Establish male monkeys in a social group, and over the course of days to months they’ll figure out where they stand with respect to one another. Once a stable dominance hierarchy has emerged, the last place you want to be is on the bottom: not only are you subject to the most physical stressors but, as will be reviewed in chapter 13 on psychological stress, to the most psychological stressors as well. Such subordinate males show a lot of the physiological indices of chronically turning on their stress-responses. And often these animals wind up with atherosclerotic plaques—their arteries are
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