Why do women get physically aroused and not even know it?
Some women seem to get turned on by almost anything man-on-women action, man-on-man, woman-on-woman, animal-on-animal, and so on. This is what sex researchers find when studying sexual arousal. When female volunteers are asked to watch erotic movies while outfitted with a plethysmograph, an instrument for measuring blood flow to the vagina, they often get very hot and bothered “down there.” Problem is, when many of those same women are asked to report how aroused they actually feel “up there” they often say they’re not turned on at all. Sometimes they even say they’re repulsed.
So what’s going on? Do women even know what turns them on?
Such is the puzzle that has plagued sex researchers for decades. And it’s a topic clinical psychologist Meredith Chivers and her colleagues address in a recent study, a meta-analysis of 132 papers on the genital measures of sexual arousal.
Why don’t women’s genital and subjective responses always agree? Here are a few theories the researchers present:
Women’s genital responses are hidden from view and produce less prominent somatosensory cues. While men may get turned on by feeling themselves get erect, women do not. However, [studies have found that] even when women received feedback about their level of vaginal engorgement, correlations (between genital and subjective arousal) were low and statistically nonsignificant. [Being told we're getting turned on doesn't necessarily turn us on.]
Women may edit their self-report of feeling sexually aroused because of socially desirable responding. Positive affect directs attention to erotic stimuli, thereby increasing sexual response, whereas negative affect interferes in the processing of sexual cues, resulting in lower sexual response. Lower concordance among women may reflect their experience of negative affect while watching the
conventional, commercially available erotica that is primarily produced for men.
Interestingly, the authors suggest that genital response to sexual stimuli may be an evolved self-protection mechanism:
Female genital response is an automatic reflex that is elicited by sexual stimuli and produces vaginal lubrication, even if the woman does not subjectively feel sexually aroused… Female genital response entails increased genital vasocongestion, necessary for the production of vaginal lubrication, and can, in turn, reduce discomfort and the possibility of injury during vaginal penetration. Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries that resulted in illness, infertility, or even death subsequent to unexpected or unwanted vaginal penetration, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring….Reports of women’s genital response and orgasm during sexual assaults suggests that genital responses do occur in women under conditions of sexual threat. That women can experience genital response during unwanted sex or when viewing depictions of sexual assault suggests that women’s vasocongestion response is automatically initiated by exposure to sexual stimuli, whether or not these stimuli are preferred, and without subjective appraisal of these stimuli as sexually arousing or desired.
During processing of sexual stimuli, brain areas associated with emotional inhibition are activated among women… Genital responses are not affected by involuntary inhibition involving the anterior cingulate cortex, but subjective responses are. [Incidentally, women's anterior cingulate cortex is most active when we're ovulating and attracted to macho, high-testosterone men. The ACC is activated when you're in conflict about something. Is this also a self-protection mechanism warning us to proceed with caution?]
Bottom line: Physical arousal is no proof a woman is really turned on. To really get a woman hot and bothered, you have to start from the top.
The case for wearing blush
Bad news for pale girls like me: red is hot. Not only do studies find that men are more attracted to women in red, now we find that men prefer women who are red. Their cheeks, that is….
In a new study, evolutionary psychologist Ian Stephen and his colleagues at the Face Perception Lab recruited volunteers of various races and asked them to digitally adjust the color tone on more than 50 faces to make them look as healthy and attractive as possible. Volunteers consistently added more red coloring to the cheeks — whether the face was Caucasian, Asian, or Black. The redder the face, the more suggestive it is of oxygen-rich blood reaching the skin. The more oxygen-rich blood, the more suggestive it is of the person’s general health and youth. An old person, a sick person, a person with hypertension or bad circulation…will not get rosy-cheeked.
And not only is a flush suggestive of good health and fitness….but high sex hormones as well. In women in particular, high levels of estrogen may cause an expansion of tiny blood vessels under the skin. Hence, rosy cheeks. As in monkeys, female facial redness may be associated with fertility and reproductive quality.
As Stephen points out, the human eye has evolved to pick up on fine variations on the color red. “People are sensitive to the subtle color difference between oxygenated and deoxygenated blood (oxygenated blood is a bright red colour, deoxygenated blood has a slightly bluish red colour, and we interpret this difference in skin blood oxygenation colour as a cue to the health status of individuals.”)
But why did the researchers find that volunteers preferred women over men with rosy cheeks? One reason may be the sex hormones, which show up more obviously in flushed female faces. But it may also be due to the fact that men already have ruddier faces than women do — they have higher levels of hemoglobin and arterial oxygen content in their blood. As a result, the male blush is not as obvious a cue of good health and high sex hormones.
There are surely other reasons why a maidenly blush is attractive, as I describe in BLONDES. For one, a flash of color to a woman’s cheeks may suggest youth, modesty, embarrassment, excitement…all of which, depending on context, may appeal to red-blooded men.
Do hypochondriacs prefer macho men?
Evolutionary psychologists tell us that one of the reasons why women find masculinity attractive is that high testosterone is a sign of a strong immune system. A strong immune system, in turn, in a sign of good genes and childhood development (testosterone is an immunosuppressant and only men with good genes can overcome its drawbacks). These strong square-jawed macho men aren’t necessarily good dads: they’re more likely to be uncooperative, combative, and aggressive. But they may offer good genetic material for your kids, depending on the circumstances.
So how do you prove that women equate masculinity with good genes and healthy immune systems (subconsciously, at least)? An indirect approach was taken by Lisa DeBruine and her colleagues at the Face Research Lab at the University of Aberdeen. (The Lab conducts many fascinating studies on attraction, some of which I reference in BLONDES.)
