Americans feel less sense of well being, according to a recent Gallup poll. You can see the poll results.

The report notes that the Life Evaluation sub-index fell 14.3 points from a high of 47.4 in February to a low of 33.1 in November. The Life Evaluation Index categorizes respondents as either “thriving”, “struggling”, or “suffering”, in accordance with how they rate their current lives as well as their expectation of where they will be in five years using a “ladder” scale with steps numbered from 0 to 10, where “0″ indicates the worst possible life and “10″ the best possible life. Beginning in April, the number of struggling Americans outnumbered those who are thriving. A key finding from the poll is that regardless of age, gender, income, or marital status, every group experienced a drop in their Well-Being Index score from January to December of 2008.

Millions more people today are in deep psychological pain, and this has profound consequences for the country. Based on good science, we know how this pain is likely to cause…

• People will choose to eat more foods that result in weight gain. This is not a sign of moral weakness, but the result of deep evolutionary triggers that impel humans to consume more calories when under perceived threats and distress. This of course makes sense, and can be replicated in experimental studies for not just humans. If millions of Americans start to eat more foods that satisfy this evolutionary urge, we will have reverberations in rising health-care costs—just at a time we cannot afford those rising costs.

• People will act more depressed at home and work, which is born out in multiple studies. Psychological depression means productivity and innovation in the workplace will decline, and psychological depression at home means that more marriages will fail and more children will grow up with behavioral and health problems. All of these likely results are well documented scientifically.

What might turn around the declining sense of well being? Nurturance from other human beings.

We, as humans, are fundamentally wired to be sensitive to expressed warmth, help and assistance from others in our immediate environment. Why is that so? Because our survival over eons depended on it. Historically, if a parent did not nurture a child, that child was less likely to survive. If a mate or our extended human community did not cooperate, the family or whole group suffered.

The economic crisis that has resulted in the declining sense of well being has fundamentally upset the daily acts of nurturance among millions of people. While the loss of billions of dollars will not be turned around immediately, the sense of human nurturance can be with major benefits for all of us. A few examples illustrate.

In the early 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control funded my propose to increase nurturance in 8 high-risk schools, set in neighborhoods with long histories of violence, drugs, and poverty. In this effort, we taught staff and students to begin writing positive notes to each other for helpfulness and kindness. These were featured six times a day on the TV news, as well. Within a few months, students and staff were writing, sharing and posting such nurturing notes every day. Since this was a randomized control study, we were measuring the effects of this increased nurturance. Children were less ill, children were less aggressive and violent, and children developed many more competencies that predict lifetime success. Not bad for something no more than old-fashioned nurturing of children and adults. You can read the studies here.

Similar studies exist for home and the work place. These findings ought not to be surprising, as humans are the only species that we are aware of that can use language to nurture others in our group. Yet, when we feel distress, we tend to reduce our verbal nurturing of others. Fortunately, prevention science has clearly shown that we can increase these types of nurturing, which in turn improve human well being.

The severe economic downturn that Oregon is experiencing will affect the psychological wellbeing of many Oregon families. These effects are just as real as the job loss and foreclosures that will result from the downturn. Their impact will be detrimental both to the economically distressed families and to their communities.

Job loss and economic difficulties have well established effects on marital relations and parenting. Oregonians who lose a job will naturally worry and feel sad and anxious. Indeed, these losses change brain chemistry and the immune system for the worse. Many may feel shame and a sense of loss of status. Husbands and wives will become more irritable and conflict will rise. For many families, the result will be divorce, which will further worsen families’ economic wellbeing and their children’s wellbeing. Children of divorce have more conduct problems, psychological difficulties, and academic failure. Many continue to have problems as adults.

Even if parents remain together, economic hardship will affect the quality of their parenting. Many parents will spend less time with their children, get into more conflict, and do a poorer job of monitoring and guiding them. As a result, more Oregon children will commit crimes and get into problems with substance abuse.

Thus, there are strong practical reasons to be sure that Oregon and the nation provide as much economic support to families as possible. Unemployment benefits have already been extended. Help in preventing foreclosures will also be important. Many Oregonians have never collected their stimulus checks from last summers’ fiscal stimulus. Governments should take steps to find these people and get them the money. Similarly, governments should be more vigorous in making sure that families take advantage of the Earned Income Tax Credit. Charitable giving also becomes more important, but unfortunately contributions to local United Ways are down.

