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The effects of psychosocial stress on intergroup resource allocation.

ABSTRACT: Stress changes our social behavior. Traditionally, stress has been associated with "fight-or-flight" - the tendency to attack an aggressor, or escape the stressor. But stress may also promote the opposite pattern, i.e., "tend-and-befriend" - increased prosociality toward others. It is currently unclear which situational or physiological factors promote one or the other. Here, we hypothesized that stress stimulates both tendencies, but that fight-or-flight is primarily directed against a potentially hostile outgroup, moderated by rapid-acting catecholamines, while tend-and-befriend is mainly shown towards a supportive ingroup, regulated by cortisol. To test this hypothesis, we measured stress-related neurohormonal modulators and sex hormones in male and female participants who were exposed to a psychosocial stressor, and subsequently played an intergroup social dilemma game in which they could reveal prosocial motives towards an ingroup (ingroup-love) and hostility towards an outgroup (outgroup-hate). We found no significant effects of stress on social preferences, but stress-related heart-rate increases predicted outgroup-hostile behavior. Furthermore, when controlling for testosterone, cortisol was associated with increased ingroup-love. Other-regarding behavior was overall higher in male than female participants. Our mixed results are of interest to scholars of the effects of stress on prosocial and aggressive behavior, but call for refinement in future replications.

SUBMITTER: Schweda A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6901446 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The effects of psychosocial stress on intergroup resource allocation.

Schweda Adam A Faber Nadira Sophie NS Crockett Molly J MJ Kalenscher Tobias T

Scientific reports 20191209 1

Stress changes our social behavior. Traditionally, stress has been associated with "fight-or-flight" - the tendency to attack an aggressor, or escape the stressor. But stress may also promote the opposite pattern, i.e., "tend-and-befriend" - increased prosociality toward others. It is currently unclear which situational or physiological factors promote one or the other. Here, we hypothesized that stress stimulates both tendencies, but that fight-or-flight is primarily directed against a potentia ...[more]

PMID: 31819104

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Project description:BackgroundThe dominant paradigm for modeling the complexities of interacting populations and food webs is a system of coupled ordinary differential equations in which the state of each species, population, or functional trophic group is represented by an aggregated numbers-density or biomass-density variable. Here, using the metaphysiological approach to model consumer-resource interactions, we formulate a two-state paradigm that represents each population or group in a food web in terms of both its quantity and quality.Methodology and principal findingsThe formulation includes an allocation function controlling the relative proportion of extracted resources to increasing quantity versus elevating quality. Since lower quality individuals senescence more rapidly than higher quality individuals, an optimal allocation proportion exists and we derive an expression for how this proportion depends on population parameters that determine the senescence rate, the per-capita mortality rate, and the effects of these rates on the dynamics of the quality variable. We demonstrate that oscillations do not arise in our model from quantity-quality interactions alone, but require consumer-resource interactions across trophic levels that can be stabilized through judicious resource allocation strategies. Analysis and simulations provide compelling arguments for the necessity of populations to evolve quality-related dynamics in the form of maternal effects, storage or other appropriate structures. They also indicate that resource allocation switching between investments in abundance versus quality provide a powerful mechanism for promoting the stability of consumer-resource interactions in seasonally forcing environments.Conclusions/significanceOur simulations show that physiological inefficiencies associated with this switching can be favored by selection due to the diminished exposure of inefficient consumers to strong oscillations associated with the well-known paradox of enrichment. Also our results demonstrate how allocation switching can explain observed growth patterns in experimental microbial cultures and discuss how our formulation can address questions that cannot be answered using the quantity-only paradigms that currently predominate.

Dataset Information

The effects of psychosocial stress on intergroup resource allocation.

Publications

The effects of psychosocial stress on intergroup resource allocation.

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