The benefits of body-language mimicry have been confirmed by numerous psychological studies. And in popular culture, mirroring is frequently urged on people as a strategy – for flirting or having a successful date, for closing a sale or acing a job interview. But new research suggests that mirroring may not always lead to positive social outcomes. In fact, sometimes the smarter thing to do is to refrain. (…)

Interviewees who mimicked the unfriendly interlocutor were judged to be less competent than those who didn’t.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

For men, significant predictors of infidelity are personality variables, including propensity for sexual excitation (becoming easily aroused by many triggers and situations) and concern about sexual performance failure.

For women, relationship happiness is paramount. Women who are dissatisfied with their relationship are more than twice as likely to cheat; those who feel they are sexually incompatible with their partners are nearly three times as likely.

{ University of Guelph | Continue reading }

photo { Judy Linn, Patti, left tit | Judy Linn, Photographs of Patti Smith, 1969-1976 | A muse named Patti Smith | NY Times }

related quote { ‘I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.’ –Kant }

Changes in relationship formation and dissolution in the past 50 years have revealed new patterns in romantic relations among young adults. The U.S. Census indicates that young people are choosing to marry later and cohabitating more often than past generations. Now, a University of Missouri researcher has found that people in their 20s are redefining dating by engaging in “stayover relationships,” spending three or more nights together each week while maintaining the option of going to their own homes. (…)

Jamison found that “stayover relationships” are a growing trend among college-aged couples who are committed, but not interested in cohabiting.

Jamison found that couples who had a stayover routine were content in their relationships, but did not necessarily plan to get married or move in together.

“As soon as couples live together, it becomes more difficult to break up,” Jamison said. “At that point, they have probably signed a lease, bought a couch and acquired a dog, making it harder to disentangle their lives should they break up. Staying over doesn’t present those entanglements.”

{ University of Missouri | Continue reading }

photo { Thatcher Keats }

Although human love is a complicated and long journey, scientists consistently find that the release of a specific neuropetide—oxytocin—may kick start these feelings right away in courtship. In fact, for the past few decades researchers have referred to oxytocin as the “love hormone,” and credit its release as the glue that ties humans to their loved ones.

Oxytocin’s cupid effect is not specific to romantic love, but rather various forms of pro-sociality. Pregnancy and labor are times when a woman naturally experiences surges of oxytocin, which may facilitate mother-infant bonding. In males, administering oxytocin has been shown to increase trust, understanding, and even enhance empathy in males with social deficits. Nonetheless, oxytocin is best known for keeping us monogamous, or “pair bonded” as the scientists say. (…)

While oxytocin may enhance positive emotions and pro-sociality with the people we care about, it may also contribute to negative views and behaviors towards people to whom we are not close.

{ BrainBlogger | Continue reading }

painting { Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Sleeping Woman, 1897 }

Human interactions often provide people with considerable social support, but can pets also fulfill one’s social needs? Although there is correlational evidence that pets may help individuals facing significant life stressors, little is known about the well-being benefits of pets for everyday people.

Study 1 found in a community sample that pet owners fared better on several well-being (e.g., greater self-esteem, more exercise) and individual-difference (e.g., greater conscientiousness, less fearful attachment) measures.

Study 2 assessed a different community sample and found that owners enjoyed better well-being when their pets fulfilled social needs better, and the support that pets provided complemented rather than competed with human sources.

Finally, Study 3 brought pet owners into the laboratory and experimentally demonstrated the ability of pets to stave off negativity caused by social rejection.

In summary, pets can serve as important sources of social support, providing many positive psychological and physical benefits for their owners.

{ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology | PDF }

photo { Andre Kertesz, Study of People and Shadows, 1928 | more photos }

The next time you feel angry at a friend who has let you down, or grateful toward one whose generosity has surprised you, consider this: you may really be bargaining for better treatment from that person in the future. According to a controversial new theory, our emotions have evolved as tools to manipulate others into cooperating with us.

Until now, most psychologists have viewed anger as a way to signal your displeasure when another person does you harm. Similarly, gratitude has been seen as a signal of pleasure when someone does you a favour. In both cases, emotions are seen as short-term reactions to an immediate benefit or cost.

But it’s more cunning than that, says John Tooby, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Anger, he says, has as much to do with cooperation as with conflict, and emotions are used to coerce others into cooperating in the long term. (…)

All this suggests that anger and gratitude – and perhaps other emotions, too – may be tools for turning up a partner’s mental cooperation control dial.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

Researchers have shown that we sit near people who look like us.

The effect is more than just people of the same sex or ethnicity tending to aggregate — a phenomenon well documented by earlier research.

