Chat with acquaintances promotes health benefits – 04/30/2023 – Equilíbrio

Victoria Tirondola and Lam Gong started chatting for the first time last spring in the dog area of ​​Brookdale Park, in Bloomfield, New Jersey (United States) when they realized that they both had a dog named Abby. Tirondola, 65, is an insurance sales representative and lives in nearby Cedar Grove, has a little dog that is a cross between a bichon and a poodle. Lam Gong’s Abby is a terrier-beagle cross.

They talked about dogs. Then they found out they both like to cook, so “we got to talking about food and restaurants,” says Gong, a retiree who lives in Clifton.

“And how I cook better than him”, says Tirondola. They were sitting on a park bench on a balmy spring afternoon, the dogs running wild around them, next to a third person from a growing little group that meet regularly in the park: Pattie Marsh, a dog walker who takes a miniature Australian Shepherd. called Ollie to play in the park.

“We all live alone,” says Tirondola. “My mother passed away in July last year, and we were very close. Lam lost his wife a few years ago.”

Meeting in Bark Park (the part of the park set aside for dogs to run free) “gives us a sense of fellowship,” says Marsh, 55. She and Tirondola, who share a bond because they are both evangelical Christians, go to the park daily. . Gong meets them there once or twice a week. Another who encounters them with such frequency is Lee Geanoules, 69, a waitress who works part-time at a restaurant in Clifton and who arrived shortly afterwards with Charlie, the result of a cross between a pug and a beagle.

Psychologists and sociologists describe these types of relationships as “weak ties” or “peripheral ties,” in contrast to the close ties between family members and close friends. Some researchers who study these ties include in this category study or work colleagues, neighbors and people who attend the same churches or places of worship. Others look at interactions with nearly unknown people in cafes or on transit routes.

People who pass each other in the dog section of a park, for example, may recognize other regulars even if they don’t know their names (although they probably know the names of their dogs) or not much else about them. Even so, they often exchange words about their pets or the weather, and that’s important.

These seemingly trivial interactions have been shown to bolster people’s positive moods and reduce their likelihood of feeling depressed.

“Weak ties matter, not just for our mood but also for our health,” says psychologist Gillian Sandstrom of the University of Essex in England, who researches their impact.

“If I asked who you confide in, you wouldn’t mention those people,” she went on. But the sense of belonging provided by weak ties “is essential to feeling connected to other people” — even among introverts, which is how Sandstrom defines herself.

In their early studies, handheld devices were distributed to groups of college students and people over 25 to record how many peers or other people they interacted with, even minimally, over the course of several days. Those who interacted with more people with whom they have weak ties reported feeling more happiness and having a greater sense of well-being and belonging than those who had fewer interactions.

The researchers also found differences within the people themselves, showing that the effects were not due to each person’s personality. People reported being happier on days when they had more interactions. Other studies have found similar benefits when people smile or exchange words with baristas at places like Starbucks in Vancouver, Canada, or greet university bus drivers in Ankara, Turkey.

Most of the participants were young, but a study published in 2020 followed a sample of more than 800 older adults in metro Detroit over the course of 23 years.

The researchers asked the participants (median age 62) to draw three concentric circles, with “you” in the center, and then arrange the people in their lives in the circles according to how close they were. People in the inner circle of close ties were almost always family members, says psychologist Toni Antonucci of the University of Michigan and senior author of the study. Weak ties in the outer circle included friends, coworkers, and neighbors.

Over time, the number of weak ties came to predict a person’s well-being more accurately than the number of close ties. For Antonucci, weak ties “offer a low-strain opportunity for interaction. It’s cognitively stimulating. It’s engaging.”

The Covid-19 pandemic, which arrived at a time when social scientists were already warning about the risks of loneliness for the health of older adults, put many of these fleeting everyday encounters on hold.

Older people often kept in touch with their family members in one way or another. But where were the waiters who already knew what they used to order for breakfast, the bank tellers, the traffic cops, the people who walk dogs? “I hope this made people understand the importance of weak ties,” Sandstrom points out. They don’t replace strong ties, “but we miss the spontaneity and novelty of those weak ties,” he says.

When people are older and their social networks tend to shrink, it may be necessary to make an effort to interact with more people. “Make the effort,” recommends Antonucci. “You can’t have new kids at 70, but you can create new weak ties.”

Toby Gould’s day begins at 7 am with a trip to Chez Antoine Bakery in Hyannis, Massachusetts. A 77-year-old retired shepherd, Gould usually buys a cafe latte to go and exchanges a few words in broken French with the Belgian owner, who hands a slice of ham to Gould’s Australian Shepherd, Layla. If the bakery closed, “it would leave a hole in my life,” says Gould.

Weak ties, including those developed online, do not necessarily convert to tighter ties, nor does it need to. After all, the most intimate relationships can involve conflict, demands for reciprocity, and other complications.

But sometimes it happens that the weak ties get deeper.

The members of the group that formed in Brookdale Park became true friends. They go out to dinner together, go to movies and comedy shows. When the weather is bad, they go for a walk at the local mall. Lam Gong, who knows how to do a bit of everything, hung curtains at Tirondola’s house and varnished cupboards for Geanoules. He gave Marsh a ride when she left her car at the garage.

At first they were a little hesitant about exchanging phone numbers, “but we took this giant step,” says Geanoules, pausing to pet one of the Abbys. “You can change your whole life by stopping to chat with someone for ten minutes.”

Translated by Clara Allain