Prevailing wisdom suggests that our genes remain largely fixed over time. But, an emerging field of research is beginning to prove this intuition wrong. Scientists are uncovering increasing evidence that changes in the expression of hundreds of genes can occur as a result of the social environments we inhabit. As a result of these dynamics, experiences we have today can affect our health for days and even months into the future. […]

People who experience chronic social isolation show reduced antiviral immune response gene activity, which leaves them vulnerable to viral infections like the common cold. […] Other social conditions that have been found to influence human gene expression include being socially evaluated or rejected, which can have different consequences for different people depending on their sensitivity to social threat.

{ APS | Continue reading }

photo { Jonathan Waiter }

The decline of two-parent households may be a significant reason for the divergent fortunes of male workers, whose earnings generally declined in recent decades, and female workers, whose earnings generally increased, a prominent labor economist argues in a new survey of existing research. […]

Only 63 percent of children lived in a household with two parents in 2010, down from 82 percent in 1970. The single parents raising the rest of those children are predominantly female. And there is growing evidence that sons raised by single mothers “appear to fare particularly poorly,” Professor Autor wrote in an analysis for Third Way, a center-left policy research organization. […]

Men who are less successful are less attractive as partners, so women are choosing to raise children by themselves, producing sons who are less successful and attractive as partners. […]

“I think the greatest, most astonishing fact that I am aware of in social science right now is that women have been able to hear the labor market screaming out ‘You need more education’ and have been able to respond to that, and men have not,” said Michael Greenstone, an M.I.T. economics professor. […]

Professor Autor said in an interview that he was intrigued by evidence suggesting the consequences were larger for boys than girls, including one study finding that single mothers spent an hour less per week with their sons than their daughters. Another study of households where the father had less education, or was absent entirely, found the female children were 10 to 14 percent more likely to complete college. A third study of single-parent homes found boys were less likely than girls to enroll in college. […]

Instead of making marriage more attractive, he said, it might be better for society to help make men more attractive.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

New research examines the role of trust in biasing memories of transgressions in romantic partnerships. 

People who are highly trusting tended to remember transgressions in a way that benefits the relationship, remembering partner transgressions as less severe than they originally reported them to be. People low on trust demonstrated the opposite pattern, remembering partner transgressions as being more severe than how they originally reported them to be.

{ Northwestern University | Continue reading }

I next proposed a triangular theory of love, which holds that love can be understood in terms of three components that together can be viewed as forming the vertices of a triangle. The triangle is used as a metaphor, rather than as a strict geometric model.

These three components are intimacy (top vertex of the triangle), passion (left-hand vertex of the triangle), and decision/commitment (right-hand vertex of the triangle).

Intimacy refers to feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness in loving relationships.

Passion refers to the drives that lead to physical attraction and excitement.

Decision/commitment refers, in the short-term, to the decision that one loves a certain other, and in the long-term, to one’s commitment to maintain that love.

More of each component leads to different sizes of love triangles, and different balances of the three components give rise to different shapes of triangles.

{ The Psychologist | Continue reading }

The behavior of crowds at heavy metal concerts […]. In these crowds, fans often form circles called mosh pits and then run together with physical abandon, bouncing off one another with arms flaying and legs kicking.

“The collective mood is influenced by the combination of loud, fast music (130 dB, 350 beats per minute), synchronized with bright, flashing lights, and frequent intoxication,” say Jesse Silverberg and pals at Cornell University in Ithaca.

The resulting disorder may sound chaotic but Silverberg and co say it turns out to have all the properties of self-organised emergent behaviour. Today, they reveal the results of their study of this phenomenon.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

Teenagers from all walks of life who believe people can’t change react more aggressively to a peer conflict than those who think people can change. And teaching them that people have the potential to change can reduce these aggressive reactions. […]

The researchers who carried out this study sought to determine whether teens in any environment (rich or poor, violent or nonviolent) could develop a belief—that people’s character traits are fixed and can’t change—that led them to react aggressively.

“Our past research showed that believing people’s traits are fixed leads teens to think the world is full of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people, with nobody in between; they are then quick to classify people as one or the other,” according to David Yeager, assistant professor of developmental psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, the study’s lead investigator. “In our new research, we found that teens in this ‘fixed’ mindset, even after a minor offense like getting bumped in the hall or being left out of a game of catch, relegated peers to the ‘bad person’ group, decided that they had offended on purpose, and want aggressive revenge.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

art { Julie Cockburn }

{ Dress Turns Transparent When You Get Sexually Aroused }

Several experimental studies have shown that human social relationships are positively affected by the weather. Cunningham (1979) found that participants approached by an interviewer to participate in a survey were less reluctant to comply on sunny days compared with cloudy days. In a second study by this author the outside level of sunshine was found to be significantly related to the gratuity left by restaurant customers for a waitress. Hirshleifer and Shumway (2003) reported that sunshine level was positively correlated with returns on the stock market. Simonsohn (2007), examining actual university admission decisions, found that applicants’ academic attributes were weighted more heavily on cloudy days while non-academic attributes were weighted more heavily on sunny days. […]