The new finding could help explain why it is that people so often resemble physically their friends and romantic partners (known as “homophily”) — if physically similar people choose to sit near each other, they will have more opportunities to forge friendships and romances. (…)

A further possibility is that seeking proximity to physically similar others is an evolutionary hang-over — an instinct for staying close to genetically similar kin.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

Over the past few decades, social scientists have produced a sizable body of evidence suggesting that parents are less happy, experience more depression and anxiety, and have less fulfilling marriages than non-parents. In this paper, we critically assess previous research on and provide an empirical reexamination of the relationship between parental status and psychological well-being using self-reported measures of happiness (General Social Survey) and life satisfaction (DDB Needham Life Style Survey) over the period 1972 to 2008. Our empirical analysis yields a number of important results. First, the unconditional happiness gap between parents and non-parents is smaller than other well-known happiness gaps. Second, estimates of the parental happiness gap are highly sensitive to the inclusion of standard demographic covariates, and in many specifications parents are happier than comparable non-parents. Third, parents are becoming happier over time relative to non-parents.

{ SSRN | full paper }

image { Shaun Gladwell, Apologies 1 - 6, 2009 }

According to a report in the March issue of The Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 54 percent of men and 42 percent of women are unhappy with the frequency of sex in their long-term relationships.

A prime reason that couples go out of sync sexually lies in the brain’s reward circuitry. It’s a set of mechanisms that work together to drive all motivation, libido, appetite, and—when out of kilter—addiction. Therefore, it governs your attraction (or lack thereof) to each other between the sheets. It works subconsciously, which is why neither of you can will yourself to enjoy sex if the magic isn’t happening.

{ Good Men Project | Continue reading }

Susan Hughes, from Albright College in Pennsylvania, asked 1,041 college students questions about their kissing preferences, styles, attitudes and behaviors.

- Men and women reported having kissed a similar number of people in their lives; 14 was the average number for both men and women.


- About 50% of men would have sex without kissing their partner first; only 10% of women would do so.


- Men want to kiss someone based on their perception of facial attraction, women focus more on a man’s teeth in deciding if they would like to kiss him.


- Kissing seems to be more important before sex and much less so after.


- Overall, kissing is more important for women than for men in having a satisfying sexual experience.


- Overall men prefer wetter kisses with more tongue than do women.


- Both sexes preferred more tongue with long-term partners.


- Men are more than twice as likely to have sex with a bad kisser than are women.


{ eHarmony | Continue reading }

photo { Caitlin Teal Price }

Every generation has its life-defining moments. (…) For much of my generation—Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980—there is only one question: “When did your parents get divorced?” (…)

“Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.” Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents’ marriages. Not ours.

According to U.S. Census data released this May, 77% of couples who married since 1990 have reached their 10-year anniversaries. We’re also marrying later in life, if at all. The average marrying age in 1950 was 23 for men and 20 for women; in 2009, it was 28 for men and 26 for women.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

photo { Walker Evans, Torn Poster, Truro, Massachusetts, 1930 }

It is well recognized that there are consistent differences in the psychological characteristics of boys and girls; for example, boys engage in more ‘rough and tumble’ play than girls do.

Studies also show that children who become gay or lesbian adults differ in such traits from those who become heterosexual – so-called gender nonconformity. Research which follows these children to adulthood shows that between 50 to 80 per cent of gender nonconforming boys become gay, and about one third of such girls become lesbian. (…)

The team followed a group of 4,000 British women who were one of a pair of twins. They were asked questions about their sexual attractions and behavior, and a series of follow up questions about their gender nonconformity. In line with previous research, the team found modest genetic influences on sexual orientation (25 per cent) and childhood gender nonconformity (31 per cent).

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2 }

As a shy person, I’ve believed for most of my life that being among new people required an elaborate social disguise, one that would allow me to feel both present and absent, noticed and unnoticed. I’d yearn for some sort of social recognition without the bother of having to be recognized, without that oppressive pressure to live up to anything that might get me attention in the first place. So I’d find myself executing oblique tactics — being stingy and stealthy with eye contact; wearing a mask of deep concentration; staring at an underappreciated object in the room, like a light fixture or molding — in hopes of discouraging people from engaging me in actual conversation while still conveying the impression that I might be interesting to talk to.

The problem with polite conversation, I thought, was that it required the orderly recitation of platitudes before one can say anything interesting, let alone something as original and insightful as I wanted to believe myself to be. I couldn’t bear it. I had an irrational expectation that people should already know what I was about and come to me with suitable topics to draw me out.

{ Rob Horning /The New Inquiry | Continue reading | image: Thanks Rachel! }

At Çatalhöyük in Turkey, it appears that people did not live in families. Instead, the society seems to have been organised completely differently.

Discovered in 1958, Çatalhöyük’s many buildings are built so close together that people had to get in through the roof. Its inhabitants farmed crops and domesticated animals, and experimented with painting and sculpture.

They also buried their dead beneath the floors of the houses, suggesting that people were buried where they lived. So Marin Pilloud of the Central Identification Laboratory in Hickam, Hawaii, realised she could work out who lived together. (…)

We are used to the idea that living in close contact with our relatives helps to promote our own genetic inheritance and keep hold of our money and possessions over the generations. So why should Stone Age populations be different?

