• Anxiety reduction
• Conflict management
• Reconciliation
• Tolerant societies

Social living is beneficial and costly at the same time. To cope with competition for resources and mating opportunities and maintain group cohesion several social species engage in a variety of peace-keeping strategies. The affinitive post-conflict reunion between former opponents, or reconciliation, is one of the primary peace-keeping mechanisms. Here, we test some hypotheses on reconciliation in geladas (Theropithecus gelada). The data collection covering five different years from 2007 to 2014 represents one of the most extensive databases for this species. The analyses confirmed the presence of reconciliation and its occurrence in the first minute after the end of the conflict. The Corrected Conciliatory Tendency did not vary significantly across the years of observation, suggesting that reconciliation is a stable strategy in this species. Despite the presence of a linear hierarchy, dominance relationships (measured by NDS values) did not affect the reconciliation dynamics. The high levels of tolerance characterizing the species and the agonistic support frequently provided to the victims independently from their dominance position can explain this finding. Contrary to other species living in multilevel societies with the one-male unit as the basic social component (e.g. Papio hamadryas), gelada females reconciled with all members of the group, although a slight trend towards males can be detected. Reconciliation was more frequent between unrelated subjects and it produced a real improvement of the emotional state of the victims who restored their self-directed behaviours at the levels recorded in absence of any kind of conflict. In conclusion, even though the study of post-conflict behaviour in geladas needs further investigations, the peculiar nature of their social network is a good opportunity to test some theoretical assumptions on conflict resolution in primates.