Social Adaptation
People need other people to become and remain socialized; hence social adaptation, adjusting the self to a group, is essential. Sensory-deprivation experiments indicate that a continual flow of changing sensory stimuli is necessary for the person`s mental health. The infant needs stimulation through touch from another human being. Withholding caresses and normal human contact or similiar emotional deprivation utimately results directly or indirectly in phisical as well as mental deterioration.
As the person develops, the person learns to accept symbolic rather than actual touch, until the mere act of verbal recognition serves the purpose. That people recognize one another`s presence, and thereby offer the social contact necessary for the preservation of health, is more important than what is said.
Sensory stimulation that keeps certain parts of the brain active appears necessary in order to maintain a normal waking state. This need to be recharged by stimulation, and especially by social contact, may be regarded as one of the biological origins of group formation. The fear of loneliness (or of lack of social stimulation) is one reason why people are willing to resign part of their individual desires in favor of group consensus, while at the same time developing a high proficiency in getting as many satisfactions as possible from socialization.
Through social adaptation man receives spiritual and emotional nourishment. He gets responses to his ability to perform in these areas produce the everyday stresses that can cause disability and disease.
References :
Wolf, Stewart, and Helen Goodell, eds., Stress and Disease. Springfield, I11.: Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1968.
Murray, RB and Zentner JP., Nursing Concepts for Health Promotion, Second Edtion, Prentice-Hall, Inc, Englewood Cliffs, N.J, 1979.
