Gender Differences in Tend and Befriend
Tend and befriend has been heavily studied in females. One reason for this fact is that estrogen enhances the effects of oxytocin which, as noted, is believed to be an important biological underpinning of tend and befriend.
There are evolutionary bases for believing that female responses to stress may be better characterized by tend and befriend than those of males as well. In early human history when the human stress response evolved, work was largely sex segregated, with women responsible for child care. Accordingly, selection pressures for responses to threat that benefit both self and offspring would have been greater for females than for males, favoring social responses to threat in women. Research shows that women are, in fact, more likely to seek the company of others in times of stress, compared to men.
Male behavior under stress may be better characterized by the fight or flight response. Although both men and women show the biological fight or flight pattern of arousal (e.g., elevated heart rate and blood pressure), men's behavior under stress is better characterized by fight (aggression) and by flight (social withdrawal, substance abuse) in response to stress.
Women have higher life expectancies from birth in most countries where there is equal access to medical care. In the United States, for example, this difference is almost 6 years. It has been hypothesized that one reason may be that men's responses to stress (which include aggression, social withdrawal, and substance abuse) place them at risk for adverse health-related consequences, whereas women's more social responses to stress are healthier behaviors. Whether these gender differences in responsivity to stress help to explain the gender gap in mortality is not yet known (other possible factors abound, such as estrogen stimulating the immune system while testosterone suppresses it, or the evolutionary pressure to withstand the stresses of near-constant pregnancy in pre-modern cultures leaving modern women with generally untapped reserves).
However, it should be noted that this phenomena is considered by many in the field of psychology to be inaccurate and unfounded. There is little evidence to suggest that either one of these responses is significantly more likely to occur in a particular gender, and has brought into question the validity and motivation of Shelley Taylor's original research (as the results she found have only infrequently been replicated in subsequent experiments) and on some level, her tend-and-befriend vs. fight-or-flight model is sexist, by falsely categorizing the personality types of both men and women.
Read more about this topic: Tend And Befriend
Famous quotes containing the words gender, differences and/or tend:
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)
“The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“The complaint ... about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernes, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)