Stress and Social Self

FROM THE ARCHIVE | Stress and the Social Self: How Relationships Affect Our Immune System

Relationships, Adrienne Rich argued in her magnificent meditation on love, refine our truths. But they also, it turns out, refine our immune systems. That’s what pioneering immunologist Esther Sternberg examines in The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions(public library) — a revelatory inquiry into how emotional stress affects our susceptibility to burnout and disease.

As just about every socialized human being can attest, interpersonal relationships play a significant role in our experience of stress — either contributing to it and or alleviating it. And the way we connect — something psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has termed “positivity resonance” — is deeply patterned through our earliest experiences of bonding, which train our limbic pathways. Sternberg traces the cognitive origin of these formative patterns:/.../