Monitoring behavioral disturbances in experimental social systems

Abstract

Although clinicians and epidemiologists in their work with humans first perceived the details of a relationship between emotional disturbance and physical illness, we make the point in preceding chapters that man is not unique: The life changes confronting him are, in fact, responsible for stimulating or straining the instinctually determined male-female bonding, parental attachment, and territorial behavior that he experiences just like other mammals. Human society also has dominants who control access to desiderata and are high in the social hierarchy (Maclay and Knipe, 1972). All mammals continuously pass down the stream of time—the aged eventually vanish, but the young are trained and incorporated into the establishment to preserve the species. Dramatic crises arising when these life changes suddenly occur are clearly intensely arousing to humans as well as to other mammals.