The specificity of social stress

This paper attempts to clarify the concept of "social stress" as implicitly understood in the ethological literature. With respect to the general characteristics of stressors and stress responses, the concept when applied to crowding or to encounters with unfamiliar conspecifics does not appear to denote a specific process. The concept is more specific when it refers to the psychological (emotional, perceptive or cognitive) processes that accompany "behavioural stress", e.g. agonistic interactions and subordination experience. The concept of "sociological stress" is proposed to denote the very specific process whereby stress responses of individuals result from a group's social structure, and whereby the former determine the latter via behavioural interactions and the other types of couplings (e.g. perceptive) between the group-members. Finally, it is submitted that social stress at the group level may not be adequately reflected by traditional hormonal indicators of physiological stress.