The effects of everyday-life social interactions on anxiety-related autonomic responses differ between men and women

Abstract

Social buffering, a phenomenon where social presence can reduce anxiety and fear-related autonomic responses, has been studied in numerous laboratory settings. The results suggest that the familiarity of the interaction partner influences social buffering while also providing some evidence for gender effects. In the laboratory, however, it is difficult to mimic the complexity of real-life social interactions. Consequently, the social modulation of anxiety and related autonomic responses in everyday life remains poorly understood. We used smartphone-based Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) combined with wearable electrocardiogram sensors to investigate how everyday-life social interactions affect state anxiety and related cardiac changes in women and men. On five consecutive days, 96 healthy young participants (53% women) answered up to six EMA surveys per day, indicating characteristics of their most recent social interaction and the respective interaction partner(s). In women, our results showed lower heart rate in the presence of a male interaction partner. Men showed the same effect with female interaction partners. Moreover, only women showed decreased heart rate and increased heart rate variability with increasing interaction partner familiarity. These findings specify the conditions under which social interactions reduce anxiety-related responses in women and men.

The Effect of Everyday-Life Social Contact on Pain

“…In addition, participants were asked to provide a more detailed report on their social participation with a web-based survey once per day in the evening. However, to uncover relevant features of social contact, researchers usually present several questions to retrieve more comprehensive impressions of the features of the contact (eg, quantity of interaction partners, number of strangers, familiarity and gender of the interaction partner, or perceived personality traits) [ 31 , 60 , 66 ]. Thus, wrist-worn devices might not be as suited as smartphones when it comes to extensive social contact research in daily life as presenting multiple-choice EMA questions is more burdensome compared with smartphones [ 67 ].…”

“…These results are limited by the minimalistic assessment of daily social interactions: the occurrence of social interactions was coded based on a general question regarding the participant’s activity prior to receiving the phone call, and no additional social aspects were assessed [ 68 ]. However, similar to other health-related contexts (eg, anxiety-related responses) [ 60 ], daily-life pain might change in dependence on the personal characteristics of social partners, such as their gender or familiarity. For instance, there are indications from the laboratory that social support by strangers is less efficient in reducing pain than social support provided by more familiar social partners [ 21 , 69 ].…”

“…Numeric rating scales (most commonly anchored from 0 to 10, eg, with 0=“no pain” and 10=“pain as bad as you can imagine” or “worst pain imaginable”) [ 15 , 104 ] are popular, fine-grained, and insightful [ 10 , 12 ] and could serve as a common tool. Based on the experience of our and others’ previous research on social interactions, we recommend the consideration of several contextual factors in order to obtain clean and interpretable EMA data [ 31 , 38 , 60 , 105 ]: Was the interaction face-to-face or not? How many persons were involved in the interaction?…”

“…Such ambulatory measurements are objective, unbiased, and can collect data continuously and at a high resolution [ 33 , 41 ]. Previous research has already used ambulatory sensors to investigate social interaction and support in daily life [ 60 , 106 ]. The acceptance and feasibility of mobile measurement devices such as smartwatches are high among the general population [ 41 , 107 ], and the technology is quickly evolving to provide even more opportunities.…”

Differential effects of everyday-life social support on chronic pain

“…For social interactions ≤ 30 min ago, participants were presented with the social interaction questionnaire. Otherwise, they were required to answer a similarly structured activity questionnaire to prevent avoidance behavior due to time savings (see also Gründahl et al, 2023;Weiß et al, 2023). In the social interaction questionnaire, participants were asked about the characteristics of their latest social interaction: its duration, nature (face-to-face, virtual, written), the number of interaction partners, their gender, and the degree of familiarity with the main interaction partner.…”