Fight Or Flight Flashcards
(3 cards)
The evolutionary perspective offers important insights into the fight-or-flight response.
E - This perspective provides an ultimate explanation for how organisms evolved to possess the fight-or-flight response. It suggests that ancestral organisms with this trait reacted quickly to threats, increasing their chances of survival and reproduction. Those without this ability were less likely to survive and pass on their genes. As a result, the fight-or-flight response was favoured by natural selection, making it more likely to be inherited by subsequent generations. Over time, this led to its prevalence in modern populations, including humans. Furthermore, the evolutionary perspective suggests that there is now a mismatch between this evolved response and modern environments. Today, non-life-threatening stressors, such as exams or financial worries, can inappropriately trigger fight-or-flight. This is harmful to health, as these stressors can result in chronic stress and prolonged cortisol release (the hormone released when fight-or-flight is sustained over a long time), causing high blood pressure and immune suppression. However, a challenge to this claim is that evolutionary explanations can be difficult to empirically test. They often rely on speculative “just-so stories” rather than direct, falsifiable evidence. It is difficult to retrospectively prove that the fight-or-flight response evolved specifically for survival advantages, as other environmental or social factors may have influenced its development.
L - In summary, while the evolutionary explanation provides valuable insights into the origins and implications of the fight-or-flight response, its claims are challenging to empirically verify.
However, the fight-or-flight response does not fully explain how organisms respond to threats.
E – Taylor (2000) argued that human females are more likely to respond to threats by tending (caring for offspring) and befriending (seeking social support), a response called tend-and-befriend.
E – This suggests that fight-or-flight is a limited explanation for how humans respond to stress, as it does not fully account for gender differences in stress responses. This challenges the idea that fight-or-flight is the universal response to stress. Furthermore, Taylor’s findings highlight gender bias in early research on fight-or-flight. Much of the initial research was conducted on male participants. As Taylor’s findings show, it was wrong to assume that the findings could be generalized to females.
L – Therefore issues with gender biased research may have concealed that fight-or-flight is not the only way we respond to threats.
Research has investigated the advantages of the fight or flight response to threats.
E - Dugatkin (1992) placed guppies (a type of fish) with varying fight-or-flight responses in a tank with a smallmouth bass, their natural predator. After 60 hours, guppies with stronger fight-or-flight responses had significantly higher survival rates than those with weaker responses
E - The finding that the guppies with stronger fight-or-flight responses had a higher chance of survival supports the claim from the evolutionary perspective that the fight-or-flight response is an effective response to potential threats. However, we must be cautious when generalizing these findings to humans, as guppies are a very different species. Unlike guppies, humans are highly social animals with advanced intelligence, meaning they may use more complex responses to threat beyond just fight or flight.
L - This study shows that guppies vary in their fight-or-flight responses, with stronger reactions improving survival. However, applying these findings to humans is problematic.
