Your Relationships Are Affecting Your Health More Than You Think | Dr. Rich Slatcher

The XX Lab

Dr. Sarah Hill interviews Dr. Rich Slatcher to explore the profound link between social connection and physical longevity. They trace their

Key takeaways

• Social integration is a predictor of mortality roughly twice as powerful as physical exercise.
• Jamie Pennebaker's research demonstrates that expressive writing about trauma can improve immune function and reduce doctor visits.

Main topics

• Social Connection and Mortality
• Expressive Writing and Health

Notable quotes

Women's friendships are face-to-face and men's friendships are side-to-side.

Conclusion

The episode highlights that nurturing high-quality, responsive relatio

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Today on the XX Lab, I'm joined by Dr. Richard B. Slatcher. Rich is the Gail M. Williamson Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Georgia, and he's one of the leading researchers studying relationships, stress, and health. In this conversation, we explore the profound effects that close relationships and social connection have on our physical and emotional well-being. We talk about why being around groups of other people at events and gatherings can leave us feeling energized and connected, critical role that partner support plays in helping us cope with stress, and the simple questions we can ask anyone that can help build intimacy and closeness surprisingly quickly. We also dive into why, despite the fact that so many of us crave community, making couple friends as adults can feel so unexpectedly hard. This is such a thoughtful, warm, and deeply practical conversation about connection, belonging, and what it really means to build closeness in our lives. If you want to better understand the science of relationships and learn how to create stronger connections in your own life, you're not going to want to miss this episode. This is the XX Lab. I'm Dr. Sarah Hill. Let's get started. Speaker 1 (1:09) Dr. Rich Slatcher, welcome to the XX Lab. Speaker 2 (1:14) Dr. Sarah Hill, pleasure to be here. Speaker 1 (1:18) I'm so happy to see you. So you and I met in graduate school. We were both PhD students at the University of Texas at Austin. And I was working with David Buss, who of course, we had an evolutionary psychology lab there. And you worked with the incomparable Dr. Jamie Pennebaker. who is most well known for his research on expressive writing. And I was just wondering if you could tell the audience, what is expressive writing? Because I think that it's such a fascinating tool just because of how effective it is and how easy it is for any of us to do. And then I'm just also wondering, is that what brought you to UT? Was it to work on expressive writing and better understand how we can... impact our health in positive ways through the things that we do in our relationship? Speaker 2 (2:12) That is a great question and one I haven't really thought about in a long time. We both, just to circle back on your original statement, we definitely both worked with legends in our time in graduate school between David and Jamie. So it was a really exciting time to be in grad school. So very quickly, what expressive writing is. The basic idea behind this that Jamie Pennebaker pioneered was this idea that writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings about the initial studies were done looking at traumatic experiences, showed a host of positive outcomes. And especially intriguing to him and others were benefits for health. So that people, when they wrote about for like three days, 20 minutes a day about their deepest thoughts and feelings about traumatic. experiences. It led to fewer physician visits, later on better immune system function, all kinds of health outcomes. That wasn't exactly what drew me to working with him. I mean, he's kind of known for two big things, expressive writing and then language use. I was originally interested in studying friendship and studying relationships. And I did a paper I did not have an undergrad degree in psychology. I thought I was going to be an art historian, which is a whole other story. Speaker 1 (3:36) So is your undergraduate degree in art history? Speaker 2 (3:39) My undergrad degree was in business administration with an art history minor, almost major. And basically, by the middle of my junior year, I'd had all of my business classes out of the way. And I took, in the fall of my junior year, an art history class and then just took a bunch. and just really loved the subject and ended up working in the museum world for a while. And yeah, I didn't make my way down to Texas. I moved to Austin on my 30th birthday. So I did a bunch of stuff in between. Speaker 1 (4:09) Right. So what ultimately made you decide to work on your PhD in psychology? I Speaker 2 (4:14) think I kind of knew I wanted to be a professor. I had a mentor in art history where I went to undergrad at the University of Richmond. I don't know, it just seemed like a really cool lifestyle. You know, she was traveling to Paris doing research in the summer. And I just, I don't know, it was like the first, I'd had some classes in high school that really. Got me intellectually engaged, not so much in the business classes. And yeah, it just seemed I left college. It just seemed like I could spend my life being in this kind of an environment. Why I didn't go into art history, I mean, part of it was like I was intellectually really interested in it. But at the time... It was really focused on postmodernism, critical theory, Foucault, Derrida, and I started reading the stuff. And it was, you know, God bless people that love reading that, but it was like the driest thing I'd ever read. And it was very far from the undergrad art history classes I took. So I ended up moving