In this new study, DeBruine recruited 345 women of all ages to rate faces. The faces were digitally altered, and ranged from very masculine to very feminine. Participants also completed a test called the Three-Domain Disgust scale, designed to measure moral disgust (deceiving a friend), sexual disgust (hearing strangers have sex), and pathogen disgust (stepping on poop).
Turns out that women’s preference for masculinity in male faces was correlated with disgust sensitivity to pathogens, but not in the moral and sexual domains. (Yes, hypochondriacs do prefer macho men!) DeBruine speculates that in certain situations, such as disease-ridden environments, women are wired to prefer high-testosterone males. The benefits of their good immune system genes are worth the tradeoff.
The testosterone-means-good-genes theory, anyway, may explain why women in disease-ridden environments are likelier to choose macho guys. Explains DeBruine et al.:
Because a partner’s heritable health is of greater value when pathogens are a greater concern, concern about pathogens is likely to also be a factor that contributes to the resolution of this tradeoff. Cross-cultural differences in mate preferences and mating systems vary consistently with differences in pathogen prevalence. When people from 29 different cultures were asked to rank a series of attributes based on how important they would be in a mate, people in areas with a high prevalence of pathogens ranked physical attractiveness higher than people in areas with a relatively low prevalence of pathogens did. Also consistent with these
findings, rural Jamaican women prefer masculinity more than British women do…
So do hypochondriacs, fearful of disease, marry more macho men (e.g. self-professed hypochondriac Susie Essman and her new husband?) As environments become more sterile, will we prefer men with softer, sweeter faces and personalities? Or will the next swine flu outbreak inspire us to pursue pigs?
Do pretty waitresses really get higher tips?
Do pretty waitresses get higher tips? Researchers at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration want to know. Why? Because it may affect hiring decisions. The researchers claim in their recent study that evolutionary theory suggests that attractive women should receive higher tips than less attractive women.
To test this theory, the researcher recruited more than 400 restaurant waitresses to complete an online survey, asking them to rate their physical attractiveness, sexiness, age, bra size, hair color, waist size, weight, and average tip percentage.
The findings (or how to increase your tips if you’re a waitress):
1.) Blondes reported receiving larger percentage tips than did waitresses with other hair colors, as expected. However, the blond waitresses in this study did not perceive themselves to be more attractive than the waitresses with other hair colors.
2.) Women with large breasts and/or slender bodies received larger average tips than their counterparts without these characteristics.
More surprisingly:
3.) Tips increased with age with the largest tips going to women in their thirties.
The author’s analysis:
Perhaps the male restaurant customers were most attracted to the waitresses in their late teens and early twenties as expected, but tipped the waitresses who were in their thirties more than those who were younger because they thought they had a better chance of picking-up the older waitresses. Alternatively, the majority of the male customers in this study, whose average age was probably greater than 35 years old, may have been most attracted to waitresses in their thirties.as men age, they prefer women increasing younger than themselves, but nonetheless prefer increasingly older women in an absolute sense….. Given that the median age in the U.S. is 35 years old and that median age of paying restaurant customers is almost certainly even older,….most of the men is this study may have preferred women in their thirties, which is the age group among waitresses that received the largest tips.
4.) WHR (waist-to-hip ratio) was unrelated to tips in this study. Thick-waisted women were just as likely to get big tips.
The analysis:
Perhaps the effects of WHR on perceptions of physical attractiveness are too small to affect more overt behaviors… Alternatively, the failure to find a WHR effect on tipping may be due to the possibility that the waitresses’ clothing obscured their WHRs to their tipping customers.
The study has several weaknesses. First, it relies on women’s self-reports of their attractiveness, which is always tricky. More importantly, the study didn’t attempt to assess is a waitress’s effectiveness at doing her job. One would think competence and friendliness would would be stronger factors. (Which is most important — competence, friendliness, or looks? Fodder for another study?) Nor did it take into account other variables: venue, uniforms, and customer base. Did the study consider the fact that many customers may be (straight) women?
I, for one, don’t care if my waitress has big breasts or blond hair. I just want my food.
Damsel in distress? Go blond.
Do blondes get picked up more than brunettes? The question can be taken literally, as evidenced in psychologist Nicolas Gueguen’s latest study* on female hitchhikers. A specialist in the nuances of courtship and attraction, Gueguen wanted to know if a woman is more likely to be offered a ride or other assistance if she goes blond. All else being equal, do light-haired hitchhikers get more lifts?
Gurguen recruited five women in their early twenties (all natural brunettes) to stand, one at a time, by the side of a road popular with hitchhikers in France. Their job was to try to get motorists to pull over. Each woman was equipped with three wigs, blond, brunette, and black, which she was instructed to rotate every time forty cars had passed. When a car stopped, she (and two independent observers) kept a record of what color wig she was wearing and whether the driver was male or female.
Drivers prefer blondes, it turns out. Blond hair, compared with brown or black hair, inspired a statistically larger proportion of drivers to stop and offer assistance (18% for blondes vs 14% and 13% for brunettes and women with black hair respectively). Interestingly, this was true only of male drivers. Female drivers, who stopped less frequently for hitchhikers, showed no hair color bias.
Gueguen attributes a greater attractiveness of blond hair color to men’s willingness to help blondes. As described in BLONDES, blond hair may be associated with female youth, health, and fertility. Because fair-haired hitchhikers may appear younger, they may come across as more vulnerable or less of a threat.
Blond hair is also more eye-catching than other shades, so drivers may be more likely to notice blond hitchhikers. But why would more male than female drivers offer rides to blondes if sexual attraction didn’t have something to do with it?
