Lisa Neff
speaker
151 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 2 Apr
Lisa Neff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Exactly.
So, I mean, many of us have noticed as we get older and if we injure ourselves, it takes longer to recover from that injury as we get older.
The same thing is true with stress.
When we experience those stressors, it can linger in the body more.
It just takes a little bit longer to get over it.
And so older adults, when they're unable to avoid or minimize tensions in their relationship, when those tensions happen, it can take a bigger toll on them.
It can linger longer in the mind and body.
Is there like a slight paradox here where older folks would prioritize peace and harmony but new relationships are destabilizing and threatening and those early conflicts are not peaceful and harmonious so it creates even more stress than if we were younger?
It could be, absolutely, that because there is this idea that we should be maintaining harmonious relationships, we should be able to de-escalate these situations when it can't happen, it's going to create more distress in older adult individuals.
And that's what we found, that on those days when older dating individuals had more tensions with their partner, they had more negative emotions and more physical symptoms that day compared to younger daters.
Did you find a difference between older men and older women, how they responded to new relationships?
Did one group find them more stressful than others?
Some gender differences, but I would take this with a grain of salt, since this is one of the first studies of its kind to look at this.
So we found that when it came to the effects of relational tensions on physical symptoms, so things like
Are you more likely to experience headaches or nausea or muscle pains on those days that you have conflict with your partner?
Men and women were the same, that older adults were more likely to experience those physical symptoms on days of tension compared to younger adults.
However, for the emotional distress experience in the face of tensions, that was stronger for women than for men.
So we found that older women were more likely to experience those negative emotions, anger, sadness, loneliness on those days when they had tensions with their partner, more so than older men did.
And again, more so than younger men and women did.
Now, before your research, did most studies look at long-married couples when they made positive claims or proved positive things about relationships?
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