How Connection Reaches the Body: teacher key

Making Friends, grade 11 edition, written for 11th grade. Friendship is a social need, and research links it to the body as well as the mind. The research covers how long friendships take, the liking gap, a brain-scanner study of friends, and a long study of relationships and health.

Read the book. Print this page for the key.

Questions and answers

According to the Harvard study, which predicted long and happy lives better than IQ or genes?
- Close relationships (answer)
- Wealth alone
- Living in a city
What did the Dartmouth researchers use to predict who were friends?
- Surveys about hobbies
- Brain responses to video clips (answer)
- Hours spent at school
Which was Waldinger's best-supported hypothesis for why relationships affect health?
- Friends share food
- Relationships help regulate the body's stress response (answer)
- People with friends sleep more
What did the Dartmouth study find even after controlling for age, gender and nationality?
- Similarity in neural responses was still strongest among friends (answer)
- Friends were all the same height
- Students were lonelier than adults
What is a confidant?
- A person you can count on and talk to (answer)
- A kind of exercise
- A brain scanner

Words

acquaintance: slightly known
hypothesis: best explanation
inflammation: body swelling
confidant: trusted listener
reciprocal: give-and-take