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Social support reduces stress hormone levels in wild chimpanzees across stressful events and everyday affiliations

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Zuberbuehler_2016_NatComms_SocialSupport_CC.pdf (278.6Kb)
Date
01/11/2016
Author
Wittig, Roman Martin
Crockford, Catherine
Weltring, Anja
Langergraber, Kevin E.
Deschner, Tobias
Zuberbühler, Klaus
Keywords
BF Psychology
NDAS
BDC
R2C
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Abstract
Stress is a major cause of poor health and mortality in humans and other social mammals. Close social bonds buffer stress, however much of the underlying physiological mechanism remains unknown. Here, we test two key hypotheses: bond partner effects occur only during stress (social buffering) or generally throughout daily life (main effects). We assess urinary glucocorticoids (uGC) in wild chimpanzees, with or without their bond partners, after a natural stressor, resting or everyday affiliation. Chimpanzees in the presence of, or interacting with, bond partners rather than others have lowered uGC levels across all three contexts. These results support the main effects hypothesis and indicate that hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis regulation is mediated by daily engagement with bond partners both within and out of stressful contexts. Regular social support with bond partners could lead to better health through daily ‘micro-management’ of the HPA axis, a finding with potential medical implications for humans.
Citation
Wittig , R M , Crockford , C , Weltring , A , Langergraber , K E , Deschner , T & Zuberbühler , K 2016 , ' Social support reduces stress hormone levels in wild chimpanzees across stressful events and everyday affiliations ' , Nature Communications , vol. 7 , 13361 . https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13361
Publication
Nature Communications
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13361
ISSN
2041-1723
Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2016. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Description
We acknowledge Royal Zoological Society of Scotland for providing core funding to BCFS and Leakey Foundation (R.M.W., C.C., T.D., K.Z.), British Academy (C.C.), Leverhulme Trust (K.Z.) and Max Planck Society (R.M.W., C.C. and T.D.) for funding the research.
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/9751

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