Rind (1996) conducted an experiment in hotel rooms that did not have windows. A male server who delivered food and drinks to the rooms reported the sky conditions (sunny, partly sunny, cloudy, or rainy) to guests. More tips were left when the server mentioned pleasant weather conditions. In the study by Rind and Strohmetz (2001) a server in a restaurant was asked to either leave the backs of customers’ checks blank or to write one of two messages: that the weather would be good the next day or that the weather would not be so good the next day. More tips were found to be left by the customers when they were given a favorable forecast. […]

If actual or expected pleasant weather conditions facilitate positive social relationships, we can hypothesize that other behaviors, such as a courtship solicitation, are affected by weather. […]

Young women were more likely to give their phone number to a young man when solicited during sunny days.

{ Taylor & Francis | Continue reading }

The manner in which men and women evaluate potential romantic partners has been a prominent topic of evolutionary psychology for the past several decades. The impact of an individual’s sexual history on his or her desirability to potential mates has traditionally been an area of particular interest. Numerous studies have shown that having many past sexual partners adversely impacts one’s desirability as a potential mate.

This finding has been described as a manifestation of psychological mechanisms designed to avoid cuckoldry and ensure selection of more committed partners. If this explanation is correct, then the amount of time elapsed since the end of one’s previous relationship should also influence his or her desirability as a mate; specifically, a man’s or woman’s recently-ended intimate relationship could pose a risk to their potential partner’s reproductive fitness through resource diversion or cuckoldry, respectively. The recency hypothesis has not been empirically examined and is the focus of the present investigation.

{ Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | PDF }

Explicit communication involves the deliberate, conscious choosing of words and signals to convey a specific message to a recipient or target audience. […] Much of human communication is also implicit, and occurs subconsciously without overt individual attention. Examples include nonverbal communication and subconscious facial expressions, which have been argued to contribute significantly to human communication and understanding. […] Additionally, recent studies conducted by evolutionary psychologists and biologists have revealed that other animals, including humans, may also communicate information implicitly via the production and detection of chemical olfactory cues. Of specific interest to evolutionary psychologists has been the investigation of human chemical cues indicating female reproductive status. These subliminally perceived chemical cues (odors) are often referred to as pheromones.

For two decades, psychologists studying ovulation have successfully employed a series of “T-shirt studies” supporting the hypothesis that men can detect when a woman is most fertile based on olfactory detection of ovulatory cues. However, it is not known whether the ability to detect female fertility is primarily a function of biological sex, sexual orientation, or a combination of both.

Using methodologies from previous T-shirt studies, we asked women not using hormonal contraceptives to wear a T-shirt for three consecutive nights during their follicular (ovulatory) and luteal (non-ovulatory) phases. Male and female participants of differing sexual orientations then rated the T-shirts based on intensity, pleasantness, and sexiness.

Heterosexual males were the only group to rate the follicular T-shirts as more pleasant and sexy than the luteal T-shirts. Near-significant trends also indicated that heterosexual men and non-heterosexual women consistently ranked the T-shirts, regardless of menstrual stage, to be more intense, pleasant, and sexy than did non-heterosexual men and heterosexual women.

{ Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | PDF }

“If a wife left her husband with three kids and no job/ to run off to fuck in Hawaii with some doctor named Bob/ you could skin them and drain them of blood so they die…especially Bob. Then you would be justice guy.” –Stephen Lynch, Superhero

[…]

The interesting thing about this particular song is the emphasis that Stephen puts on his urge to kill Bob. It’s interesting in that it doesn’t make much sense, morally speaking: it’s not as if Bob, a third party who was not involved in any kind of relationship with Stephen, had any formal obligation to respect the boundaries of Stephen’s relationship with his wife. Looking out for the relationship, it seems, ought to have been his wife’s job. She was the person who had the social obligation to Stephen that was violated, so it seems the one who Stephen ought to be mad at (or, at least madder at) would be his wife. So why does Stephen wish to especially punish Bob?

[…]

Too much punishing of his wife – in this case, murder, though it need not be that extreme – can be counterproductive to his goals, as it would render her less able to deliver the benefits she previously provided to the relationship.

[…]

Punishing third parties versus punishing one’s partner can be thought of, by way of analogy, to treating the symptoms or the cause of a disease, respectively. Treating the symptoms (deterring other interested men), in this case, might be cheaper than treating the underlying cause on an individual basis, but you may also need to continuously treat the symptoms (if his wife is rather interested with the idea of having affairs more generally).

