Tend-and-Befriend
Shelley Taylor's 2000 argument that fight-or-flight is not the whole stress response: under threat, people also tend, soothing distress in themselves or a dependant, and befriend, actively building the social ties that offer protection. Affiliation, on this account, is not a comfort that follows stress. It is part of the stress response itself. The core claim has aged well. The sex-specific part of it, which Taylor's own paper argued for, has not gone unchallenged.
What it is
Fight-or-flight has long stood as shorthand for the entire stress response: threat triggers arousal, arousal prepares the body to fight or run. Shelley Taylor's 2000 paper in Psychological Review, written with Laura Klein, Brian Lewis, Tara Gruenewald, Regan Gurung and John Updegraff, argued that this shorthand was incomplete. Alongside the classic sympathetic-nervous-system pattern, the authors proposed a second behavioural response that runs in parallel: tending and befriending.
Tending is nurturant activity aimed at quieting distress, whether the distress is one's own or a dependant's: calming a child, checking in on someone who is struggling. Befriending is the active creation and maintenance of social networks that supply protection, seeking out others and strengthening ties in a way that builds a group capable of absorbing a shock. The paper's central move was to treat both as part of the stress response itself rather than as a coping strategy layered on top of it once the adrenaline has passed. Grouping up under threat, on this account, is not a symptom of stress. It is what stress does.
The 2000 paper went further and argued the pattern is more characteristic of females than males, tying it to the demands of protecting offspring under threat across evolutionary history. That claim was strong enough to draw a published response: David Geary and Mark Flinn challenged it in the same journal two years later, in 2002, offering reciprocal altruism as an alternative account of tending behaviour. Taylor's published reply called their argument a reasonable descriptive case that was, in her view, unsupported by the empirical evidence available at the time. The exchange never fully resolved, and it is worth being precise about which half of the theory survived it. The core observation, that affiliation is itself a stress behaviour rather than a comfort that shows up afterwards, has held up well and been taken up widely across the stress literature. The sharper claim, that tending and befriending is a sex-specific mechanism rather than a general human one, is the part that remains contested.
Read alongside Social Buffering, tend-and-befriend describes the behaviour: people move toward others under threat. It does not, on its own, explain when that movement actually lowers physiological stress and when it does not. That distinction, between a friend who merely supports and a friend who shares the stressor, is a separate and later finding.