For various reasons, slightly more drivers appear to prefer blondes. But are they gentlemen? That remains in question.
***
Nicolas Gueguen’s studies are good fun. In BLONDES I reported on his fascinating research on the power of touch in a courtship context. I’ve also blogged about Gurguen’s studies on whether makeup is more likely to attract men; whether dog owners attract more dates (and whether breed makes a difference); how priming men to think about love changes their behavior; whether asking a woman a small favor makes her more likely to give him her number later; and whether cup size helps a female hitchhikers get picked up.
* to be published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2009, 109, 3, 1-8.
Did Tiger win by cheating? Hint: testosterone
Earlier this year, I wrote about Tiger Woods after he lost the World Gold Championship. My theory — perhaps a stretch — was that Tiger’s testosterone was down. He said he had been spending a lot of time with his pregnant wife Elin and their two-year-old daughter. In February Elin gave birth to a son.
All this downtime on the homefront suggests, at least to this observer, that Tiger was hormonally challenged. In the months preceding and following a baby’s birth, fathers’ testosterone levels are lower. Lower testosterone levels make a man less aggressive, less focused, less competitive — and more agreeable and responsive. High testosterone levels have the opposite effect.
Later this year Tiger rebounded to win the Arnold Palmer Invitational, the Memorial Tournament, the WGB-Bridgestone Invitational, the BMW Championship, and the 2009 Presidents Cup this. And now it emerges that during all this winning he had been cheating — on his wife.
Is there a connection here? Again, it may be a stretch, but did Tiger’s philandering contribute to a testosterone surge that helped his game? Lots of illicit sex, after all, could be linked to high testosterone levels. So did cheating help him win? Or did his success and the resulting testosterone-high spur him to cheat?
Or was it a vicious cycle: cheating leading to winning leading to cheating, and so on?
Why women eat salads on dates
Is she resentful?
I have a friend who only orders salads when she goes out on a date. Me, I’d order the pasta and make sure to leave room for dessert. Turns out I’m unusual that way.
According to the latest study at McMaster University, women consume far fewer calories in the presence of a man (or men) than when eating alone or with another woman. Of over 450 people observed in a cafeteria setting, only the women revealed different consumption habits around the opposite sex.
What I was oblivious to when dating is the fact that what you eat, and how much, can affect impressions of your habits, world-views, social appeal, and attractiveness. According to the authors, psychologists Meredith Young and her colleagues:
1. In [groups of two], women selected foods with lower caloric value if their companion was male than if with another woman, whereas men’s choices were not affected by partner’s sex.
2. In our study, women’s total calories were not just reduced in the presence of a male, but also decreased further as a function of the number of male companions (and tended to show a reverse effect of female companions).
3. Women, in particular, adjust their eating to accord with consumption stereotypes, specifically that smaller eaters are viewed more favorably. The women we observed adjusted food selection not so as to match men, but perhaps in accordance with beliefs about what men find attractive.
Is a lusty appetite really less attractive?
How it’s possible to be too nice
A few weeks ago, my friend G. went out on a date with a man she met online. She had liked the guys’s profile: mid-thirties, lawyer, yogi, middle child (like herself), vegetarian. He was cute, too, with green eyes and a boyish grin. In his profile photo he included a shot of himself hugging his niece. And when G. met him, he hugged her, too — a great bear hug. He held the door open for her when they went to the restaurant and picked up the check at the end of the meal. All this she liked, but she said certain things about him annoyed her. When pressed, she said sheepishly: “I know this sounds weird, but he was just too nice.”
G.’s date not only opened doors for her, but also for the women behind her. He struck up conversation with the people at the next table and helped them get the waitress’s attention. Strolling together in the park after dinner, she caught him smiling at people who passed.
That’s odd, I thought. Studies show that kindness is one of the top qualities that men and women seek in a partner. But then I found a new study by University of Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologists Aaron Lukaszewskia and James Roney that offers a little more nuance.
Yes, the psychologists found: people prefer partners who are kind, altruistic, and trustworthy. In fact, people desire as kind a mate as possible. But what most studies fail to take into account is to whom the kindness is directed. Most people agree that prospective partners must be kind and generous with their companions, friends, and family. But what about people in the larger social context?
Lukaszewskia and Roney embarked on their investigation by asking nearly 60 women and more than 70 men to rate various personality traits in their ideal partner: kindness, trustworthiness, and dominance. Do you want your ideal partner to be less, equal, or more (kind, trustworthy, dominant) than the average man/woman? Do you want you partner to be less, equal or more (kind, trustworthy, dominant) than the average with other men or other women?
Here are the results:
Both sexes preferred very high levels of kindness and trustworthiness only when considering behaviors directed toward self or close friends and family, and much lower levels of these traits when considering behaviors directed toward other classes of individuals. In fact, people may actively prefer that their partners not be too kind or too trustworthy toward people who are not companions, friends, or family.
My friend G. hated it when her date expressed as much kindness with strangers as with her. A turn-off, she said. Men apparently don’t like it either. Nice guys and gals appear to finish last when they’re too nice to everyone.
Women preferred higher levels of dominance when considering behaviors directed toward other men than when considering behaviors directed toward self. Although not predicted in advance, men’s dominance preferences showed the same pattern as women’s preferences, with higher levels of dominance preferred when considering behaviors directed toward other women than when considering behaviors directed toward self.
Curiously, many studies suggest that women value kindness over dominance in long-term relationships, but this only applies to their partner’s dominance in a broader social context. Men also prefer women who are dominant among other women (but not dominant in the context of the relationship). As an interesting side note, the evolutionary psychologists suggest that men in ancestral environments may have benefited from having partners who were dominant within female status hierarchies (offspring more likely to survive).