Pilloud thinks Çatalhöyük developed its odd social structure as the people began settling down and farming, rather than hunting and gathering. “It makes a lot of sense to shift to a community-centred society with the adoption of agriculture,” she says. People living in close quarters all year round and working together to produce food needed to create a strong community, rather than only cooperating with relatives.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

painting { Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, Hostile Force (detail), 1902 }

A gentle touch on the arm can be surprisingly persuasive. Consider these research findings. Library users who are touched while registering, rate the library and its personnel more favourably than the non-touched; diners are more satisfied and give larger tips when waiting staff touch them casually; people touched by a stranger are more willing to perform a mundane favour; and women touched by a man on the arm are more willing to share their phone number or agree to a dance.

Why should this be? Up until now research in this area has been exclusively behavioural: these effects have been observed, but we don’t really know why. Now a study has made a start at understanding the neuroscience of how touch exerts its psychological effects. (…)

The most important finding is that a touch on the arm enhanced the brain’s response to emotional pictures.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

Anyway. There are two essential truths about girl-on-girl friendship: 1) underneath the harsh hate-tokes, girls really, really, really love each other and understand that we’re part of an all-powerful pussy tribe bound by wisdom and empathy and being on the same period cycle and 2) we still want to kill and eat each other (not in a sexy way). Here’s why:

• GIRLS WANT TO (BE THE ONLY GIRL WHO GETS TO) FUCK

• GIRLS WANT EACH OTHER’S BODIES, FACES, CLOTHES, LIVES

• GIRLS CAN’T JUST HANG OUT

{ Vice | Continue reading }

photo { Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin }

Whines, cries, and motherese have important features in common: they are all well-suited for getting the attention of listeners, and they share salient acoustic characteristics – those of increased pitch, varied pitch contours, and slowed production, though the production speed of cries varies. Motherese is the child-directed speech parents use towards infants and young children to sooth, attract attention, encourage particular behaviors, and prohibit the child from dangerous acts. Infant cries are the sole means of communication for infants for the first few months, and a primary means in the later months. Cries signal that the infant needs care, be it feeding, changing, protection, or physical contact. Whines enter into a child’s vocal repertoire with the onset of language, typically peaking between 2.5 and 4 years of age. This sound is perceived as more annoying even than infant cries.

These three attachment vocalizations – whines, cries, and motherese – each have a particular effect on the listener; to bring the attachment partner nearer. (…)

Participants, regardless of gender or parental status, were more distracted by whines than machine noise or motherese as measured by proportion scores. In absolute numbers, participants were most distracted by whines, followed by infant cries and motherese.

{ Whines, cries, and motherese: Their relative power to distract | Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | Continue reading }

photo { Tod Seelie }

Cuddling and caressing are important ingredients for long-term relationship satisfaction, according to an international study by the Kinsey Institute, which queried committed, middle-aged couples from five countries. But contrary to stereotypes, tenderness was more important to the men than to the women. Also contrary to expectations, men were more likely to report being happy in their relationship, while women were more likely to report being satisfied with their sexual relationship.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Jeremy and Claire Weiss }

Female sexuality is particularly enigmatic, simply because the sex function in women is so much more complex than that of their male counterparts. A study conducted by Dutch scientist Gert Holstege showed that while the areas in male brains activated during orgasm were not surprising, the activated areas in the female brains were slightly different. For one, the female brain becomes noticeably silent in certain areas, like in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, two areas in the brain that process feelings and thoughts associated with self-control and social judgement. Holstege noted that “at the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.” (…)

Even women in good health have a difficult time achieving climax. Reportedly, 10% of women have never had an orgasm, and as many as 50% of women have trouble being aroused.

{ BrainBlogger | Continue reading }

Imagine you are a single, heterosexual woman. You meet a nice man at the driving range, or on a blind date. You like him and he likes you. You date, you get engaged, you get married. You decide to have a child together, so you go off the pill. One morning you wake up and look at your husband, and it’s like seeing him through new eyes. Who is this stranger you married, and what did you ever see in him?

After some articles made the news when they suggested mate preferences change on hormonal contraception, this seemed to be the scenario in the heads of many women. Is my pill deceiving me? What if my birth control is making me date the wrong man?

Several articles over the years have demonstrated that women prefer men with more masculine features at midcycle, or ovulation, and more feminine features in less fertile periods. Based on body odor, women and men also often prefer individuals with MHC (major histocompatibility complex) that are different from theirs, which may be a way for them to select mates that will give their offspring an immunological advantage. These findings have been replicated a few times, looking at a few different gendered traits. And as I suggested above, other work has suggested that the birth control pill, which in some ways mimics pregnancy, may mask our natural tendency to make these distinctions and preferences, regarding both masculinity and MHC.

{ Context and Variation | Continue reading }

image { Thanks Glenn! }