Scientists find that friendships between women may have health benefits

• Across species and throughout human cultures, females have banded together for protection and mutual support.
• They have groomed each other, tended each other's young, nursed each other in illness and engaged in the kind of aimless sociability that has generally mystified male anthropologists.
• It may help explain one of medical science's most enduring mysteries: why women, on average, have lower rates of heart disease and longer life expectancies than men.
• "Women are much more social in the way they cope with stress," says Shelley E. Taylor, author of "The Tending Instinct" and a social neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
• "Men are more likely to deal with stress with a 'fight or flight' reaction --- with aggression or withdrawal."
• But aggression and withdrawal take a physiological toll, and friendship brings comfort that mitigates the ill effects of stress, Taylor says.
• To be sure, friendships --- the feeling of being connected to a supportive network --- profoundly affect the health of both genders, according to researchers.
• Men and women who report loneliness die earlier, get sick more often and weather transitions with greater physical wear and tear than those who say they have a support network of friends or family.
• Researchers attribute the difference to women's greater reliance on friendships outside of marriage.
• Increasingly, researchers think that the hormone oxytocin is, for women especially, the elixir of friendship --- and, by extension, of health.
• Present in men and women, oxytocin levels spike in females following childbirth and when nursing.
• Stacy Anderson, a 36-year-old Culver City, Calif., mother of two young children, recognizes oxytocin's effects.
• For women, there is some evidence that a male partner, in times of stress, can make things worse.