from the National Gallery of Art, took a job at George Washington University, also in D.C. My wife and I met in D.C., and so I lived in D.C. for five years after college. I had been just so that I could get into the museum world. I was in the Office of External Affairs doing some fundraising, which I kind of hated, but I was okay at it. And I moved to GW thinking, well, I can take some classes for free here. That's part of the perks of the job. I can work there and then kind of figure out what I want to do. And my boss was, my kind of big boss, was the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. And I was just telling him, you know, psychology sounds kind of cool. My buddy Sean is getting his master's in psychology. That sounds kind of interesting. And he was a psych professor. And actually, it turned out, had written an intro text that was in its seventh edition at the time, Lester Lefton. And he's like the only dean I've ever met that still taught. Like he taught a course a year. And so he's like, take my intro class. And he was this just. dynamic lecturer. I mean, and, and it was kind of like, like love at first reading, which is funny because I actually took in college, uh, a team taught intro psych class in a huge lecture hall, hated it, got like a C plus or something. And, but then when I took it, you know, at the second time, it was just, I remember going home. I was so just kind of done with being a fundraiser and just. reading through this intro psych textbook, like for the first time, frankly, because I had pretty severe undiagnosed ADD as a kid, like I could never get through textbooks. I could always go to class and, you know, I could kind of wing it in some ways. But this was like the first class that I remember, like just really getting into the reading and like having fun taking notes and highlighting. And it was kind of the rest is sort of history in a way. So I was like, oh, this is cool. And then I took some more undergrad classes. These were all undergrad classes. I was taking my mid-20s. And then I thought, well, you know, I don't want to stick around and get a full like major in psychology. Maybe it'll give me a leg up if I take like a grad course or two. And I took this course in cross-cultural psychology with Professor Maria Cecilia Zea and had been starting being a volunteer in her lab because I was starting to get interested in studying friendship. So this was sort of the seeds of that. I think, I think. It was in part driven by, I'd had great friends in high school and college, but I had this really strong friend group that was a really cohesive friend group in my 20s. And I was just really kind of intrigued by the psychology of this group and why we were friends. And her lab studied friendship in a matter of sorts or tangentially. She had a big NIH grant looking at when and how Latino men who have sex with men. came out about HIV diagnoses and to whom. And so this was the seeds of self-disclosure. She really studied self-disclosure. Why do people who have a disease like this, which in the late 90s was still pretty darn stigmatized. And so I got interested in that sort of as a process. And I took her cross-cultural psychology class. And I wasn't that – I actually am interested in cross-cultural psychology now. It's kind of the irony. But I wasn't interested in sort of the traditional sense of cross-cultural psychology at the time, like comparing people from different countries of origin. I thought, well, it would be kind of cool to study – I'm fascinated learning more about self-disclosure, why guys are so not disclosing. There's a phrase in the research world that – Speaker 2 (8:58) women's friendships are face-to-face and men's friendships are side-to-side, right? And that's essentially the lower levels of self-disclosure in a nutshell. So I did this paper on, this is a really long Speaker 1 (9:10) answer to your question, so you can edit a lot of this out. Speaker 2 (9:12) But I ended up taking this class and I wrote this paper. I got permission from Maria Cecilia to write a paper. It does not sound at all cross-cultural, but she approved it. Older men's friendships and the role of self-disclosure. Kind of comparing them to women's friendships. Because I also was interested across the lifespan. What happens when dudes retire? And I'm inching closer and closer. I'm not retiring anytime soon. But I'm closer to retirement than I am to the beginning of my career. So in writing that paper, I came across Jamie's stuff about self-disclosure. Speaker 2 (9:49) You know, it just, I was kind of interested in this idea, the expressive writing that was cool and stuff, but there, it turns out at the time, at least there were like very few social psychologists who study friendship. Most of them were in developmental psychology. I thought about being a developmental psychologist just so I could study friendship, but I didn't really want to study kids per se. I wanted to study adults. And so he was on my list. And then I went to APA, the APA conference, which. Didn't know at the time, like no social psychologists go to. That was, I think, my first and last, literally, APA convention in like 2000. And I saw Jamie give a talk and it was like all over. I mean, you've seen him speak before. He's an incredibly dynamic speaker. And he was starting to get into this work on language and sort of the social psychology of everyday word use. And it was kind of that. And him starting to use this device that he and Matthias Mell, who we also went to grad school with, came up with, the electronically activated recorder, which listens in on people's everyday social lives. And it was sort of that, like the disclosure kind of got me hooked, but it was this method. Jamie's really a methods guy and he's all about studying everyday life. And I was like, this