YOU HAVE a big fight and what is the first thing that happens? Your friends come over to give you a hug, or maybe a kiss, or perhaps to pick a few fleas from your hair.
Details of how post-conflict "consolation" works to reduce stress in the chimpanzee community were revealed yesterday at a Festival of Science taking place in Liverpool.
Dr Orlaith Fraser of Liverpool John Moores University spent 18 months observing 22 adult chimps at Chester Zoo and studying their "post-conflict" behaviour as witnesses to the row offered consolation to the combatants.
"It tells you a lot about how chimpanzees are capable of empathy," Dr Fraser said yesterday.
"We don't actually know the mechanism behind this, we don't know what is going on in their minds," he added. But studies of human seven-year-olds produced a similar effect, with consolers on hand after a fight to offer "sympathetic concern" to the participants. There are any number of theories about why the chimps exhibit this behaviour, which involves valued friends of the participants going up afterwards to offer a hug or to groom them.
All members of a troop become stressed when a fight breaks out, with repeated scratching a sign of their agitation, Dr Fraser explained.
Once the consolation started, however, scratching declined, dissipating the stress and calming down the entire troop. "It is the first time that consolation has been seen to reduce stress," she said.
She noted the troop's behaviour and recorded 256 cases of ape-on-ape violence. "There is a lot of screaming in chimpanzee fights," she indicated.
Consolation was offered after half of these fights, with friends rather than relations offering the comfort.
Similar behaviour has been recorded in gorillas and bonobo apes and even in rooks. None of these were associated with stress reduction, leading Dr Fraser to speculate on this very human approach to calming things down.
Empathy in humans involves realising when it is required and then responding to the individual who needs it. "This is considered a trait only seen in humans," she said, so the chimps respond in a very human way.