Shelley E. Taylor

There's fight or flight stress response that we've talked about.

And There is a really unique and interesting study from UCLA researcher Dr. Shelley Taylor, and she identified a distinctly female pattern under stress called tend and befriend.

This was in the early 2000s that she did this research.

And it's nurturing and seeking connection rather than just fighting or fleeing.

And many parents who left work early walked to their kids' schools to pick them up.

It took Shelly Taylor four hours to get to PS 58 on Carol.

Street between Smith and Court Street in Brooklyn.

Being that he goes to school down in the court area, I was worried about a bomb and possibly down in downtown Brooklyn.

Here is the real biology behind that.

So Under acute stress, and there's a well-known theory out of UCLA, the researcher Shelley Taylor called tend and befriend.

Tend and befriend.

Compared to the classic fight or flight stress response, the one that everybody's learned at school.

The researchers actually researched this because they thought the behavioral pattern for stress would be different for women because that whole like fight or run away might be lower in women than it is in men, like that natural kind of primitive response.

So back in 2000, a psychologist at UCLA called Shelly Taylor showed that while the normal sympathetic fight or flight response actually occurs in both sexes, which we naturally talk about all the time, women's stress behavior can also be characterized by something else, something different.

And it's something she called tend and befriend.

So tending being like protecting, nurturing and befriending is that social connecting, seeking out support socially.