Effects of Altering Social Connectedness on Health

Project Summary Social life profoundly influences health. The ability to treat and prevent illness and improve human health therefore requires a detailed understanding of the complex mechanisms underlying the influence of social complexity on biological systems. Such understanding is key to the development of new interventions to improve public health. Past studies have demonstrated the critical contribution of social relationships in shaping health outcomes but are limited in application because such studies rarely consider social support or health as “complex systems”. As a result, we lack a deep understanding of how and why individuals within families, and families within communities, remain healthy or become unhealthy in the context of their social environments. In this application, our proposed research overcomes this limitation by adopting an intervention- based experimental and computational systems science approach that provides methods uniquely suited to elucidate the complex mechanisms by which social systems influence health by modeling short- and longer term integrative effects of social life on health in a proven nonhuman primate model.