Stress and the Hedgehog’s Dilemma

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We face a dilemma when we engage with others. If we put ourselves out there — for example, with a potential romantic partner — we may forge a lifetime bond of love and commitment. However, such an overture puts us at risk for heartbreak. This is like the metaphor of the Hedgehog’s Dilemma: Hedgehogs need to huddle together for warmth, but their sharp quills can make such close contact painful.

What can the Hedgehog’s Dilemma tell us about the positive and negative impacts of other people on our experience of stress? Let’s start with the positive: Social support can provide a buffer against the negative effects of stress on our health. Such support can be as simple as having someone to talk with or being engaged in social activities. People reporting stronger social support report lower stress, lower cortisol levels, and better immune function (Uchino et al., 1996). Social support when under stress may provide a shut-off valve for stress physiology. Sharing one’s stressful situation may selectively reduce one’s physiological responses, leading to less impact and ultimately better health.

Social relationships are not always helpful, however. One of the most well-documented examples is adverse childhood events such as child abuse. These experiences are "social" in the sense that other people are necessary to inflict the abuse. The experience of one or more adverse childhood events is associated with a significant increase in adult mental illness, including addiction (Hughes et al., 2017). These early adverse experiences can mold the brain’s stress response system in such a way that benign experiences come to elicit a stress response (Kraaijenvanger et al., 2020). Such hypervigilance turns a normal social interaction into a stressful event.

The fine line between positive and negative social experiences begins in infancy. Human infants are born helpless and must establish attachment with a caregiver to survive. Ideally, that caregiver would provide only positive social interactions, but that is not always the case. Research in rat pups demonstrates that negative social interactions are preferred to no social interactions at all. Rat pups that received a shock in the presence of their mother continued to approach their mother (Sullivan et al., 2000). Such behavior is adaptive in that even though the pup is shocked, the proximity to the mother is necessary for survival. Importantly, this shock-approach behavior goes away after infancy, once the pup develops survival skills of its own.

Another aspect of our social nature is the potential for loneliness. The absence of positive social relationships can be as damaging as negative social interactions. Loneliness is related to a host of negative health outcomes; it may actually be as unhealthy as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010). The Surgeon General recently highlighted the negative health effects of loneliness and recommended reconnecting with old friends and volunteering as ways to combat loneliness. (Murthy, 2020)

The Hedgehog’s Dilemma is an intriguing demonstration of one of the prickliest challenges of a social species: How do we foster positive social relationships while avoiding the negative? Navigating the social environment is one of the most challenging situations we face, especially for children and adolescents. Who is trustworthy? Who is a threat? Who is harmless? These can literally be life-or-death questions. Most commonly, however, they determine how stressful our lives are and how well we manage that stress.