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Why Sisterly Chats Make People Happier

“Having a Sister Makes You Happier”: that was the headline on a recent article about a study finding that adolescents who have a sister are less likely to report such feelings as “I am unhappy, sad or depressed” and “I feel like no one loves me.”

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These findings are no fluke; other studies have come to similar conclusions. But why would having a sister make you happier?

The usual answer — that girls and women are more likely than boys and men to talk about emotions — is somehow unsatisfying, especially to a researcher like me.

Much of my work over the years has developed the premi se that women’s styles of friendship and conversation aren’t inherently better than men’s, simply different.

A man once told me that he had spent a day with a friend who was going through

a divorce. When he returned home, his wife asked how his friend was coping. He

replied: “I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it.”

His wife chastised him. Obviously, she said, the friend needed to talk about what he was going through.

This made the man feel bad. So he was relieved to read in my book “You Just

Don’t Understand” (Ballantine, 1990) that doing things together can be a comfort in itself, another way to show caring. Asking about the divorce might have made his friend feel worse by reminding him of it, and expressing concern could have come across as condescending.

The man who told me this was himself comforted to be reassured that his

instincts hadn’t been wrong and he hadn’t let his friend down.

But if talking about problems isn’t necessary for comfort, then having sisters shouldn’t make men happier than havin g brothers. Yet the recent study— by Laura Padilla-Walker and her colleagues at Brigham Young University— is supported by others.

Last year, for example, the British psychologists Liz Wright and Tony Cassidy found that young people who had grown up with at least one sister tended to be happier and more optimistic, especially if their parents had divorced. Another British researcher, Judy Dunn, found a similar pattern among older adults.

So what is going on?

My own recent research about sisters suggests a more subtle dynamic. I interviewed more than 100 women about their sisters, but if they also had brothers, I asked them to compare. Most said they talked to their sisters more often, at greater length and, yes, about more personal topics. This often meant that they felt closer to their sisters, but not always.

One woman, for example, says she talks for hours by phone to her two brothers as well as her two sisters. But the topics differ. She talks to her sisters about their personal lives; with her brothers she discusses history, geography and books. And, she added, one brother calls her at 5 a.m. as a prank.

A prank? Is this communication? Well, yes —it reminds her that he’s thinking of her. And talking for hours creates and reinforces connections with both brothers and sisters, regardless of what they talk about.

A student in my class recounted a situation that shows how this can work. When their family dog died, the siblings (a brother and three sisters) all called one another. The sisters told one another how much they missed the dog and how terrible they felt. The brother expressed concern for everyone in the family but said nothing about what he himself was feeling.

My student didn’t doubt that her brother felt the same as his sisters; he just didn’t say it directly. An d I’ll bet that having the phone conversations served exactly the same purpose for him as the sisters’ calls did for them: providing comfort in the face of their shared loss.

So the key to why having sisters makes people happier — men as well as women — may lie not in the kind of talk they exchange but in the fact of talk. If men, like women, talk more often to their sisters than to their brothers, that could explain why sisters make them happier. The interviews I conducted with women

reinforced this insig ht. Many told me that they don’t talk to their sisters about personal problems, either.

An example is Colleen, a widow in her 80s who told me that she’d been very close to her unmarried sister throughout their lives, though they never discussed their personal problems. An image of these sisters has remained indelible in my mind.

Late in life, the sister came to live with Colleen and her husband. Colleen recalled that each morning after her husband got up to make coffee, her sister would stop by Colleen’s bedroom to say good morning. Colleen would urge her sister to join her in bed. As they sat up in bed side by side, holding hands, Colleen and her sister would “just talk.”

That’s another kind of conversation that many women engage in which baffles many men: talk about details of their daily lives, like the sweater they found on sale —details, you might say, as insignificant as those about last night’s ballgame which can baffle women when they overhear men talking. These seemingly pointless conversations a re as comforting to some women as “troubles talk” conversations are to others.

So maybe it’s true that talk is the reason having a sister makes you happier, but it needn’t be talk about emotions. When women told me they talk to their sisters more often, a t greater length and about more personal topics, I suspect it’s that first element — more often — that is crucial rather than the last.

This makes sense to me as a linguist who truly believes that women’s ways of talking are not inherently better than men’s. It also feels right to me as a woman with two sisters — one who likes to have long conversations about feelings and one who doesn’t, but who both make me happier.

Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author, mo st recently, of “You Were Always Mom’s Favorite! Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives.”

What to Do Now to Feel Better at 100

Many changes take place in physical abilities as we age. Try as I may, I simply can’t swim as fast at 69 as I did a t 39, 49 or even 59. Nor am I as steady on my feet. I can only assume my strength has waned as well —I’m finding bottles and jars harder to open and heavy packages harder to lift and carry.

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But in August, I hiked in the Grand Canyon, prompting my 10-year-old grandson Stefan to ask, “Grandma, how many 69-year-olds do you think could do this?”

The answer, of course, is “a lot.” And the reason is that we work at it. For my part,

I exercise daily, walking three miles or biking 10, then swimming three-quarters

of a mile. In spring and summer, heavy-duty gardening strengthens my entire body.

But now that my physically stronger spouse is gone, I see that I need to make

some improvements. With no one handy to open those jars or lift those heavy objects, I’ve begun strength training so I can remain as independent as possible as long as possible.

