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Back in the late 2000s, a small study at UCLA revealed something fascinating about family relationships across cultures, as NPR’s Michaeleen Doucleff reports. The study involved two groups of young adults: one group was made up of people who self-identified as Latino, and the other were European Americans. The volunteers all played a game where they had to decide whether to help a family member who needed money. Sometimes they received money themselves. As they played, researchers monitored participants’ brain activity.
Both Latino and European American participants equally assisted their family members who needed help. But the reward center of the European Americans' brains lit up much more when they received money themselves compared to when they gave money to their family members. For Latino participants, their reward centers lit up more when they gave money to their family compared to when they received money.
“I think those findings make such a compelling argument that some of us find the act of giving to others really rewarding because we’ve been socialized to,” says Belinda Campos, a psychologist who studies interpersonal relationships.
Outside of the lab, recent college grad Caitlynn Almance says she doesn’t hesitate to go out of her way for her siblings. Once she drove two hours each way to lend her sister a pair of boots, and she told her younger brother she’d happily move from Texas to California to help support him through college. Caitlynn's mom, Cindy Almance, says she modeled this type of tight-knit bond with her own siblings, gathering the family together or talking on the phone on a daily basis.
Close bonds with family aren’t just a nice thing to have. According to research out of Mexico's Technological Institute, “relational wealth” has massive repercussions for Latino communities across the Americas.
Read about how close sibling ties can promote happiness over generations.
Also: We asked, you answered: What's the secret to a close relationship with siblings?
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Aneri Pattani/KFF Health News |
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In a simple structure built of bent samplings and covered with canvas, something profound can occur. At the center of the sweat lodge is a good-sized hole in the ground. Fire-heated rocks are placed in the hole, and water poured over them to create steam. Inside, in pitch blackness, people lay down their emotional burdens as sweat streams from their skin. It’s a place for prayer, for song, for connection with the divine and the community around you. For forgiving others, and forgiving yourself.
On Mi'kmaq Nation land in northern Maine, the tribe’s health department has a new sweat lodge dedicated to helping members recover from addiction, as Aneri Pattani of KFF Health News reports. The experience can be "a vital tool" in healing, says health director Katie Espling. Espling says tribal members have requested this kind of traditional healing for years, but it wasn’t an option because health insurance wouldn't cover it. The new lodge was funded by settlement payments from companies that made or sold prescription painkillers and were accused of exacerbating the overdose crisis.
Companies including Purdue Pharma, CVS, and Cardinal Health are paying out more than $1.5 billion to hundreds of tribes over 15 years. Other tribal nations are allocating funds toward things like hiring nurses and peer recovery workers, or investing in a health statistics modeling platform. Still, some say that given the disproportionate toll of the opioid addiction crisis on indigenous communities, the settlement dollars are a mere “drop in the bucket.”
Learn more about how tribes are treating addiction and recovery.
Plus: With bison herds and ancestral seeds, Indigenous communities embrace food sovereignty
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We hope you enjoyed these stories. Find more of NPR's health journalism online.
All the best,
Andrea Muraskin and your NPR Health editors |
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