sounds awesome. Like it was just like this excitement. That was in the air when he talked. And I was like, I want to, he is not a relationship researcher at all. Really? I mean, he would probably say that he is, but he's not, not in the traditional sense. And so I just thought, well, this would be cool to like apply these, these techniques that, that he and his students are using to relationships. Speaker 1 (11:33) What's really funny. I can't believe that you and I haven't talked about our origin stories, but you know, I was actually an anthropology major. as an undergraduate. And like you, I took a psychology class. I took it, I think it was my sophomore year. Now, unlike you, I didn't get a C because I dropped it. Because I was like, this is the dumbest stuff I've ever heard because they started off with Freud. right? And like, this doesn't account for human nature, because I was just really, like really interested in human nature, right? It's like, why are people the way that they are? And so I ended up taking, and just like you, I ended up in anthropology, because it seemed to get a little bit closer to the heart of it. And it was, I really got into evolutionary biology, I thought it was super interesting. And, and it wasn't anything I really had any familiarity with from from high school. But when I went to college, I like was serious. And so I fell in love with evolutionary biology. But ultimately, I was interested in why people do what they do. And so I took psychology. I'm like, oh, that doesn't, you know, that's, and so drop that. And then I had to read a bunch of philosophy for these classes. And like you, I was like, well, this isn't right either. You know, I was like, and yeah, I was like Foucault and these structuralists, like explaining the way that society sort of shapes you. And I'm like, that doesn't feel right to me. Like, I'm like, I don't, I don't, I'm not just a passive vehicle for the thrust of, you know. culture and institutions. Like I was like, I don't believe that either. And so I spent a lot of time just kind of trying to figure out where the truth was in terms of understanding human behavior. And then I ended up accidentally somersaulting my way into a class called Human Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology. And that David Buss's textbook was what we read in that book, along with another book of edited, you know, sort of peer reviewed journal articles. And then it was like, aha, you know, it was like the light bulb went off. And so anyway, so you and I. So were you also Speaker 2 (13:26) not a psych major? Speaker 1 (13:28) I was anthropology. And I actually went to UT Austin. So here's my story. I'm going to end up hijacking this episode and make it all about me. No, I love it. I mean, Speaker 2 (13:39) it is easy to get me to wax nostalgic about grad school. I loved it. Speaker 1 (13:45) Yeah. Yeah, no, I loved it too. It was like it was time of my life and one of the times of my life, I should say. But so it was so crazy. I actually moved to Austin. So I was actually set to go to grad school. I was going to go to Columbia. And my plan was to go to Columbia University, New York. I love New York. I got in. I got a really nice scholarship. In anthropology? In anthropology. Speaker 2 (14:05) In anthropology. Speaker 1 (14:06) Yes, in anthropology. And UT Austin was on my list. And I applied there. And I also got in. And they also gave me money. They didn't give me as much money as Columbia gave me. And I got a pair of wool socks for my birthday from my cousin because I was going to be moving to New York to go to Columbia. And it was in grad school decision time. And I grew up in Wisconsin. I went to my undergraduate institution was in Wisconsin. And I opened up these wool socks and I just started to cry. And it was because the weather was miserable. And it's, you know, up in Wisconsin, the weather was always miserable. And I was like, I blew everybody's mind. I ended up turning down Columbia. And I ended up going to UT Austin for anthropology just because I felt like I just needed a total change of pace. You know, I was like, it was like the cold and the gray. And I was like, I just need, I just, I just need to get out and do something totally different. And so. I turned my whole plans that I had for myself completely upside down. I moved down to Texas for anthropology. And then it turned out that anthropology was a terrible fit for me because it was more of the cultural construction. You know, everything is a social construction and sex differences aren't real. And it's just the you've just bought into the patriarchy. And I was like, this is. Like I didn't buy into the, you know, it's like, I didn't buy into the patriarchy, you know. And you weren't studying Speaker 2 (15:30) it necessarily to make a political statement. Speaker 1 (15:33) No, I wasn't. And it was like, and it was like this weird left wing political group is what it felt like. And I was just like, and I was like talking about biology and whatever. And so I was in a dropout. So here's my long sob story. So Speaker 2 (15:46) what Speaker 1 (15:46) year Speaker 2 (15:46) is this? Speaker 1 (15:48) This is 2000. I moved to Austin in the summer of 2000. I started graduate school in the fall of 2000 and working in the anthropology department. And all of this was happening, and it was the worst time of my life. And I remember, you know, at the library at UT, how they have, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. It's like carved into stone, like about the library. I remember because I had like totally bought into this idea of evolved psychology and that we've inherited these predispositions and all of this. And everybody was telling me that I was crazy and had been brainwashed by the patriarchy, you know, in the anthropology department. I