Going on what G. told me about her date, I suspect there’s another explanation for why excessive kindness to others can be a turn-off in a partner. We all want to feel special, sought out. As other studies I’ve described in BLONDES have shown, homing in on one person and making that one person feel unique and exemplary is key. G.’s date may have been an extremely nice guy, but he didn’t make her feel special. Who knows how he’d be as a boyfriend — would his eye wander?
He who loves all may not love one. It’s as George Orwell said: “Love means nothing if it does not mean loving one person more than others.”
What machines teach us about how we flirt
I’ve always been a fan of the MIT Media Lab, and in BLONDES I write about Media Lab director Alex Pentland’s development of a machine that tracks “vocal body language” — pitch, speed, the space between words, and so on. Tested in a speed dating study, the machine had an impressive accuracy rate. About 70 percent of the time it could predict whether a man and woman was interested in each other, and whether they’d say yes to a second date.
Now it turns out that researchers at Stanford are following suit, in what may someday be the next big iPhone app.
Computer scientist Rajesh Ranganath and his colleagues developed a “flirtation-detection machine” that — based on prosodic, dialogue, and lexical clues — can detect a speaker’s intent to flirt with up to 71.5 percent accuracy. (In contrast, men were only 56.2 percent accurate when assessing if their date was flirting with them, and women were only 62.2 percent accurate.) Results were derived by testing the machine’s analysis against the self-reported intentions and perceptions of men and women on a speed date.
Without going into the technical details of the study, here are a few of the findings:
1. [When flirting],men ask more questions, and use more “you” and “we.” They laugh more, and use more sexual, anger, and negative emotional words. Prosodically they speak faster, with higher pitch, but quieter [softer voice] (lower intensity min).
2. [When flirting], women use more “I” and less “we”; men use more “we” and “you”. Men labeled as flirting are softer, but women labeled as flirting are not. Women who say they are flirting have a much expanded pitch range (lower pitch min, higher pitch max), laugh more, use more “I” and “well,” use repair questions (Excuse me?) but not other kinds of questions, use more sexual terms, use far less appreciations (Wow, That’s true, Oh, great) and backchannels (Uh-huh., Yeah., Right., Oh, okay.), and use fewer, longer turns, with more words in general [than do men].
3. Both genders convey intended flirtation by laughing more, speaking faster, and using higher pitch. However, we do find gender differences; men ask more questions when they say they are flirting, women ask fewer, although they do use more repair questions, while men do not.
Interestingly, the device was able to predict flirtation in men with greater accuracy than in women (79.5 percent versus 68.0 percent). In BLONDES I write about evolution and men’s overperception bias; essentially, guys are wired to think women are into them when they are not. I wonder if this is also true of the machines men make.
Foot-in-the-door as a pickup technique
French psychologist Nicolas Gueguen is fun. He’s the guy who asks the pressing questions we’d all like answered, whether we admit it or not: Does makeup really make a woman more attractive to men?; Are dog owners more likely to get dates?; How much does cup size really matter?; and How does priming men to think about love change their behavior?
And now Gueguen strikes again, this time with a study on courtship and “foot-in-the-door-technique.” The latter is an actual term in psychology. “Foot in the door” is a compliance tactic in which an initial, small difficult-to-turn-down request is made (as in a solicitor asking passers-by on the street for their signature). Once people acquiesce to an easy request, they are likelier to agree to a larger request (to donate money, time, etc.). Kids seem to implicitly know the foot-in-the-door effect, as when they ask for a small treat, followed immediately by a request for a larger one.
But what about men looking for love (or sex)?
Gueguen wanted to know if the foot-in-the-door technique would work in a pick-up context, so he recruited a nice-looking guy in his twenties to solicit young, hot women in the street. Over a series of days the man approached 360 different ladies, and asked them if they’d like to have a drink with him. Some of the time he approached them, greeted them, and made the drink offer right away. In the foot-in-the-door condition, however, he asked them for directions or requested a light for his cigarette before inviting them to have a drink with him.
Turns out, the technique works. Women were significantly more likely to say yes to a drink with the guy if he made a minor request immediately beforehand. That’s how foot-in-the-door works, by fostering compliance. It’s easier to say no when the no hasn’t been preceded by a yes. (Incidentally, it’s also more difficult to say no after nodding your head.)
Of course, for most men the aim is to get much more than a foot in the door. For that, I suspect the actual nature of the second, larger request counts a lot. Ask too much, guys, and you’ll get a door-in-the-face.
The science of gaydar
Given at least 1/20th of a second to look at a man, you can probably guess whether he’s gay — and be correct at least 70 percent of the time. Remarkably, your first split-second assessment would be as accurate as your impression after a full minute.
That was the case, at least, in a study by Tufts University psychologists Nalini Ambady and Nicholas Rule when they asked male and female judges to guess the sexual orientation of 90 faces of gay and straight men (without facial hair or piercings). Regardless of their own sexual orientation, the judges were astoundingly swift and accurate when it came to identifying most men’s sexual orientation. (Women’s faces weren’t tested.)
But the problem with gaydar — a contraction of “gay” and “radar” — is that identifying gay men and lesbians based on physical qualities alone isn’t always reliable. Despite the high accuracy rate for most faces, several yielded no clue of sexual orientation and were consistently misjudged. And when the judges were right, it was tough to pinpoint what clued them in. Was it the set of an expression? The hairstyle, the lips, the lower jaw? The eyes? Nevertheless, the results were surprising because many gays and lesbians attribute their own gaydar to behavioral cues such as the way someone looks at them — a sliding glance or the hint of a wink — or certain postures, gestures, facial expressions, and ways of speaking. As for straight women having gaydar, it might be evolutionarily advantageous — after all, it’s helpful to know who is a potential mate and who is not.
