’re like fish that don’t notice the water,” Smith said. “That constant interaction is not only beneficial psychologically but directly to our physical health.”

Brad Layton worked on the study as an undergrad at BYU and appears as a co-author on the new study.

Layton’s involvement in this project helped him secure a spot as a Ph.D. candidate in the highly ranked epidemiology program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Story Source: The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Brigham Young University.

Journal Reference: Holt-Lunstad J, Smith TB, Layton JB. Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review. PLoS Medicine, 2010; 7 (7): e1000316 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316

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Researchers at the University of Freiburg in Germany showed previously that people with depression have difficulty detecting black-and-white contrast differences.

Publishing a new report in Biological Psychiatry, these scientists combined neuropsychiatric and ophthalmologic investigations to focus on the response of the retina to varying black-and-white contrasts.

Specifically, they measured the pattern electroretinogram, which is like an electrocardiogram (ECG) of the retina of the eye, in patients with depression and healthy individuals.

They found dramatically lower retinal contrast gain in the depressed patients, regardless of whether or not they were receiving antidepressant medication.

There was also a significant correlation between contrast gain and severity of depression, meaning those with the most severe symptoms of depression also had the lowest retinal responses.

The electrophysiological signal of response was sufficiently consistent to distinguish most depressed patients from the healthy subjects.

“These data highlight the profound ways that depression alters one’s experience of the world,” commented Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry.

“The poet William Cowper said that ‘variety’s the very spice of life’, yet when people are depressed, they are less able to perceive contrasts in the visual world. This loss would seem to make the world a less pleasurable place.”

Lead author Dr. Ludger Tebartz van Elst noted that although these findings are strong, they still need to be replicated in further studies. However, “this method could turn out to be a valuable tool to objectively measure the subjective state of depression, having far-reaching implications for research as well as clinical diagnosis of and therapy for depression.”

Story Source:The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Elsevier, via AlphaGalileo.

Journal Reference:Bubl et al. Seeing Gray When Feeling Blue? Depression Can Be Measured in the Eye of the Diseased. Biological Psychiatry, 2010; 68 (2): 205 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.02.009

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Researchers Duncan Gillespie, Dr Virpi Lummaa and Dr Andrew Russell, from the University´s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, studied Finnish church records from the 18th and 19th centuries, a time during which almost everyone married and divorce was forbidden, to trace the survival and marriage histories of 1,591 women.

They found that women aged 30-35 were the most likely to be married. Those that married wealthy husbands were married at a younger age but to relatively older men, thereby gaining the family size-benefits of wealth but also an increased risk of widowhood.

This high chance of widowhood, coupled with low re-marriage prospects for older widows with children, limited the percentage of women in the population with the opportunity to reproduce at older ages.

In today´s society however, women do not start childbearing until an older age as marriage is often delayed, and casual or short-term relationships and divorce are more common.

As a result, the natural selection maintaining young-age fertility might weaken and the relative strength of natural selection on old-age fertility could increase, something that could potentially lead to improvements in old-age fertility over many generations.

Duncan Gillespie from the University of Sheffield´s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, said: “In today´s society, family-building appears to be increasingly postponed to older ages, when relatively few women in our evolutionary past would have had the opportunity to reproduce.

As a result, this could lead to future evolutionary improvements in old-age female fertility.

“Childbearing within a relationship is still the norm in modern society, but at ages where fewer women have the chance to reproduce, we should expect the evolution of lower fertility.”

Story Source: The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of Sheffield.

Journal Reference: Duncan O. S. Gillespie, Mirkka Lahdenperä, Andrew F. Russell, Virpi Lummaa. Pair-Bonding Modifies the Age-Specific Intensities of Natural Selection on Human Female Fecundity. The American Naturalist, 2010; 176 (2): 159 DOI: 10.1086/653668

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Those compounds include estrogen-like substances known as soybean isoflavones.

Agricultural Research Service (ARS) physiologist Marta D. Van Loan and other researchers learned more about these compounds in a 3-year study–the longest of its kind–reported earlier this year in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Van Loan is with the ARS Western Human Nutrition Research Center at the University of California-Davis.

Because of its potential as a possible substitute for conventional steroid hormone replacement therapy for postmenopausal women, soy has been the subject of more than two dozen studies conducted here and abroad during the past decade.

According to Van Loan, some of those investigations suggest that soy enhances bone health.

Van Loan teamed up with Iowa State University researcher D. Lee Alekel and others for the 3-year investigation to determine whether isoflavones extracted from soy protein would protect postmenopausal volunteers against bone loss.

Participants in the study took either a placebo tablet or a tablet containing one of two moderate amounts of the isoflavones–80 milligrams (mg) or 120 mg–for the duration of the investigation.

Overall, the isoflavones had no significant positive effect on preventing bone loss. However, the 120-mg treatment showed a modest benefit when evaluated in conjunction with lifestyle factors.

The researchers suggest that the body’s response to isoflavones extracted from soy proteins may be different from responses to isoflavones in their natural matrix of soy protein or soy foods, or in a soy-protein supplement.

Or, some soy-protein compound other than the extracted isoflavones may have been responsible for the bone-protecting effects seen in some previous studies. Finally, the isoflavone doses used in the 2010 study may not have been high enough to produce a bone-sparing effect.

This and other bone-health research is highlighted in the July 2010 issue of Agricultural Research magazine, available online at: http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/jul10/bone0710.htm.

Story Source: The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by USDA/Agricultural Research Service. The original article was written by Marcia Wood.

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Authors Darron Billeter (Brigham Young University), Ajay Kalra (Rice University), and George Loewenstein (Carnegie Mellon University) found that consumers are overconfident in their abilities to learn skill-based products before they try them out.

But as soon as they gain experience with the product they often quit using it. “Anyone who has tried, then rapidly abandoned snowboarding, knitting, fancy new software or the calendar on their iPod can probably ruefully relate,” the authors write.

The authors studied tasks new to most people, which wouldn’t take long to learn in a lab setting, like typing on a keyboard with an unfamiliar layout, tracing lines while only being able to view the tracing in a mirror, and folding t-shirts in a novel way.

Participants were given verbal instructions and then were asked to predict how rapidly they would be able to perform the task. Initially, participants overestimated their abilities.

Next, participants were given a short amount of experience with the task and were asked to predict how rapidly they would be able to perform the task, both in the short term and longer term.

“Not only were subjects overly pessimistic about their ability to perform the task in the short term, but they were also overly pessimistic about their ability to improve over time,” the authors write. Participants began correctly predicting their performance after four rounds (20 minutes) of under-predicting.

Because of this initial discouragement, the authors discovered that consumers were willing to pay more for a keyboard before they had tried it than they were after they gained a few minutes experience with it.

“Much of parenting is about teaching children that persistence pays off — that tasks that initially seem difficult become easier with practice,” the authors write.

“The results of these studies suggest that, despite the lessons our parents might have sought to teach us, most of us have not fully learned the lesson.”

Story Source: The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of Chicago Press Journals, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Journal Reference: Darron Billeter, Ajay Kalra, and George Loewenstein. Underpredicting Learning Following Initial Experience with a Product. Journal of Consumer Research, February 2011 [link]

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