Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Social relationshipsโboth quantity and qualityโaffect mental health, health behavior, physical health, and mortality risk. Sociologists have played a central role in establishing the link between social relationships and health outcomes, identifying explanations for this link, and discovering social variation e. Studies show that social relationships have short- and long-term effects on health, for better and for worse, and that these effects emerge in childhood and cascade throughout life to foster cumulative advantage or disadvantage in health.
This article describes key research themes in the study of social relationships and health, and it highlights policy implications suggested by this research. Keywords: relationships, social support, social integration, stress, cumulative disadvantage.
Captors use social isolation to torture prisoners of warโto drastic effect. Social isolation of otherwise healthy, well-functioning individuals eventually results in psychological and physical disintegration, and even death.
Over the past few decades, social scientists have gone beyond evidence of extreme social deprivation to demonstrate a clear link between social relationships and health in the general population.
Adults who are more socially connected are healthier and live longer than their more isolated peers. This article describes major findings in the study of social relationships and health, and how that knowledge might be translated into policy that promotes population health. Key research findings include: 1 social relationships have significant effects on health; 2 social relationships affect health through behavioral, psychosocial, and physiological pathways; 3 relationships have costs and benefits for health; 4 relationships shape health outcomes throughout the life course and have a cumulative impact on health over time; and 5 the costs and benefits of social relationships are not distributed equally in the population.