Stripped of cultural influences, there aren’t clear-cut, consistent physical distinctions that would trigger gaydar. Not that researchers haven’t found some very general biological differences between straights and gays.
As I detail in BLONDES:
* Prenatal testosterone levels, which are linked to sexual orientation, also influence traits such as finger ratios. Gay men’s ring and index fingers (of the right hand especially) are more likely to be the same length, like those of straight women, whereas a greater number of straight men have a ring finger that’s longer than their index finger. Women who identify themselves as “butch” lesbians are much more likely than “femme” lesbians or straight women to have a low digit ratio (ring finger longer than index finger) due to higher levels of prenatal testosterone.
* Depending upon the study (one here), gay men have a 34-82 percent greater chance of being left-handed than straight men (note: not all studies detect a bias), and lesbians are up to twice as likely to be lefties than straight women. Bear in mind that even though a gay man or lesbian has a higher chance of being left-handed, the majority of lefties are straight.
* Sniffing t-shirts of gays and straights, gay men prefer the odor of other gay men more than straights of either gender do. (Lesbians generally like the natural smell of other lesbians, straight women, and even straight men.)
* Gay men’s hair whorl (direction of scalp hair rotation) is more likely to be counterclockwise than that of straights. Nearly 30 percent of a sample of gay men had hair whorls that rotate counterclockwise, compared to fewer than 10 percent in a mixed group of men and women.
* A man’s gait might be another clue — in one study, judges identified gay men by their walks with about 60 percent accuracy. The reason is that some gay men have lower waist -to-hip ratios (larger hips compared to waist) than the average straight guy.
None of these traits proves a person is gay or lesbian, nor can their absence prove a person is straight. They’re just trends. Yes, gaydar works, although it’s as much an art as a science.
But someday, if MIT’s Project Gaydar goes as expected, identifying who’s gay may be mere computation.
No eyebrows = you’re less recognizable
Evolution has done to our profiles what glaciers do to mountains. Gone is the jutting jaw. Washed away is the bulging brow ridge. Our faces are relatively flat compared to what they once were. This means there’s not much to look at to get your bearings. According to a study by Javid Sadr and his colleagues at MIT, eyebrows are a crucial part of facial identification. The behavioral neuroscientists discovered that faces without eyebrows are like land without landmarks.
The study: Volunteers were asked to identify fifty famous faces, including that of former U.S. president Richard Nixon and actor Winona Ryder. The photos were digitally altered and shown either without eyebrows or without eyes. When celebrities lacked eyes, subjects could recognize them nearly 60 percent of the time. However, when celebrities lacked eyebrows, subjects recognized them only 46 percent of time.
The lesson: eyebrows are crucial to your identity — they’re at least as important as your eyes, if not more so. If you put colored contacts in your eyes, pumped collagen into your lips, or put on a pair of funky sunglasses, people would probably still recognize you easily. But try shaving off your eyebrows. Chances are that everyone will say they didn’t recognize you at first glance.
As Sadr points out, eyebrows pop out against the backdrop of your face — and for that reason not only identify who you are but how you’re feeling. Along with the lips, they may in fact be the most expressive part of your body. The single raised eyebrow is a universal sign of skepticism, and the dual raised eyebrow a sign of surprise. Think about it — entire Charlie Chaplin movies are spoken in the language of brows.
The shape of your eyebrows also says, in a glance, a lot about your age and other characteristics. Bushy, gnarly, salt-and-pepper brows: old, powerful men. Thin, graceful arcs: young, stylish women. Sparse, light brows: childlike. When waxed and tweezed, the brow is a sign of good grooming.
Eyebrows sometimes meet each other halfway across the bridge of the nose, especially on men, to form a “monobrow,” which resembles the vanished browridge of our primate ancestors. Distinctive? Yes, and also brow-raising.
Are men in pinstripes more marriage-worthy?
There’s a new twist on that classic McDonald’s experiment, the one in which there are two photos of a guy; in the first he’s dressed in a Mickey D’s uniform and in the second he looks like a banker. Women are asked to judge the man’s physical attractiveness and — surprise! — he gets much higher attractiveness ratings when he’s wearing a suit.
In the current study by evolutionary psychologist Murray Millar at the University of Nevada, women behaved similarly. This time, 123 female judges were shown photos of three men seeking a partner. A description accompanied the photo of each man, containing general biographical information (e.g. place of birth, food preferences), a statement about what type of relationship he was seeking (long-term or short-term), and his profession, which was either high-status (doctor, banker, lawyer) or low-status (salesman, janitor).
No shocks here: As Millar suspected, women, when primed to think about a long-term relationship, found men more attractive when they were described as having a high-status profession than a low-status one. For a fling, the ladies gave men more-or-less equal attractiveness ratings regardless of profession. These results, Millar concluded, are in keeping with the evolutionary argument that women have different mating strategies. For long-term relationships, women implicitly place more value on social status and resources that may benefit her child. For short-term relationships, women place more value on cues of genetic value such as physical attractiveness. In the latter condition, it doesn’t matter so much if he cleans toilets or flips burgers for a living. They’re lovin’ it.
But it’s not always so simple, as I describe in BLONDES. Hormonal cycles may subtly push or pull us in unexpected directions. Don’t forget the UCLA study in which women who were in their peak fertile window (around ovulation) found poor creative men more attractive than rich boring ones, at least in the short term. As evolutionary psychologists suggest, mating isn’t always binary. That is, some women may pursue more than one strategy at once: marry a stable office worker and have curiously-timed flings with hunky down-and-out artists (or burger flippers).
