A five-year multi-institutional study discovers giving and being unselfish not only helps others, but can also protect the health and prolong the lives of the altruistic.
The finding is the first to discover that providers of compassion reap benefits similar to the recipients of such help.
Poulin, along with colleagues at Stony Brook University and Grand Valley State University, produced the study, found online in the American Journal of Public Health.
The authors point out that although it is established that social isolation and stress are significant predictors of mortality and morbidity, 20 years of studies and meta-analytical review have failed to establish that receiving social support from others buffers recipients against mortality after exposure to psychosocial stress.
Researchers tested the hypothesis that providing help to others would predict a reduced association between stress and mortality for the helpers.
This premise was supported in the study as researchers discovered that when dealing with stressful situations, those who had helped others during the previous year were less likely to die than those who had not helped others.
Researchers followed 846 subjects, all from the Detroit, Mich., area. Participants completed baseline interviews that assessed stressful events they had experienced in the previous year and whether they had provided tangible assistance to friends or family members in the past year.
Self-reported stressful experiences included such things as serious, non-life-threating illness, burglary, job loss, financial difficulties or death of a family member.
Respondents also reported the total amount of time in the past 12 months they had spent helping friends, neighbors or relatives who did not live with them by providing transportation, doing errands and shopping, performing housework, providing child care and other tasks.