Past humans did not get a lot of the diseases we get these days simply because they did not live as long. A lot of these diseases are effected by stress. So stress has become more important to us. The more immediate effects are probably anxiety issues but there are a lot of long term effects also including stress related diseases. However, some people and psyches deal better with stress then others. Why?
Since you can't study a 20 year tie between people who got depression and people who got cancers later you can't do this in humans. Rats are not a good model for you emotional capabilities. Rats can't take things in stride and look on the brights side. So, he studied baboons.
They have personality and a social structure involving a very rigid dominance hierarchy. They have a lot of stress responses, they do a lot of boasting and eventual fighting.
So, what makes an event stressful. You are more likely to handle stress poorly if;
1) You have no outlets for your frustrations.
2) You have no predictive information, how bad will it be.
3) You feel like you have no control over the event.
4) You interpret events as worsening.
5) Your socially isolated.
Having your stress systems on causes you to produce fight or flight hormones and other systems of your body. Modern humans are having trouble with anxiety because like low ranking baboons, we turn on our flight systems too often. We worry too much, perhaps for good reason, but none the less, we do.
Baboons do the same thing and they do it more often the further down the baboon hierarchy they are. Other animals experience the same phenomena. If your low ranking you you have more things to be afraid of. the above 5 scenarios happen more often. One example is good cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, vs. bad cholesterol LDL. This is documented in humans as well and is present in baboons. What is this do to? Controlling for this, the higher your glucocordicoids?, stress hormones, the lower your good cholesterol. You can even map this to heart disease in baboons. The lower baboons get it more often for the same reasons humans due when they have bad cholesterol. Also your white blood count is lower, so you get illnesses, you get infections, etc. The scientist claimed many other systems have the same experiences. So we've established that stress is bad and the lower you are in rank the more stress you have and the unhealthier you are because of it.
Now that was the end of it for a while. However social revolutions thought him something further. During a revolution of the social order everybody gets stressed, baboon village wide pandemic. He saw that it wasn't just rank, two other things, one interesting, one not. The uninteresting was if you managed to a bystander to the revolution, you did alright.
the interesting one was, it was how you took your situation. Your personality. And he defined the types.
Turns out rank didn't matter, its was personality. You could be way down the scale and have good physiology even at the bottom of the ladder.
You would have this personality. 5 traits.
1) Can you tell the difference between big and small things? Don't sweat the small stuff. If your baboon enemy gets in your face, you get excited, if your enemy is 100 yards away, you get excited. Most baboons couldn't tell the difference and suffered.
2) Do you control the situation, do you start the fight.
3) Can you tell if you won or lost?
4) Do you mope or displace aggression? Displacers do better, those with an outlet.
5) The last was the most powerful and has been well documented in humans. Social isolation. Do you have friends? About 25% of male baboons have friends (females but not sexual) and it mattered.
You'll notice these are very similar to what people teach you about happiness and stress.
In humans, other studies have shown this ranking, too things best predict a bad physiology and disease succeptablility, you do poorly if you are;
1) poor
2) socially isolated
3) smoke
4) drink
And this is controlling for people taking their medicine, eating well, its not the other effect of not having friends you might guess to effect your health. Its having friends. And its something to consider about those you know who are aging and have lost some of their social network.
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