[…]

A paper by Glaeser and Sacerdote (2003) examined whether victim characteristics (like age and gender) were predictive of sentencing lengths for various crimes. […] When the victim was a man, if the killer was also a man, he would get about 18 years, on average; if the killer was a woman, that number drops to 11.3. For comparison’s sake, when the victim was a woman and the killer a woman, she would get about 17.5 years; if the killer was a man, that average was 23.1 years.

{ Pop Psychology | Continue reading }

photo { Peter Turnley, Métro Franklin Roosevelt, Paris, 2000 }

Jealousy is commonly known as a negative emotional reaction experienced when a relationship that is important to an individual is threatened by a rival. Perhaps then it is not surprising that jealousy can be viewed as a negative emotion that will only harm relationships. It is viewed as harmful to relationships due to its ability to evoke negative emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness. In addition, the onset of jealousy can occur for many different reasons that are associated with loss of affection, rejection, suspiciousness, insecurity, and anxiety. But, while jealousy can harm relationships, it can also help relationships.

Daly, Wilson, and Weghorst report that human males evolved defenses such as jealousy to protect them against wasting their efforts on children they had not sired. For a woman, jealousy provided a way to ensure that her male partner is investing resources in raising her offspring rather than squandering his resources on other women. Jealousy also evolved to protect love from the threat of loss and the threat of loss to a rival. So, while jealousy can lead to negative emotions, when it is properly used, it can also enhance relationships and provide mating benefits and enhance survival, i.e., it is an adaptive emotion.

{ Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | PDF }

Study authors found that approximately 44% of emerging adults who had been in a romantic relationship in the past two years had experienced at least one reconciliation with an ex romantic partner and 53% of those who reported reconciliations also reported having sex with their ex. Additionally, racial minorities in particular were even more likely to experience reconciliation or sexual relationships with previous romantic partners.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Darwinian literary analysis is a way to examine texts and arrive at conclusions about evolved human behaviors, motivations, and emotions. That is, by analyzing texts, it is possible to indirectly analyze human nature. Recently, scholars have examined the works of Jane Austen, Harlequin romance novels, and folktales for this purpose. Although this prior work has been informative, it has only included heterosexual relationships.

Symons noted that lesbian and gay populations are a vital group to gain insight into evolutionary sex differences, as their relationships involve only same sex individuals, thus highlighting dominant female and male mating behaviors. Therefore, in this paper, our primary goal is to analyze lesbian pulp fiction to better comprehend women’s evolved mating strategies. We also consider the era that these books were most popular and explore the cultural climate in relation to the characters in the novels. In general, the way the characters are described and their relationship dynamics are consistent gender stereotypes concerning masculine versus feminine women.

{ Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | PDF }

Research comparing regions in China with varied sex ratios has demonstrated that when available female partners are relatively more abundant, men are less likely to engage commercial sex workers, although they are likely to engage in more and more frequent sexual encounters outside of marriage; avoiding partnering that includes an explicit financial cost constitutes greater selectivity.

Other research indicates that when available female partners are relatively scarce, men are more likely to marry young, presumably motivated to secure an available partner against relatively less certain future mating opportunities; men are less likely to avoid partners who insist on marriage, indicating relatively lower selectivity. This also results in women marrying younger in populations characterized by sex ratios that skew male.

Although such studies document important and clear patterns, experimental exploration may provide added insight. Recent research, for example, examined women’s preferences for facial symmetry in men after viewing images of crowds in which sex ratios varied, revealing that women became more selective in their preferences when they perceived an abundance of men.

The present study seeks to extend experimental exploration of the impact of sex ratios in two ways: first, it examines the impact on men, and second, it examines the effects of sex ratios in media narratives rather than either real populations or still images.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | PDF }

I once tried to talk somebody out of pursuing a mail-order bride, a young Filipino who for a relatively modest fee would agree to move to Spokane, Wash., and start a new life with a complete stranger. Among the many questions raised by this half-baked plan was: How could you marry someone you had never met?

The case of Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame linebacker and finalist for college football’s highest honor, and his fake dead girlfriend takes this question to a whole new level. How can someone claim to have fallen in love with a woman he never met?

The answer, in part, is what’s wrong with love and courtship for a generation that values digital encounters over the more complicated messiness of real human interaction. As my colleague Alex Williams reported in a widely discussed piece a few days ago, screen time may be more important than face time for many 20- and 30-somethings. “Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret,” said Shani Silver, 30, in the story.