In a newly published book,“Treat Me, Not My Age”(Viking), Dr. Mark Lachs, director of geriatrics at the NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System, discusses two major influences (among others) on how well older people are able to function.

Delaying Bodily Decline

The first, called physiologic reserve, refers to excess capacity in organs and biological systems; we’re given this reserve at birth, and it tends to decrease over time. In an interview, Dr. Lachs said that as cells deteriorate or die with advancing age, that excess is lost at different rates in different systems.

The effects can sneak up on a person, he said, because even when most of the excess capacity is gone, we may experience little or no decline in function. A secret of successful aging is to slow down the loss of physiologic reserve.

“Yo u can lose up to 90 percent of the kidney function you had as a child and never experience any symptoms whatsoever related to kidney function failure,” Dr. Lachs said. Likewise, we are born with billions of brain cells we’ll never use, and many if not most of them can be lost or diseased before a person experiences undeniable cognitive deficits.

Muscle strength also declines with age, even in the absence of a muscular disease. Most people (bodybuilders excluded) achieve peak muscle strength between 20 and 30, with variations depending on the muscle group. After that, strength slowly declines, eventually resulting in telling symptoms of muscle weakness, like falling, and difficulty with essential daily tasks, like getting up from a chair or in and out of the tub.

Most otherwise healthy people do not become incapacitated by lost muscle strength until they are 80 or 90. But thanks to advances in medicine and overall living conditions, many more people are reaching those ages, Dr. Lachs writes: “Today millions of people have survived long enough to keep a date with immobility.”

The good news is that the age of immobility can be modified. As life expectancy rises and more people live to celebrate their 100th birthday, postponing the time when physical independence can no longer be maintained is a goal worth striving for.

Gerontologists have shown that the rate of decline “can be tweaked to your advantage by a variety of interventions, and it often doesn’t matter whether you’re

50 or 90 when you start tweaking,” Dr. Lachs said. “You just need to get started. The embers of disability begin smoldering long before you’re handed a walker.”

Lifestyle choices made in midlife can have a major impact on your functional ability late in life, he emphasized. If you begin a daily walking program at age 45, he said, you could delay immobility to 90 and beyond. I f you become a couch potato at 45 and remain so, immobility can encroach as early as 60.

“It’s not like we’re prescribing chemotherapy—it’s walking,” Dr. Lachs said. “Even the smallest interventions can produce substantial benefits” and “significantly delay your date with disability.”

“It’s never too late for a course correction,” he said.

In a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 2004, elderly men and women who began strengthening exercises after a hip fracture increased their walking speed, balance and muscle strength and reduced their risk of falls and repeat fractures.

“Minor interventions that may seem trivial — like lifting small weights with multiple repetitions —can lead to dramatic improvements in quality of life,” Dr. Lachs said.

U.N. Sets Goals to Reduce the Extinction Rate

UNITED NATIONS — After years of wrangling, most United Nations member states agreed early on Saturday in Japan to set significant new goals to reverse the extinction of plant and animal species. As part of the accord, they also agreed that rich and poor nations would share profits from pharmaceutical or other product s derived from genetic material.

The negotiations among mostly environment ministers from about 190 countries in Nagoya, Japan, ultimately produced an agreement that had seemed distant just hours before the meeting ended.

The agreement, known as the Nagoya Protocol, sets a goal of cutting the current extinction rate by half or more by 2020. The earth is losing species at 100 to

1,000 times the historical average, according to scientists who call the current period the worst since the dinosaurs were lost 65 million years ago.

The new targets include increasing the amount of protected land to 17 percent, from the current figure of about 12.5 percent, and protected oceans to 10 percent,

from less than 1 percent. The protocol also includes commitments of financing, still somewhat murky, from richer countries to help poorer nations reach these goals.

“We would have liked to see more ambitious targets in protected area goa ls and the financing,” said Glenn Prickett, the chief external affairs officer for The Nature Conservancy. “But the fact that they were able to reach an agreement is a big deal.”

The goals, 20 in total, are specific enough to be able to gauge whether progress is being made, he said. A previous and vague agreement in 2002 to substantially reverse the loss of species by 2010 failed to achieve that target.

The most significant change was breaking a nearly 20-year impasse over the issue of sharing the benefits of medicines or other products developed from plants or animals. Developing nations have long complained of exploitation by richer nations, and have been imposing stringent export controls on such material.

The lack of an agreement on sharing the benefits had threatened to sink the entire preservation accord. It remained vague on details, but established the idea that any exploitation of genetic material — both future and past — must include royalties. The accord is potentially worth billions of dollars to countries rich in biological diversity.

“Before today you did not have an inter national set of ground rules on how to share the benefits of new pharmaceuticals, new crops, new products derived from the genetic treasure trove of the developing world,” said Nick Nuttall, the spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program.

Participants acknowledged the hurdles to getting the agreement translated into action — among other things, the United States has not ratified the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity, the underlying treaty.

But the Nagoya talks focused on preserving biodiversity as being good for business and for the environment, particularly because many of the world’s poorest depend on it for survival, participants said.

Thomas E. Lovejoy, who represented the United Nations Foundation at the conference, said the agreement took “significant steps to heal the living planet.”