Perceptions may also shift. As women becoming more economically independent, they may find high-dominance males less desirable in a marriage context. Better, perhaps, to have a man who’s around more to change diapers. Even now, given the cause of the current recession, pinstripes might not be so marriage-worthy.
PORN: pastime or peril?
Today I’d like to introduce a guest blogger, Duana Welch, Ph.D., author of Love Science, a fabulous relationship advice column that bases its advice in social science research rather than opinion. Check out Duana’s blog at http://www.lovesciencemedia.com/.
Sorry; no pictures. But you really are here for the articles…right? Right?!?
And in that spirit, Wise Readers, here are two notes your cohorts sent regarding pornography and marital happiness—the first from a man, the second from a woman:
“I think that happiness, including sexual, can be satisfied in many ways both with and without influences outside of the marital relationship. Unfortunately, one answer to what the effects of porn are on marital well-being is, “It depends.” There is such a huge dynamic involved. Full disclosure: I have looked at boobies on the Internet. I love my wife and in no way think that those other boobies have changed the way I feel about her.” –Sam
“I am already pretty insecure about my own sexiness quotient, and I think feeling sexy to your mate is key to being able to open up and fulfill both of your sexual and emotional desires. Knowing that my mate needs to fill his thrill with external stimulants does not make me more inclined to open up more — in fact it has the opposite effect. On the other hand, it is probably all in the approach — light porn shared between secure partners might serve to rev the engine. But porn found stashed on the computer or behind t-shirts in the closet is not the best way to ignite my flame. 
Unless it’s the flame behind my eyes…” –Gina
So who’s right? Is porn a mere pastime, a marital peril, or some combination of the two? Certainly, the question is not an idle one; porn outsells all other forms of media combined every year, and the National Research Council reports that in the USA, porn is a bigger money-maker than all pro sports together. Recently, Utah’s residents were reported to be America’s top Internet-porn “end users” (pun intended), with much hoopla ensuing about What It All Means.
Happily for us, for almost 30 years, well-regarded researchers such as Dr. Neil Malamuth and Dr. Ed Donnerstein have studied porn’s effects. Experiments abound; conclusive, cause-based answers—no wussy mere correlations here!—exist.
And the first conclusion is: Viewing porn *causes* increased male violence against women and increased male acceptance of violence against women—IF and only if the porn viewed is violent. In the typical rape porn script, women who are initially unwilling appear to become enthusiastic participants in their degradation, ultimately screaming out for more. In these experiments, men are randomly assigned to view violent porn or non-violent porn or non-porn, and are then given opportunities to behave so that the researchers can compare the groups’ resulting attitudes and behaviors. It is now well-documented that men who experience violent porn are more accepting of such violence, believe sexual violence is not such a big deal, rate injuries real women have sustained as not being severe, recommend 50% lighter prison sentences for real rapists, and –most compelling—they actually harm women. For example, in one such experiment by Donnerstein, men who viewed a violent porn film gave higher shocks to a woman who made a learning error than did the men who viewed a non-violent porn or non-porn movie (the violent-porn viewers also gave much lower shocks to a man who made a learning mistake). The men were not actually administering shocks; but they fully believed that they were.
Yet most of the porn consumed today is non-violent; everyone in the images is portrayed as ready, willing, able, and of legal age. So what are the effects there? First, the good news: Non-violent porn viewing among non-addicted observers does not cause mates to stop loving one another, nor to actively harm one another. If a spouse is devoting a lot of time and money to porn consumption, that is taking away from the couple’s bond–but that can be said of any activity with an inappropriate focus of time, dollars and energy.
On the other hand, you can forget this rationale: “Honey, I actually want you more if I watch porn!” Although porn can have a very temporary effect of making men want to have sex with the nearest acceptable person—such as their spouse—the longer-term impact is not positive for the marital bond. Simply put, porn makes men less excited by and attracted to their mates. Experiments by Dr. Douglas T. Kenrick , Dr. Dolf Zillman and others show that men who have recently viewed porn rate their own partners as substantially less desirable and attractive than men who watch non-porn material. (To a much lesser degree, this is true of watching gorgeous creatures generally; even men who have recently seen an episode of “Charlie’s [fully-clothed] Angels” rate photos of a normal, unknown woman as plain…plain.)
We’ve paid a lot of attention to men’s perceptions; they buy and watch the vast majority of the porn, and that’s where most of the research has focused. What of women’s post-porno experience? In a nutshell, women are more physically turned on by porn in the moment than they admit; women worry about their mates finding them less appealing after the women have seen porn; women see themselves as less desirable after watching porn; and women flatly reject the idea that they would want to be raped.
So, Sam and Gina: You’re both partly right. Sam, you’re almost certainly not less in love with your wife for having seen a few extra boobies, although unless hers are truly supreme, you may find yourself less attracted to hers than before. And Gina, if your physique compares unfavorably to the perfect pay-per-view bodies, you’re feeling appropriately threatened vis-à-vis your desirableness to your mate. And both of you: In no case is porn actually helping your marriage.
What’s a guy or girl to do? Obviously, avoid the violent stuff. As for non-violent porn, it’s no marital happiness promoter, but it’s not necessarily the home-wrecker it’s been cast as, either.
Cheers,
Duana
Duana C. Welch, Ph.D., is the author of blog Love Science: Research-based relationship advice for everyone (www.LoveScienceMedia.com). Although many relationship advice columns exist, Love Science is the only one that presents not only what to do and how to do it–but the science and research behind the advice. Published free bi-weekly, Love Science is also Amazon.com’s best-selling relationship and behavioral science blog for Kindle. Feel free to Ask Duana *your* question at Duana@LoveScienceMedia.com.
