Growing Young

by Marta Zaraska

  Harry Harlow was a brilliant man obsessed with fame, an alcoholic, and a workaholic whose experiments at the primate lab caused uproar among animal activists. Take the isolation studies he conducted on baby rhesus macaques, little creatures with round eyes and big ears. To study what would happen to monkeys deprived of social contact in early life, Harlow designed something he called “the pit of despair.” It was a cage shaped like an inverted pyramid, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, its roof made of wire mesh. A monkey would be placed inside, all alone. For the first two or three days it would try to flee, scrambling up the slippery sides to the top, where a mesh roof prevented its escape. Then it would give up. “Most subjects typically assume a hunched position in a corner of the bottom of the apparatus. One might presume at this point that they find their situation hopeless,” Harlow wrote. Even a few days were enough to break a monkey. It would sit motionless at the bottom of the cage, staring blankly, head slumped. When these monkeys were returned to their families, they were withdrawn and unable to reconnect.

  Not all Harlow’s experiments were as horrific as these ones. You might have heard, for example, about his studies involving terry-cloth surrogate mothers. Baby macaques would be placed in a cage with two makeshift “mothers” to choose from. One would be made out of wire, perfect for climbing but with no soft edges to hug. The other would have a smiling face and a round body covered in sponge rubber and cotton terry cloth, heated by a light bulb. In some cases it was the soft mother that held a bottle of milk; in others, the metal one. No matter, though, which surrogate had the food, little monkeys invariably preferred the cloth mothers—they would cuddle up to them for hours and run to them when scared. When the surrogates needed to be taken out of the cages for cleaning, the baby monkeys bawled inconsolably. Physical warmth and simple touch, it seemed, were everything when it came to parenting primates.

  These experiments, though less stomach-turning than the ones involving the “pit of despair,” unfortunately also didn’t have a happy ending. As they reached adulthood, macaques raised from infancy by sponge stand-in mothers started showing worrisome characteristics: they were shy and withdrawn, unsure how to behave around other monkeys. When they became mothers themselves, their parenting skills were pretty poor, too. Some were indifferent toward their babies, not nursing them. Others were outright abusive, biting and injuring their own offspring.

  Over the years, the Goon Park experiments on love and sociality formed the basis of research on human attachment—the science of how early experiences with our caregivers shape us for life and determine our abilities to forge meaningful relationships with others. Just as Harlow’s monkeys would become attached to their terry-cloth mothers, human infants get attached to their mothers, too—for better or for worse. How the relationship is going can be tested quite early on. If a mother leaves a twelve-month-old baby alone in a room with a stranger for a mere three minutes, after which the mother returns and the stranger exits, you can get an idea of how the infant is attached to the mother.

  This procedure, known as the “Strange Situation,” in its proper form includes a few more steps, such as leaving the baby completely on their own for a couple of minutes. Its basic simplicity, however, made it widely popular among researchers (and if you have a baby between twelve and eighteen months old you can try it at home, too). If the little one is distressed when the mother leaves the room yet happy on reunion, using her as a safe base to explore the surroundings, they are likely securely attached. If they are upset by being left with a stranger yet also upset with the mother when she returns, they are probably insecurely attached in a way that’s considered “anxious.” And if the mother’s comings and goings don’t seem to affect the baby at all, the assumption is that they are attached in an insecure-avoidant way. Any parent should want their child to be securely attached, but the reality is that only 65 percent of American babies are that way. In the UK, 75 percent are securely attached, while in China that number is just 50 percent.

  Decades of research show that the consequences of insecure attachment in both its forms can be pretty dire, predicting depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem later in childhood. On the other hand, securely attached babies grow up to be more empathic, helpful preschoolers who are surrounded by friends. As preteens, they are more popular and socially competent.

  Yet attachment is not just about babies—it can also be measured in adults. Do you know someone who is always on the lookout for the ways others may hurt their feelings? Who constantly worries what people think about them? Who gets easily offended and exaggerates emotions? What about someone who is dismissive and afraid of commitment and intimacy? People like that are avoidantly attached—just like the babies who don’t cry when their mom leaves them with a stranger. Those of us who are securely attached, meanwhile, tend to see the world as a generally safe place where other people can be counted on for help and support. The differences between securely and insecurely attached people can be seen not just in their behaviours, but in their brains, too. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies show that when people with avoidant attachment style meet their friends, the reward circuits in their brains don’t light up as strongly as they do in adults who are securely attached.

  There are plenty of indications that your attachment style truly matters for your health and longevity—for one, it can affect your physical well-being directly. For instance, adults with more attachment anxiety deal less well with a virus that can cause mononucleosis. Compared to securely attached people, those who are anxiously attached have more strokes and heart attacks, higher blood pressure, and more ulcers. They also suffer more often from medically unexplained musculoskeletal pain. To avoidantly attached people—those who agree with statements such as, “I find it difficult to allow myself to depend on romantic partners”—even a simple pinprick to the fingertip can feel particularly painful, much more so than to the happily attached people of the world.

