If you’ve ever wondered how having a spouse or life partner affects your stress, a new study may have some answers.

Knowing that older adults tend to have a stronger physiological response to stress but a decreased ability to slow down the body’s response of cortisol production, the researchers wanted to determine if intimate relationships can help older couples manage their cortisol levels.

The Research

A team of researchers from the University of California, Davis analyzed data collected from 321 adults between 2012 and 2018. The information was taken from three intensive studies in Germany and Canada and included data from participants who were 56 to 87 years old. In all the studies, the following was collected multiple times each day for one week:

• Self-reported emotional states

• Relationship satisfaction

• Cortisol levels (from saliva samples)

The Results

As the scientists theorized, the results of the study showed that the bodies of older people in an intimate relationship produced less cortisol during the times that their partner had higher-than-usual positive emotions. This effect was even stronger in three circumstances:

• When the person who produced less cortisol reported their own positive emotions

And

• Among people who reported being happier in their relationship

And

• In older couples

“Having positive emotions with your relationship partner can act like a social resource,” explains Dr. Tomiko Yoneda, who serves as an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Letters and Science at University of California, Davis. “Positive emotions can buffer the production of cortisol. This is especially relevant when we think about how our relationship partners might actually bolster that effect.”

Unsurprising was the finding that there was no link between a person’s cortisol levels and their partner’s negative emotions. According to one of the study’s lead authors, that’s because prior research suggests that older adults may protect their partners from a stress response to negative emotions.

According to Yoneda, healthy relationships can create a positive feedback loop that enhances our ability to act more fluidly in the moment and these experiences can improve over time.

“Relationships provide an ideal source of support, especially when those are high-quality relationships,” says Yoneda. “These dynamics may be particularly important in older adulthood.”

The research was a collaborative project from multiple sources, including Christiane Hoppmann of University of British Columbia; Theresa Pauly of Simon Fraser University, and researchers from Humboldt Universitat Berlin, and Stanford University.

The study was published in the September 2024 edition of the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.

MBJ

Wendy Burt-Thomas writes about the brain, mental health and parenting.

Check out the original research:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306453024001628?via%3Dihub