All material copyrighted by Duana C. Welch, Ph.D., 2009
Are women more interested in men who are taken?
If you believe that all the good men are already taken, doesn’t it follow that you’d be more interested in a married (or otherwise engaged) guy? It’s been found to be true of other female animals — even fish and birds — they all prefer to “poach” males already chosen by other females. And I describe in BLONDES, studies have found that men who are in the company of an attractive woman (especially if they’re smiling at him) are more desirable to female judges.
But are women more likely to chase that guy if he’s already taken?
Psychologists at the University of Oklahoma wanted to know, so they recruited nearly 200 heterosexual men and women, some of whom were single and others who were in relationships. Told only that they were participating in a study on attraction, they were shown a photo of an opposite-sex stranger and answered questions about their attraction to that person: How likely would you show interest? How likely would you be to initiate conversation? How likely would you be to initiate a romantic relationship with this person? The psychologists also attached a relationship status to the person in the photo: either single or in a relationship.
Turns out the relationship status made a tremendous difference — but only when it comes to women choosing men, and not the other way around. As expected, women in relationships were less attracted to the stranger than single women were, regardless of the man’s relationship status. But here’s the interesting result: single women were more attracted to the man, and more likely to initiate a relationship with him, when told he was in a relationship than when told he was single. According to the psychologists, an attached man signals desirable resources and a willingness to commit to family life. He’s been tested, “pre-screened.” Simply put, commitment makes men more attractive.
As for men, a woman’s relationship status, at least in this study, had little effect on her attractiveness Single men were slightly (although not significantly) more attracted to the woman when told she was single. Attached men were slightly (although not significantly) more attracted to a woman when told she was attached.
Of course, bear in mind that this study is based on photos and is hypothetical. I suspect a man’s partner has some influence over whether a single woman dares move in on her territory. Is she beautiful? Is she the jealous type? And what happens after a divorce or break-up? Is a divorced man more attractive than one who never committed?
Are Americans more loving?
I love the large cross-cultural surveys done by evolutionary psychologist David Schmitt and his colleagues at Bradley University. His latest adds evidence to the conviction that love is universal. Repeat: love is universal. To be universal, there must be a evolutionary reason — in other words, it must help our species to perpetuate somehow. As Schmitt explains:
Love can rivet our attention to a single mate, instigate the process of romantic flirtation, lead to systematic patterns of courtship behavior, and on occasion culminate in marriage. Love helps parents bond in healthy ways with newborn offspring, leads to informative adolescent infatuations before more serious romantic pursuits, and serves as a social glue for functional interchanges of support amongst family and friends.
But even if love is universal, there are some very interesting cultural distinctions that emerge in the study. Here are a few outcomes/insights derived from the answers of 15,234 participants from 48 nations:
Nationality affects emotional investment, an indicator of love. As measured by an Emotional Investment Scale, countries in which people scored highest are the United States, Slovenia, and Cyprus. Low-scoring nations were Tanzania, Hong Kong, and Japan.
Focusing on men alone, the countries with the most emotionally invested males are the United States, Brazil, Portugal, Argentina, Philippines, and Greece.
The countries with the most emotionally invested women are Slovenia, the United States, Malta, Cyprus, Australia, and Argentina.
In almost every country, women reported higher levels of emotional investment than did men. But there are a few notable exceptions: In Bolivia, men and women were identical in their average levels of Emotional Investment, and Malaysia, men scored higher than women (though not significantly so). The researchers suggest there is something restricting women’s reporting of their romantic investment in these two cultures.
Oddly, sex differences in emotional Investment were larger in nations with high gender equality (e.g., Switzerland, Australia, and Germany) and were smaller in nations with low gender equality (e.g., Turkey, South Korea, and Bolivia). The researchers claim: “What appears to be happening is that greater gender equality is associated with higher Emotional Investment among both men and women, but the accentuating effects of gender equality on Emotional Investment are greater among women, leading to larger levels of the naturally-occurring sex difference in Emotional Investment.”
Stress reduces emotional investment. In cultures with high stress (e.g., Bolivia, Indonesia, and Malaysia), levels of Emotional Investment were significantly lower, especially among women. High national levels of stress (Infant Mortality rates, Childhood Malnutrition rates, and the Pathogen Stress experienced in local environments) —were also linked to lower levels of Emotional Investment. This is predicted by evolutionary theory: harsh conditions lead people to develop insecure attachment levels that result in lower emotional investment.
Emotional investment doesn’t lead to higher fertility rates.To the contrary: countries with lower emotional investment levels among women were related to higher fertility levels.
Countries scoring high in emotional investment don’t have stronger marriages. To the contrary: national levels of emotional investment were positively correlated with divorce rate, unrestricted sociosexuality, short-term mating interests, and the tendency to engage in short-term mate poaching (i.e., stealing someone else’s partner for a short-term sexual affair)
Emotional investment is linked with commitment, but there are nationwide exceptions. Individuals from North America who reported more unrestricted sociosexuality reported lower levels of emotional investment. Similar results were observed within the world regions of South America, Eastern Europe, and Oceania. However, unrestricted sociosexual individuals from South/Southeast Asia and East Asia reported higher levels of emotional investment. Moreover, individuals from Africa who were interested in short-term mating reported significantly higher levels of emotional investment.
Emotional investment peaks when dating one person. It’s somewhat lower among those who are living with someone, married, or currently single (in that order); and is significantly lower than that among those who have never had sex.
