The baboons that handle stress best, in contrast, are those who have formed stable social connections. Over the short term, stress hormones help baboons deal with harsh realities: competition for sexual partners and aggression from bullies, coalitions or beaten animals looking for a third party to pummel.
Sapolsky observes baboons in the wild to determine their ranks, personalities and social affiliations. Then he anesthetizes them with a blowdart to collect blood samples that reveal levels of stress hormones, antibodies, cholesterol and other indicators of health status.
Because baboons are rarely threatened by famine, plague or predators, they are good models for socialized disease, Sapolsky says: "Baboon societies are ironically a lot like Westernized humans. We're ecologically privileged enough that we can invent social and psychological stress.
"Some baboons have a Type A personality, and they pay for it in terms of disease," Sapolsky told an audience Feb. 18 at a symposium on stress and health at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The baboons that handle stress best, in contrast, are those who have formed stable social connections.
Sapolsky showed that in baboons, the lower the social rank, the greater the stress. The one exception was during periods of instability, when top males faced many challenges and their stress increased. It was good to be king, he found, but a lot better when the realm was quiet.
"The reason baboons are such good models is, like us, they don't have real stressors," he said. "If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don't mess with you much.
Every summer since the late '70s, Stanford physiologist Robert Sapolsky has traveled to Kenya to study the stressful lives of baboons, whose competitive, stratified society resembles our own. By linking baboons' behavior with their health, he has learned that some individuals handle stress better than others.
30 yearsFor 30 years, Sapolsky and his colleagues have been gathering behavioral and physiological field data—such as blood samples, tissue biopsies and electrocardiograms—on African baboons, close cousins of humans. They study stress and neuron degeneration in the lab.
Sapolsky's research uncovered that dominant males had the lowest stress levels, while submissive baboons were in worse health with increased heart rates and higher blood pressure.
why did Sapolsky choose baboons? They experience stress as a result of their interactions with each other, not from predators. They are being stressed by social and psychological tumult invented by their own species. They're a perfect model for Westernized stress-related disease."
And so Sapolsky set out to test the hypothesis that the stress involved in being at the bottom of the baboon hierarchy led to health problems. At the time, stress was mostly ignored as a scientific subject. It was seen as an unpleasant mental state with few long- term consequences.
Summary: Top-ranking males exhibit higher stress hormone levels than second-ranking males in a wild baboon society suggesting that being at the very top of a social hierarchy may be more costly than previously thought.
Baboons are close evolutionary relatives to humans, and on average, baboons and humans have a genetic similarity of 94%. Like many primates, baboons are highly social. They live in social groups of around 20 to 150 animals, including several adult females, adult males, and many offspring.
Stress reduces dopamine, which makes it harder to feel pleasure for a stressed individual. What did Shively discover about how stress affects the ability to feel pleasure? Residents had diabetes and heart disease. What diseases did Dr.
Robert: If you are a normal mammal, a stressor is a challenge to homeostatic balance — a real physical challenge in the world — and the stress-response is the adaptation your body mobilizes to re-establish homeostasis.
Stress that's left unchecked can contribute to many health problems, such as high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity and diabetes.
Baboons can teach us a lot about being too stressed. Baboons are just as stressed as we are, but their politics are a little more violent. Volume 90%. Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard Shortcuts. Enabled Disabled. Play/Pause SPACE.
Baboon politics say a lot about human politics: It's tough to be on top, and the key to staying there is to know when to stress over the competition. Professor of Neuroscience at Stanford University, and author of Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky tells us what humans can learn from the baboons.
Over the short term, stress hormones help baboons deal with harsh realities: competition for sexual partners and aggression from bullies, coalitions or beaten animals looking for a third party to pummel . But over the long term, aggression and even psychological stress itself can exact a toll in the form of elevated stress-hormone levels, a poor immune response, elevated resting blood pressure, an unhealthy ratio of "good" to "bad" cholesterol, hardening of the arteries and perhaps even premature death.
Because baboons are rarely threatened by famine, plague or predators, they are good models for socialized disease, Sapolsky says: "Baboon societies are ironically a lot like Westernized humans. We're ecologically privileged enough that we can invent social and psychological stress.
Then he anesthetizes them with a blowdart to collect blood samples that reveal levels of stress hormones, antibodies, cholesterol and other indicators of health status. So far, most data are from male baboons, as at any given time, 80 percent of the females are pregnant or lactating and cannot be anesthetized without risks.
Every summer since the late '70s, Stanford physiologist Robert Sapolsky has traveled to Kenya to study the stressful lives of baboons, whose competitive, stratified society resembles our own. By linking baboons' behavior with their health, he has learned that some individuals handle stress better than others.
Sapolsky has found a key to handling stress may be cultivating friendships. Males who spend the most time grooming and being groomed by females who are not in heat (that is, are not of immediate sexual interest) and playing with infants have the lowest levels of stress hormones.
But you must absolutely flatten the immune system to hurt tumor defense, and the effects of stress on the immune system are never that severe.".
But unlike zebras, whose bodies are well-adapted to dealing with short-term emergencies like running from hungry lions, primates also experience psychological stresses that can elicit physiological responses that, evoked over time, can make us sick.