  Once again, the underlying cause for the links between attachment style and physical health appears to be the stress response and the functioning of the HPA axis. When insecurely attached people experience stress, their HPA axis becomes highly activated—it quickly dumps large quantities of cortisol into the body, which then takes a long time to return to baseline. Cortisol, in turn, can alter the workings of the immune system. In one study, people with high attachment anxiety had 22 percent fewer CD3+CD8+ cytotoxic T cells than those with lower attachment anxiety. These T cells are vital for the immune response since they kill pathogen-infected cells, and their reduced number is an indication of aging in the immune system. In other words, you could say that people who are anxiously attached have the worn-out immune systems of the elderly. And if that’s not enough, insecure attachment can also mean poor self-control with food—it may be linked to eating disorders, and binge eating in particular. So if you ever find yourself in front of the fridge at midnight, consider that your attachment style may be to blame.

  To make things worse, commitment-phobes tend to have higher fasting blood glucose levels, which is a warning sign for diabetes. This may have an evolutionary explanation. Blood glucose is the basic fuel of the body, and of the brain in particular. If you are alone on the savanna, you need to deal with threats on your own. Since there is no one else to warn you of predators, you have to be constantly ready for danger. Your brain and body need easily accessible metabolic resources to help with quick decision making—and so your blood glucose stays up.

  Besides directly affecting your HPA axis or your blood glucose, your attachment style can also influence your centenarian potential indirectly by changing the quality of your relationships. People who are securely attached are happier with their friendships, fight less with their loved ones, and are less likely to end up divorced. On the flip side, insecurely attached people are not only less satisfied with their romantic partners, but with their kids as well. And even if they have as many friends as others do, they are o
ften quite negative about the support they are getting. That, of course, is also a longevity wrecker.

  Now, here is the big question: are you securely or insecurely attached? With babies the test may be fairly easy, but how do you assess attachment in adults? After all, I bet you don’t cry when left for a few minutes alone with a stranger. To evaluate adult attachment, psychologists use several carefully designed questionnaires, in which they make you score statements such as, “I feel like I have someone to rely on,” “I feel I can trust the people who are close to me,” and “I feel a strong need to be unconditionally loved right now,” with the last one being a sign of anxious attachment.

  In general, about 55 to 65 percent of adults are securely attached, 22 to 30 percent are avoidant, and 15 to 20 percent are anxious in their attachment style. The bad news for both love and longevity, though, is that insecurity in attachment is on the rise. A large meta-analysis of studies of college students revealed that whereas in 1988 close to 50 percent of American youth were securely attached, by 2011 that number had dropped to 41 percent. The scientists behind the meta-analysis point out that smartphones and internet may be to blame for our “increased disconnection in an age of increased connection.”

  Wait a second, you may say, phones and internet? Isn’t attachment all about the mother who was not involved enough, didn’t breastfeed you, didn’t babywear you, and didn’t co-sleep with you? The answer is both yes and no. For an infant to be securely attached, you do need a caring, affectionate parent. The recipe is as follows (more or less, of course): take a sensitive, loving parent who responds to the baby’s basic needs, and the little one will grow up believing that the world is a safe place and that people can be generally trusted. Simple in theory, harder in practice, if you consider attachment statistics. Parents who are inconsistent in how they respond to their children—lovingly one time, coldly or angrily another—tend to have anxiously attached children, while those who are often emotionally unavailable to their kids end up with mini commitment-phobes.

  Yet although it may be tempting to blame your mom for your imperfect romantic life, your cardiovascular health, or your binge sessions in front of the fridge, how you were parented early in your life is not a sentence when it comes to attachment style. Many psychologists argue that adult attachment is flexible and can’t be fully attributed to how you were parented. This is good news. Simply knowing that even if your mom’s caregiving style wasn’t Instagram-perfect you are not doomed to insecure attachment for lifetime—and hence busted health—can empower you to change the way things are. How to do it? The best solution is psychotherapy (sorry, no easy fixes here). Luckily, though, you don’t necessarily need to spend years on a psychotherapist’s couch and pay a gazillion dollars in fees. As little as six weeks of intensive therapy can boost security of attachment—and, hopefully, your health.

  What’s more, an additional side effect of enhanced attachment security can be higher empathy—another vital ingredient of a robust social life. If you want to live happily to a hundred, empathy is something you should certainly put on your self-improvement agenda, even if it means skipping a few trips to the gym or saying no to broccoli-cooking classes.

  Laughter Epidemics, Phubbing, and the Empathy Crisis

  On January 30, 1962, in the small village of Kashasha in northern Tanganyika (now Tanzania), something strange started happening at a local school. At first it was innocent enough: three of the local girls started laughing—and couldn’t stop. But then things got considerably weirder: the incontrollable laughter went on spreading among the teenage students. For some, the laughing episode lasted a few hours. For others, it went on as long as sixteen days. By March 18, well over half the girls at the Kashasha school were affected and the school was temporarily closed down. Yet even that wasn’t the end of the story. The laughter epidemic continued to widen its range, jumping from village to village. In total, about a thousand people ended up with the giggle-bug, girls and boys, students and adults alike, and fourteen schools were forced to shut their doors.