Schmitt admits that people from different cultures may express emotional investment differently (have different response biases) and in ways hard to quantify on a standardized scale. Moreover, the questions were written in English and translated into the native languages of the participants. Could this possibly bias the U.S. results — or are Americans really more loving?
(My book, BLONDES, provides a more detailed description of some of Schmitt’s fascinating work with the International Sexuality Description Project.)
Night owls have more lovers
Early birds may get worms but not chicks. That is, according a recent study by Davide Piffer at the University of Pisa, the mean number of sexual partners for morning-oriented men was 3.6 versus 16.3 for evening-oriented men. This means that guys who are night owls have about four times as many sexual partners as morning birds.
Drawing on evolutionary psychology, Piffer offers a few theories:
1.) Throughout human history social activities have taken place at night. (In fact >60 percent of the people Piffer polled met their latest partner in the evening or night.) The evening is commonly reserved for courtship activity — dancing, drinking, having sex. Over time, the male night owl attends more social events, meets more women, and has more sex.
2.) “Eveningness” is a sexually dimorphic trait. Across cultures, “more males than females stay up late at night (due to biological differences involving the timing of peak melatonin levels). Piffer speculates that men evolved to stay up late because, in the deep past, the most reproductively successful males were night owls and they passed along their genes to subsequent generations. In terms of Darwinian sexual selection, evening orientation benefits males more because it gives them an increased opportunity to acquire multiple lovers — all at one go, or over time. Women, however, don’t achieve greater reproductive success by having sex with more men (it only takes one to get pregnant), which is why fewer women are evening-oriented. Men with an evening orientation have a competitive advantage over men with a morning orientation.
3.) Evening-orientation, Piffer speculates, may also be a direct product of sexual selection. That is, women may actively choose night owls over morning birds. Piffer draws on the “cads-versus-dads” theory; that is, women often go for bad boys, especially at a certain stage of life, and men who stay up into the night are likelier to fall into this category.
4.) Being a night owl may also be a form of “handicap signaling.” Staying up late at night (possibly drinking and smoking) can take a toll on one’s health. Only a man who is fit and healthy would be able to compensate for his lifestyle. Assuming a man seems unaffected by little sleep, his evening orientation indicates a strong constitution — a sexy quality.
Mind you, Piffer’s theories are allextremely speculative (but fun!). Of course there are many unanswered questions: By nature, is there something about a night bird’s personality that makes him more promiscuous than a morning bird — or is it only that he has more opportunities to meet women? Do night owls in all cultures get more sex? The study took place in Italy — it would be interesting to repeat the same experiment in non-Western cultures.
At least this may explain the otherwise inexplicable female obsession with vampires.
Rechanneling sexual arousal?
Scientists know exactly how to mediate sexual attraction between mice. Introduce males to females, and the brain region known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is activated. A new study has found that he neurons in the ACC are “fed” by a fusion of glutamate when a mouse is sexually aroused. Shut down the ACC with a sly drug and the result is a sudden loss of sexual interest. The drug used in the study was muscimol, the major psychoactive ingredient in some mushrooms such as Altamaria, and in mice it reduced sexual attraction within ten minutes of injection and lasted for about a half hour.
This is interesting because human attraction is also mediated by the ACC (as I describe in a previous post and in BLONDES). Researchers speculate the the ACC is involved in feelings of pain and pleasure and the evaluation of risk and reward. ACC activation affects our emotional state, leading to sexual behavior.
Is it possible to shut down our ACC with a drug such as muscimol (or a different drug without psychoactive side effects), and would it also temporarily make us asexual?
Bear in mind that what works in mice might backfire in humans. We may find that desire can overpower an addled ACC — there’s more than way to turn us on. For instance, sexual arousal of sorts is known to occur in a muscimol-induced dream state — although it often translates into a sort of cosmic awe. Some people apparently can have sex on psychedelics (although most popular ones are psylocybin-based, not muscimol); many can not. (Annie Sprinkle says that when she takes mushrooms (psylocybin) she doesn’t want to make love in a traditional sense, but found they can “deepen a relationship/”). It’s out-of-body sex. It transcends sexual arousal.
To get a real sense of the complexity of human sexual arousal we’d need human subjects — but even if volunteers are willing, certain experiments are unlikely to fly with ethics boards. Which brings us back to muscimolized mice, who, unbeknownst to us, may also be experiencing a sort of transcendental erotic phantasmagoria.
But a mouse couldn’t describe it as Annie Sprinkle does:
[Sex on psychedelics] was not about bodies coming together for physical sex, but about circulating sexual energy, which was everywhere and available just for the asking. I could tap into it just by tuning in and saying “yes.” I realized that everything was sexual/ sensual–that even all my little cells were all having sex. Sex was both microscopic and enormous.
Does “stress sweat” make you more compassionate?
Pheromones fascinate me, and not only the ones that mediate sexual attraction.
Several months ago I wrote a post about a study that suggests that airborne chemical signals also mediate stress and fear. Known as alarm pheromones, these chemicals are found in sweat and saliva. In that experiment, sweat from skydivers (collected from pads in their armpits) activated anxiety circuits in the brains of people who sniffed those pads later on. The fascinating theory: Emotions can be communicated by smell. It happens unconsciously.
That was just one study, and naysayers are quick to point out that a solitary experiment doth not prove human pheromones are real. But now there’s further proof.
Researchers at the Universities of Dusseldorf and Kiel in Germany recently published the results of study based on the sweat smells of 49 stressed-out students after a.) taking a final oral exam (stress sweat) and b.) exercising (sport sweat). Sniffing the pads that had been in students’ armpits, volunteers often couldn’t detect an actual odor. