Sex differences in biobehavioral responses to threat: Reply to Geary and Flinn (2002)

Early theories of stress obscured differences in how men and women respond to threat. The tend- and-befriend model attempted to partially redress that oversight by identifying biological and behavioral patterns of stress responses distinctive to females, responses that are markedly social. Although men's behavior under stress may also be social, at least under certain circumstances, extending the tend- and-befriend model to men is premature and potentially flawed, from the vantage points of the underlying biology and the behavioral stress responses it may help to foster.