Lastly, alleviation of an acute fear response because a friendly peer (or in biological language: an affiliative conspecific) tends and befriends is called "social buffering". The term is in analogy to the 1985 "buffering" hypothesis in psychology, where social support has been proven to mitigate the negative health effects of alarm pheromone mediated distress. The role of a "social pheromone" is suggested by the recent discovery that olfactory signals are responsible in mediating the "social buffering" in male rats. "Social buffering" was also observed to mitigate the conditioned fear responses of honeybees. A bee colony exposed to an environment of high threat of predation did not show increased aggression and aggressive-like gene expression patterns in individual bees, but decreased aggression. That the bees did not simply habituate to threats is suggested by the fact that the disturbed colonies also decreased their foraging.
lastly alleviation of an acute fear response because a friendly peer (or in biological language an affiliative conspecific) tends and befriends is called "social buffering" the term is in analogy to the 1985 "buffering" hypothesis in psychology where social support has been proven to mitigate the negative health effects of alarm pheromone mediated distress the role of a "social pheromone" is suggested by the recent discovery that olfactory signals are responsible in mediating the "social buffering" in male rats "social buffering" was also observed to mitigate the conditioned fear responses of honeybees a bee colony exposed to an environment of high threat of predation did not show increased aggression and aggressive-like gene expression patterns in individual bees but decreased aggression that the bees did not simply habituate to threats is suggested by the fact that the disturbed colonies also decreased their foraging