remember seeing that sign and just like crying, like feeling like this is overly dramatic moments. But I didn't know that David Buss was there. And I had read his textbook as an undergrad. And it's what totally gave me the paradigm shift that led me ultimately. to pursue the research I pursued. And I was going through the course offerings because I was going to drop all my anthropology classes and move back to Wisconsin and then just figure out what I was going to do next. And so I was going to drop my classes and just replace them with like pottery, you know, or like kite flying 101 or something. And so I was going through the course offerings to figure out what to take. And I saw his name there. And I sent him this like long, tearful email explaining my plight that I had been introduced to evolutionary psychology. And it was the way I saw the world. And I was in this anthropology program because I'm interested in human nature. And I thought it was going to be this. And it ended up being that. And could I please sit in on your graduate seminar? And he let me do it. And then the rest was history. And I applied to get into his lab the next year. So I started in the psych program in 2001. The year after I moved to Austin. I Speaker 2 (17:31) was trying, because I thought we were like one year apart that I came a year later. You graduated in 06 or 07? Speaker 1 (17:37) 06. 06, yeah, right. But December of 06. Yeah, so I actually, I defended my dissertation in December of 06, and then I had my daughter, my oldest child, two weeks later. Speaker 2 (17:49) Really? I don't think I realized that. I knew you had kids, but I actually had both of my kids in Austin. Speaker 1 (17:55) Oh, did you really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's so funny because I have, you know, so many, so many of my PhD students are women. And I just tell them, like, look, if you want to have kids, you just need to, you just need to do it. Figure it out. I mean, never, there's never Speaker 2 (18:10) an ideal time, right? Speaker 1 (18:11) No, there's not. Speaker 2 (18:12) That's really interesting. I had no idea that we had that similarity. Yeah. Speaker 1 (18:18) So you moved to Austin, you're working with Jamie, and you're going to be applying his cool tools to better understand friendship. And since then, I mean, you have built this huge career on essentially, well, there's a lot of different avenues, but like a lot of it revolves around the positive health benefits, right, of relationships that we have. One of the things that you're most well known for is this work that looks at the relationship between the quality of the relationships that we have and then also the process of self-disclosure in relationships and then how that influences our health. And I think that for a lot of people who are listening, this might actually be one of their first introductions to this idea because most of the time when people think about health, right, they think about avoiding toxins and they think about the quality of their diet and they think about making sure that they're getting enough sleep. And they think about exercise, but they don't really think about the quality of their relationships. And so I want you to tell us, like, how do our relationships impact our health? And just tell us a little bit about the research on this. So Speaker 2 (19:26) I'll start with kind of the most compelling set of findings in the field. And that is when you look at all the studies that have been done that have included measures of social connection in large epidemiological studies. And by that, I mean, you know, these large panel studies of thousands of people where invariably they'll have some social kinds of connection, sorts of measures in there. How many friends do you have? Are you married? That sort of thing. And a study came out in 1988 by Deborah Uberson, who was at UT at the time, and James House, who's at University of Michigan. It came out on Science, and they looked at like... 10 of these large studies and they showed the links between social integration, how socially connected people are, and mortality. And it was like every single one of these studies all went in the same direction. The more socially integrated that you were, the longer you lived. About 10 years ago, Julianne Holt-Lunstead, whose name you're probably familiar with, did this huge meta-analysis, essentially looking at the same thing, but in this case was like, hundreds of thousands of people and is now, I think, one of the most, if not the most widely cited psychology paper like ever. She found the exact same thing. And the effects are huge. I mean, when I talk about this, I have a figure from that paper of hers. And I talked about this work. A lot of our work looking at relationships and health has been done using something Speaker 1 (21:02) called the MIDAS dataset, which is actually housed at University of Wisconsin. Speaker 2 (21:06) And so I was there giving a talk and it's all different kinds of researchers, some like psychology, some health. And there was this physical activity exercise researcher that came up right before me. And she said that it is hard to overestimate the effect of physical activity on people's health and longevity. So I came up next and I had this figure and I'm showing all of these different. health behaviors like smoking or not smoking rather, exercising, eating well, all these kinds of things. And exercising was up there. And I turned to the speaker from before me and I said, I don't mean to get competitive, but then I reveal this is the effect of social relationships on health. And it's like double the size of all of those except for smoking in terms of it's an opposite effect. I have some doubts about some findings, and we can talk about that, in terms of really getting a good handle on what the