Students have numerous ways of dealing with stress: Some try to get more sleep, while others eat healthier or become time-management gurus. But one way of combating stress — a solution which is often overlooked — is simply to make new friends.
According to a recent study at the University of California, Berkeley, cross-racial friendships can actually reduce anxiety in both academic and social situations. The study tested the effects of inducing cross-group friendship between Caucasians and Latinos, and found that it led to decreases in cortisol, a hormone related to stress.
"People tend to associate with similar [people] more easily than they tend to associate with out-of-group members," said Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, a researcher and co-author of the study. "But once you're able to make that [interracial] friend, it seems to have these positive effects."
Branching out of one's comfort zone can be difficult for many students, especially since the past can significantly affect the present. Students from homogenized high schools seem to be less comfortable making cross-racial friendships.
"I still worry about offending people, especially African-Americans," senior Cassandra Wallace said. "There were literally about five at my 2,500-student high school, and so I still don't really know what's appropriate and what's not. I would say I'm extra cautious … probably more cautious than I need to be, which makes me feel like I'm being racist in a way."
But neither college campuses nor the "real world" echo the homogeneity of Wallace's high school. Mendoza-Denton noted the important role that diversity plays in social growth.
"We started the experiment with the recognition that we live in an increasingly multicultural world," Mendoza-Denton said. "And certainly our university campuses such as Tufts or Berkeley reflect that reality. We noticed from our research and everything we know from social psychology that inter-group interactions can be very anxiety-provoking and … that inter-group contact is a really useful way to reduce that kind of anxiety."
To test this, participants from same-sex interracial and intra-racial pairings were invited into the lab to partake in a three-part version of the "fast friends" procedure, invented by psychologist Arthur Aron. The groups were given cards that had questions printed on them.
"For the first two sessions, they went back and forth answering questions that escalated in self-disclosure," said Elizabeth Page-Gould, another co-author of the study. "So the first types of questions were things like, ‘What would … a perfect date [be like] for you?' It's individualized but not personal. And they ended with questions like, ‘If you were to die in a car crash later tonight, what would you most regret not telling someone, and why haven't you told them yet?'"
For the third session, participants played a modified game of Jenga. Pairs worked together to try to pull out as many pieces as possible before the tower fell. According to the researchers, the newly formed friendships were very apparent in this part of the experiment.
"The genuine laughter and comfort [were] clear … very, very clear, even to [an] untrained eye," Mendoza-Denton said. "A lot of the research I do really focuses on how difficult it is for people from different groups to talk to each other and to address and recognize each other's humanity … The genuine friendship … and genuine positive effect that [were] evident in the cross-group condition [were] so heartwarming."
Each pairing had to spit into a tube before and after every session so that experimenters could determine the levels of cortisol in participants, a process which, according to Page-Gould, "seemed to facilitate bonding."
"[Cortisol] is a stress hormone that breaks down muscle tissues in order to quickly muster energy to deal with a stressor," Page-Gould said. "This is a good inner reaction to have if fighting an animal or something like that, but not really while having a friendly interaction with someone else."
Researchers found that levels of cortisol decreased steadily throughout the sessions. Page-Gould said that she is particularly excited by this trend, especially because high levels of cortisol are associated with cancer, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
"In the first session, people tended to be stressed in inter-group interactions," Mendoza-Denton said. "By the end of the third session, at [a] physiological level, they seemed to be very much relaxed, whether it was an inter- or intra-group pairing."
But not everyone begins at the same level of bias, or lack thereof.
"[What] seems [to be] a fairly strong predictor of whether a person is going to be comfortable in [a] new inter-group environment is the amount of past inter-group contact," Mendoza-Denton said. "In other words, the more exposure you have crossing the racial divide, the more likely you'll be less anxious during these new interactions."
At Tufts, past experience is a major factor in the probability that one will create inter-group friendships.
Senior Kris Coombs, who is black but attended a predominately white high school in Illinois, noted the lack of cross-racial social groups at Tufts.
"[It's] kind of funny. If you look over at that table there, it's all black students," Coombs said, pointing to a group of friends sitting in the Campus Center. "They feel much more comfortable hanging out together. And that's true for a lot of my black friends who came here; they hang out with other black kids … For me personally, I don't particularly enjoy hanging out with all black people or all white people. My group of friends is really diverse — it always is."
Sophomore Robin Socol went to a Jewish high school in Greensboro, N.C. Her friends were mostly white, American Jews, but she was excited to branch out upon coming to Tufts.
"[Tufts] felt very diverse for me," she said. "But I was coming from a high school that had little to no diversity. Mostly, I was really intrigued by the prospect of getting to know people of other faiths, other ethnicities, even regional backgrounds, because I lived in the South my whole life."
Socol admitted that her social circle has definitely changed since her high school days.
"I absolutely have friends from plenty of different backgrounds," she said. "My roommate is Indian, and we talk a lot about the different cultures that we come from, the values that our families hold, and commonalities and differences. Having closer relationships with people of different backgrounds makes me more comfortable meeting new people. I feel like at least I have a little bit of insight into their culture, whereas before in high school, I wouldn't have necessarily known the commonalities that we shared."
