{"id":116882,"date":"2021-03-27T15:43:56","date_gmt":"2021-03-27T22:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/69.46.6.243\/?p=116882"},"modified":"2021-03-27T15:43:56","modified_gmt":"2021-03-27T22:43:56","slug":"want-a-longer-healthier-life-resolve-your-arguments-by-days-end-osu-study-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/?p=116882","title":{"rendered":"Want a Longer, Healthier Life? Resolve Your Arguments by Day\u2019s End, OSU Study Says"},"content":{"rendered":"

Corvallis, OR….A recent Oregon State University study found that when people feel they have resolved an argument, the emotional response associated with that disagreement is significantly reduced and, in some situations, almost entirely erased.\u00a0 That reduction in stress may have a major impact on overall health, researchers say.<\/p>\n

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\u201cEveryone experiences stress in their daily lives. You aren\u2019t going to stop stressful things from happening. But the extent to which you can tie them off, bring them to an end and resolve them is definitely going to pay dividends in terms of your well-being,\u201d said Robert Stawski, senior author on the\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0and an associate professor in the\u00a0College of Public Health and Human Sciences<\/a>. \u201cResolving your arguments is quite important for maintaining well-being in daily life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Researchers have long been aware of how chronic stress can affect health, from mental health problems such as depression and anxiety to physical problems including heart disease, a weakened immune system, reproductive difficulties and gastrointestinal issues.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not just major chronic stressors like poverty or violence that can inflict damage.<\/p>\n

\u201cDaily stressors \u2014 specifically the minor, small inconveniences that we have throughout the day \u2014 even those have lasting impacts on mortality and things like inflammation and cognitive function,\u201d said Dakota Witzel, lead author and a doctoral student in human development and family studies at OSU.<\/p>\n

For the study, Stawski and Witzel used data from the\u00a0National Study of Daily Experiences<\/a>, an in-depth survey of more than 2,000 people who were interviewed about their feelings and experiences for eight days in a row.<\/p>\n

The researchers looked at reports of both arguments and avoided arguments, defined as instances where the person could have argued about something but chose to let it slide so as not to have a disagreement. They then measured how the incident affected the person\u2019s reported change in negative and positive emotions, both for the day of the encounter and the day after it occurred.<\/p>\n

The measure of how an experience affects someone emotionally, an increase in negative emotions or a decrease in positive emotions, on the day it occurs is known as \u201creactivity,\u201d while \u201cresidue\u201d is the prolonged emotional toll the day after the experience occurs. Negative and positive affect refer to the degree of negative and positive emotions a person feels on a given day.<\/p>\n

Results showed that on the day of an argument or avoided argument, people who felt their encounter was resolved reported roughly half the reactivity of those whose encounters were not resolved.<\/p>\n

On the day following an argument or avoided argument, the results were even starker: People who felt the matter was resolved showed no prolonged elevation of their negative affect the next day.<\/p>\n

The study also looked at age-related differences in response to arguments and avoided arguments and found that adults ages 68 and older were more than 40% more likely than people 45 and younger to report their conflicts as resolved. But the impact of resolution status on people\u2019s negative and positive affect remained the same regardless of age.<\/p>\n

The researchers had several explanations for older adults\u2019 higher rate of resolution: Older adults may be more motivated to minimize negative and maximize positive emotions as they have fewer years remaining, which is consistent with existing theories of aging and emotion. They may also have more experience navigating arguments and thus be more effective at defusing or avoiding conflict.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf older adults are really motivated to maximize their emotional well-being, they\u2019re going do a better job, or at least a faster job, at resolving stressors in a more timely fashion,\u201d Stawski said.<\/p>\n

While people cannot always control what stressors come into their lives \u2014 and lack of control is itself a stressor in many cases \u2014 they can work on their own emotional response to those stressors, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people are more reactive than other people,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the extent to which you can tie off the stress so it\u2019s not having this gnawing impact at you over the course of the day or a few days will help minimize the potential long-term impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

In future research projects, Stawski and Witzel hope to further unpack the nature of people\u2019s disagreements to measure which contexts and relationships provoke the most stressful arguments.<\/p>\n

About the OSU College of Public Health and Human Sciences:<\/strong>\u00a0The first accredited college of public health in Oregon, the college creates connections in teaching, research and community outreach while advancing knowledge, policies and practices that improve population health in communities across the state and beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Corvallis, OR….A recent Oregon State University study found that when people feel they have resolved an argument, the emotional response associated with that disagreement is significantly reduced and, in some situations, almost entirely erased.\u00a0 That reduction in stress may have a major impact on overall health, researchers say. \u201cEveryone experiences stress in their daily lives. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":116883,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_cbd_carousel_blocks":"[]","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,5,33,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-government","category-health-fitness","category-news","last_archivepost"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/figure_1_in_color.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=116882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/116883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=116882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=116882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=116882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}