Gender Differences in Response to Stress
A New Stress Paradigm for Women
I have been teaching
the gender differences in how we respond to stress in my programs for many
years. Here is the research on how women respond to stress by tending and
befriending, while men do the typical freeze, fight, flight, fall or faint
response. Check on my other blog posts on gender differences in stress at
the links below.
Rather than fighting or fleeing, women may respond to stress by
tending to themselves and their young and befriending others.
By
BETH AZAR
Monitor Staff
July/August
2000, Vol 31, No. 7
Print
version: page 42
Move over
"fight-or-flight"--there's a new paradigm in town, the first new
model to describe people's stress response patterns in more than 60 years.
The model, called
"tend-and-befriend" by its developers, won't replace fight-or-flight.
Rather, it adds another dimension to the stress-response arsenal, says
University of California, Los Angeles, psychologist Shelley Taylor, PhD, who,
along with five colleagues, developed the model.
In particular, they
propose that females respond to stressful situations by protecting themselves
and their young through nurturing behaviors--the "tend" part of the
model--and forming alliances with a larger social group, particularly among
women--the "befriend" part of the model. Males, in contrast, show
less of a tendency toward tending and befriending, sticking more to the
fight-or-flight response, they suggest.
The researchers describe
this new model in an upcoming issue of Psychological Review, supporting their
premise by pulling together existing evidence from research with nonhuman
animals, neuroendocrine studies and human-based social psychology.
The tend-and-befriend
model fills what Taylor sees as a huge gap in the stress response literature:
namely, that almost all the studies have been conducted in males and so,
therefore, upheld fight-or-flight as the main response to stress.
The tend-and-befriend
response, in contrast, fits better the way females respond to stress. It builds
on the brain's attachment/caregiving system, which counteracts the metabolic
activity associated with the traditional fight-or-flight stress
response--increased heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol levels--and leads
to nurturing and affiliative behavior.
The research findings
used to support the model are not new, says University of Chicago psychologist
John Cacioppo, PhD, but the way they've been integrated is.
"The data
supporting the model look very compelling," says Cacioppo, who has studied
the biology of stress in animals and humans. "Even if it's wrong, which I
don't think it will be, it's a very powerful model."
What's more, the model
is sure to inspire thousands of new studies designed to test its claims, from
whether women truly do respond to stress by tending and befriending, to
questions about the specific hormonal and neuroendocrine systems responsible
for the response to the specific contexts in which such a system may be
triggered, adds psychologist Nancy Collins, PhD, who studies human reactions to
stressful situations. The model can serve as a foundation on which to build an
entirely new body of research, she says.
Culling
the evidence
Taylor and her
colleagues developed their model after listening to a lecture on stress
responses in rats. The description of fight-or-flight in response to stress
didn't fit any of the findings Taylor had seen in almost 30 years as a health
psychologist studying people's reactions to stressful life events.
When she began
discussing the issue with her laboratory staff, postdoc Laura Klein, PhD,
pointed out that the findings heard about at the lecture had been heavily based
on studies of male animals.
"It was like a big
light went on," says Taylor, who developed the new model with Klein, now
at Pennsylvania State University, Brian Lewis, PhD, now at Syracuse University,
Regan Gurung, PhD, now at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, and graduate
students Tara Gruenewald and John Updegraff.
Women, they speculated,
may have developed a completely different system for coping with stress in
large part because their responses evolved in the context of being the primary
caregiver of their children. To find support for their theory, they pulled
together data from previously unconnected sources.
From research into the
neuroendocrine responses responsible for fight-or-flight, for example, they
document that, although women do show the same immediate hormonal and
sympathetic nervous system response to acute stress, other factors intervene to
make fight-or-flight less likely in females.
In terms of the fight
response, while male aggression appears to be regulated by androgen hormones,
such as testosterone, and linked to sympathetic reactivity and hostility,
female aggression isn't. Instead, female aggression appears to be more cerebral
in nature--moderated by social circumstances, learning, culture and the
situation--and in animals "confined to situations requiring defense,"
write the researchers.
In terms of flight,
fleeing too readily at any sign of danger would put a female's offspring at
risk, a response that might reduce her reproductive success in evolutionary
terms. Consistent with this idea, studies in rats suggest there may be a
physiological response to stress that inhibits flight. This response is the
release of the hormone oxytocin, which enhances relaxation, reduces fearfulness
and decreases the stress responses typical to the fight-or-flight response.
So rather than fight or
flee, Taylor and her colleagues posit, women often tend and befriend, an idea
supported by several lines of research in humans and other animals. Some of the
more intriguing work, says Taylor, comes out of Michael Meaney's laboratory at
McGill University. He and his colleagues remove rat pups from their nest for
brief periods--a stressful situation for pups and mothers--and then return them
to the nest and watch what happens. The mothers immediately move to nurture and
soothe their pups by licking, grooming and nursing them. This kind of tending
response stimulates the growth of the pups' stress-regulatory system.
What stimulates this
behavior in the mother? Taylor and her colleagues suggest that it's governed in
part by oxytocin. Studies in many different animals, including non-human
primates and humans, show that oxytocin promotes caregiving behavior and
underlies attachment between mothers and their infants. In addition, some
studies have found that mothers tend to be more nurturing and caring toward
their children when they are most stressed.
As for the idea of
"befriending" when stressed, Taylor and her colleagues detail
evidence from rodent studies and studies in humans that when they are stressed,
females prefer being with others, especially other females, while males don't.
Indeed, in humans, women are much more likely than men to seek out and use
social support in all types of stressful situations, including over
health-related concerns, relationship problems and work-related conflicts.
"It is one of the
most robust gender differences in adult human behavior," write Taylor and
her colleagues.
Again, oxytocin may be
at play, they suggest. In female prairie voles, for example, injections of
oxytocin enhance social contact and inhibit aggression. The same may occur in
males, but males are less likely than females to have naturally high levels of
oxytocin.
One
of a repertoire of responses
Although the
tend-and-befriend model emphasizes gender differences, the researchers reject
the idea that gender stereotypes are written in our genes. Indeed, Taylor
doesn't see biological models of behavior as inherently constraining--rather,
they help tie human behavior to other species and provide a framework for
general behavioral tendencies. The fun, she says, will be teasing apart how our
biological predispositions unfold in the context of real-life experience.
Both Collins and
Cacioppo hope that means researchers will examine social context to figure out
which situations may promote tend-and-befriend and which might, instead,
promote fight-or-flight or even as yet undiscovered stress responses.
In fact,
tend-and-befriend may be just as adaptive for men as for women in certain
contexts, says Collins, whose research finds no gender differences when examining
how often husbands and wives seek support from their most intimate
companions--for example, each other.
"Perhaps these
gender differences are adaptive with acute stressors," says Collins.
"But when you think of longer term stressors, such as hunger, it doesn't
make sense to have these gender differences. Men and women need social networks
to work it out."
The most adaptive system
would be one in which men and women select from a repertoire of responses
depending on the specific stressor, she says.
Adds Taylor: Mainstream
stress researchers "have been very quick to study behaviors like
aggression and withdrawal and have failed to notice very important behaviors
like affiliation. We think it's cute when women call up their sisters when
they're under stress. But no one has realized that that is a contemporaneous
manifestation of one of the oldest biological systems. Our focus on
fight-or-flight has kept us from recognizing that there are systems that are as
old as fight-or-flight that are tremendously important."
Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at
www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at
www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at
http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.
