Gender Differences in Behavioral Responses to Stress:

“Fight or Flight” vs. “Tend and Befriend”

Last Updated: Dec. 1, 2003

The “fight-or-flight” response is generally regarded as the prototypic human response to stress. Physiologically, it is characterized by sympathetic nervous system activation, which ultimately results in the secretion of chemicals into the bloodstream mobilizing the behavioral response.

Whether the response culminates in “fight” or “flight” is thought to depend on whether the threat or stressor is perceived as surmountable. Thus, an appropriate stress response is essential to survival.

While this biobehavioral “fight-or-flight” theory has dominated stress research for the past five decades, it has been disproportionately based on studies of males. This is because females’ greater cyclical variation in neuroendocrine responses presented a confusing and often uninterpretable pattern of results. As a result, the processes involved in stress responses in females are less well understood.

Tend and befriend
A team of scientists supported by the National Institute of Mental Health has formulated a theory that characterizes female responses to stress by a pattern they term “tend-and-befriend,” rather than by “fight-or-flight.”

They believe that female stress responses have selectively evolved to simultaneously maximize the survival of self and offspring. Thus, the “tend-and-befriend” pattern involves females’ nurturance of offspring under stressful circumstances, the exhibition of behaviors that protect them from harm (tending), and befriending – namely, creating and joining social groups for the exchange of resources and to provide protection.

The researchers propose that these responses build on the biobehavioral attachment-caregiving processes that depend in part on oxytocin, estrogen and endogenous opioid mechanisms for the down-regulation of sympathetic and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) responses to stress.

Studies on both human and nonhuman primates evidence substantial female preference to affiliate under stress compared to males. The “tend-and-befriend” pattern likely is maintained not only by sex-linked, neuroendocrine responses to stress, but by social and cultural roles as well.

This interesting, new, theoretical model opens a fresh field of inquiry in stress research that has potential for closing some empirical gaps and addressing gender biases. For example, it examines other neurohormones (e.g., serotonin, prolactin, dopamine, etc.) that also may be implicated in these processes of stress-regulation, but that are not yet well understood in either males or females. It also examines the role of oxytocin in social bonds outside of the basic mother-offspring attachment processes commonly studied.

Source: National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

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