  It was hardly a laughing matter. People were scared. Some believed that the event was caused by atmospheric pollution from an atomic bomb (that, of course, wasn’t true). Others speculated that the local maize flour might have been poisoned. Doctors were called, blood was drawn and shoved under microscopes, lumbar punctures were performed, but no toxins, bacteria, or viruses were found. In fact, nothing was found. The people affected by the laughter epidemic were most likely perfectly healthy. Today, psychologists suspect that the Tanganyika laughter epidemic was caused by mass hysteria, and that it had something to do with mood transmission—an essential part of empathy.

  Have you ever noticed that if someone beside you yawns, it’s hard to resist doing the same? Even just reading about yawning may be causing you to stretch your mouth to inhale deeply right this very moment. Small epidemics of yawning, which can be observed anywhere from the metro to university classrooms, rely on similar mechanisms to that infamous Tanganyika outbreak of laughter. And the more empathic someone is, the more susceptible they are to the yawning contagion. For that reason, if you had a classroom full of psychopaths—admittedly a daunting prospect—the yawning would not spread.

  Frans de Waal, a renowned Dutch primatologist, believes that mood contagion evolved so that primates such as our ancestors could coordinate their behaviour, a crucial thing for a species that travels in groups. If it’s feeding time, we’d better all be eating. If it’s walking time, we’d better all start going. Yet empathy is about far more than just simple mood transmission. It’s also about adopting other people’s perspectives, understanding their motivations, and being sensitive to their emotions. As Roman Krznaric, the author of Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It cleverly puts it, empathy is about looking outward instead of inward.

  Yet just like secure attachment, empathy may also be in crisis these days. A meta-analysis of studies done on over thirteen thousand American students showed that between 1979 and 2009, empathic concern for others nose-dived by 48 percent. Now consider that 2009 was still the early days for smartphones—the word “phubbing” hadn’t even been invented yet. In one of his speeches, former president Barack Obama noted that “we live in a culture that discourages empathy.” He blamed the looming empathy crisis on the selfish impulses promoted by our culture: to be entertained, famous, thin, and rich. Obama was right to point his finger at the pursuit of riches—studies confirm that those who are financially very well off tend to score low on empathy. He was also right that cultures are not created equal when it comes to “looking outward,” although the US does not come out particularly badly in the rankings. In research conducted at Michigan State University, the US ranked seventh from the top among sixty-three countries, while Canada was twelfth and UK was forty-seventh. Ecuador proved to be the world’s most empathic nation. At the very end of the list was Lithuania, while my native Poland scored fourth from the bottom.

  Yet, to state the obvious, it’s not just countries that differ in their levels of empathy—individual people do so, too. What’s less obvious is that there are patterns to these differences. In general, women tend to be more empathic than men: over 66 percent of the time it will be the woman who will score higher on empathy. This difference is already apparent in toddlerhood, with two-year-old girls showing more concern for people in distress than do boys of the same age. De Waal argues that we’ve evolved this way: the empathy of the mother was more vital to the baby’s survival than the empathy of the father—whether she was quick to nurse in response to hunger, for instance. So the infants of the most empathic mothers were the most likely to survive and carry on the genes.

  Male fetuses are exposed to higher levels of testosterone during pregnancy, with effects on the brain. If a pregnant woman undergoes amniocentesis during the second trimester of pregnancy and the levels of testosterone in the amniotic fluid are measured, you can have quite a good shot at guessing how empathic her
kid will be at school age. In a study of six- to eight-year-olds that followed such a procedure, the most “outward looking” kids were the ones who were exposed to the lowest levels of testosterone in their mother’s bodies. Which is another good reason for not smoking while pregnant, since nicotine raises testosterone levels in the fetus. The testosterone-empathy connection is also a perfect excuse for expecting mothers to put their feet up more often—just like nicotine, maternal cortisol may hike up fetal testosterone (note to future moms: now you can claim that that relaxing maternity massage is totally for the baby).

  In the testosterone study, the children were evaluated with a test commonly used to asses empathy called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes.” If you want to check your own empathy levels, it’s a fun way to do so: your task is to look at photos of human eyes and guess what emotion the portrayed person is experiencing (there are links to the test on this book’s website). Another tool to assess your empathy is also available there—“Empathy Quotient,” which is a more standard survey-type test.

  Why does that all matter for your longevity? Just like its relative, attachment, empathy plays a vital role in health by affecting our relationships. Take a teenager, measure their empathy levels, and you will be able to predict how socially well-integrated they will be two decades later as a thirty-something. Empathy also has a potent anti-loneliness effect. No matter your age, the more empathic you are, the less likely you are to feel all alone in the world. For marriage, too, high empathy means better quality, in a roundabout way adding years to our lifespans. Several studies have uncovered that higher empathy in the spouses predicts more relationship satisfaction, with the husband’s “outward looking” skills being more vital than the wife’s.