But there are also things that Oregonians can do that don’t cost money. And, although intangible, the benefits of these things are just as real as the impact of economic hardship on families’ wellbeing. Thanks to decades of research, we now know that social support can prevent many of the most difficult consequences of economic hardship.

You can provide social support simply by listening and showing that you care—even if you can’t help economically. People who have supportive friends and family members are more resilient in the face of all kinds of difficulties, including economic hardship. They are less prone to depression and have less marital conflict. People with supportive friends and neighbors do more to find another job and are more likely to find a job. There is even evidence that support from others makes people less susceptible to colds!

As individuals and as a community Oregonians can communicate their support, concern, and caring to those who are having a hard time. You can give money and food to help others and you can let your friends and neighbors know that you are doing it so that we strengthen the social bonds among us and motivate others to get involved.

But even if you cannot afford to give material goods, you can let those who are having a hard time know that you want them to get through this difficult time. You may also be able to help them connect with others who can help them find jobs, material assistance, and social support. For children, you can write them notes of praise about their positive actions. This will reduce the effects of stress and trauma. And you can make special effort to include such children in your family outings.

In reading these suggestions, you may notice a feeling of resistance. It is a natural human tendency to avoid people who are having troubles. Certainly, you won’t want to intrude. But most people will benefit from being encouraged to talk about their difficulties to a sympathetic listener. You don’t have to be able to solve their problems. In fact most people find that unasked-for advice unhelpful. Just letting them know that you hear them and you care will make a difference.

Our state and local leaders can play an important role in encouraging every Oregonian to look for ways to help their friends and family; to reach out to others and to make their caring about every Oregonian’s wellbeing visible to everyone around them.

This is a difficult time for Oregon and the nation. But it is also an opportunity. By looking for ways to help others through this time, we can strengthen the bonds among us, reduce the pain of those who are hardest hit, and prevent much anxiety, depression, marital conflict, delinquency, and even sickness. In doing so, we could emerge as a state more firmly committed to everyone’s wellbeing and better able to make this value a reality.

Over the past forty years, behavioral and biological scientists have studied all of the most common and costly problems of human beings. They have made great advances in the treatment and prevention of psychological problems like depression and anxiety; behavioral problems like antisocial behavior, substance abuse, marital conflict, and child abuse; and physical illnesses, like obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer.

The evidence from all of these areas converges on a surprisingly simple conclusion. We can prevent an enormous proportion of the problems that confront us by increasing the prevalence nurturing environments. Nurturing environments minimize biological and psychological toxins or stressors, richly reinforce prosocial behavior, teach prosocial values and skills, and foster psychological flexibility. Much of my recent work has summarized the evidence.

Unfortunately, the scientific community has not quite caught up to this fact. The majority of America’s behavioral science resources continue to be invested in treating, and to a much lesser extent, preventing individual problems. It is, as David Sloan Wilson likes to say, a disciplinary archipelago. One group of researchers and practitioners are dealing with depression, another with cigarette smoking, a third with crime. The fact that each of these problems stems from an environment that is stressful, socially rejecting, and unrewarding is missed and the possibility that we could prevent most problems by making people’s environments more nurturing is not seriously pursued.

Prevention research has moved us forward. All of the effective preventive interventions involve ways of reducing stress and increasing positive reinforcement, effective instruction, and psychological acceptance. Yet even in prevention, interventions tend to focus on one or two problems and do not make use of all of the tools available to us. In addition to evidence-based programs, we need policies, simple evidence-based behavior influence practices (what Dennis Embry calls kernels), and data monitoring systems that feed back to community members our progress.

But in this flat world, there is no longer a need to wait for the leaders of the field to decide what to do. I hope to reach anyone who thinks that we could have a better world through direct personal action. For example:

• A mother with a young child in day care who thinks that the children could have a warmer more caring environment, will, I hope, get help from this blog.
• An employee who thinks that his workplace could be more supportive should get help too.
• A political leader who wants to improve public health can get guidance and ammunition.

I have invited several prominent behavioral scientists to join me in making occasional contributions to this blog. And I am hopeful that through your participation and networking with others, we can encourage a grass roots effort to increase nurturance in every facet of our lives.