Technology, with its promise of both faux-intimacy and a protective sense of removal, does not alone explain the bizarre and still unfolding story of Te’o, who claimed that the love of his life died of leukemia last September after also suffering from a serious car crash. […] Te’o never actually met his phantom lover. Never. No face time. The entire relationship was electronic. And yet she was likely to become his wife, according to Te’o’s father. […]

The woman either existed, and then died, or didn’t exist, and therefore couldn’t have died at such a young and tender age. […] The digital girlfriend, Te’o said in an interview last October, two months before he found out the fraud, “was the most beautiful girl I ever met. Not because of her physical beauty, but the beauty of her character and who she is.” […] There was a picture, from their online encounters, of a lovely woman, a Stanford student, supposedly. There was a voice, from telephone conversations, of someone as well. And that someone finally called him up in early December and said the whole thing was a hoax perpetuated by an acquaintance in California, according to Deadspin, which broke the story.

“The pain was real,” said Swarbrick. “The grief was real. The affection was real. That’s the nature of this sad, cruel game.” No, that’s the nature of people who develop relationships through a screen. […]

To fall in love requires a bit of unpredictable human interaction. You have to laugh with a person, test their limits, go back and forth, touch them, reveal something true about yourself. You have to show some vulnerability, some give and take. At the very least, you have to make eye contact. It’s easier to substitute texting, tweeting or Facebook posting for these basic rituals of love and friendship because the digital route offers protection. How can you get dumped when you were never really involved?

{ NY Times | Continue reading | Thanks Rob }

art { General Idea, Artist’s Conception: Miss General Idea 1971, 1971 }

{ Brazilian site that builds fake girlfriend profiles on Facebook for 3, 7 or 30 days depending on your chosen plan }

What is memory for? Episodic memory enables one to capture the precise details of an experience, and then to recollect this information rapidly whenever and wherever needed. Typical examples of its evolutionary value focus on the individual navigating the world, but the advantages conferred by episodic memory may be more far-reaching than often appreciated. For example, interactions with other people are important for our survival and wellbeing. Might episodic memory be crucial for establishing and/or maintaining interpersonal relationships? To address this question, we examined social relationships in three amnesic patients.

{ Frontiers | Continue reading }

Evolutionary psychologists who study mating behavior often begin with a hypothesis about how modern humans mate: say, that men think about sex more than women do. Then they gather evidence — from studies, statistics and surveys — to support that assumption. Finally, and here’s where the leap occurs, they construct an evolutionary theory to explain why men think about sex more than women, where that gender difference came from, what adaptive purpose it served in antiquity, and why we’re stuck with the consequences today.

Lately, however, a new cohort of scientists have been challenging the very existence of the gender differences in sexual behavior that Darwinians have spent the past 40 years trying to explain and justify on evolutionary grounds. […]

Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).

In 2009, another long-assumed gender difference in mating — that women are choosier than men — also came under siege. In speed dating, as in life, the social norm instructs women to sit in one place, waiting to be approached, while the men rotate tables. But in one study of speed-dating behavior, the evolutionary psychologists Eli J. Finkel and Paul W. Eastwick switched the “rotator” role. The men remained seated and the women rotated. By manipulating this component of the gender script, the researchers discovered that women became less selective — they behaved more like stereotypical men — while men were more selective and behaved more like stereotypical women. The mere act of physically approaching a potential romantic partner, they argued, engendered more favorable assessments of that person.

Recently, a third pillar appeared to fall. To back up the assumption that an enormous gap exists between men’s and women’s attitudes toward casual sex, evolutionary psychologists typically cite a classic study published in 1989. Men and women on a college campus were approached in public and propositioned with offers of casual sex by “confederates” who worked for the study. The confederate would say: “I have been noticing you around campus and I find you to be very attractive.” The confederate would then ask one of three questions: (1) “Would you go out with me tonight?” (2) “Would you come over to my apartment tonight?” or (3) “Would you go to bed with me tonight?”

Roughly equal numbers of men and women agreed to the date. But women were much less likely to agree to go to the confederate’s apartment. As for going to bed with the confederate, zero women said yes, while about 70 percent of males agreed.

Those results seemed definitive — until a few years ago, when Terri D. Conley, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, set out to re-examine what she calls “one of the largest documented sexuality gender differences,” that men have a greater interest in casual sex than women.

Ms. Conley found the methodology of the 1989 paper to be less than ideal. “No one really comes up to you in the middle of the quad and asks, ‘Will you have sex with me?’ ” she told me recently. “So there needs to be a context for it. If you ask people what they would do in a specific situation, that’s a far more accurate way of getting responses.” In her study, when men and women considered offers of casual sex from famous people, or offers from close friends whom they were told were good in bed, the gender differences in acceptance of casual-sex proposals evaporated nearly to zero.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { George Brassaï }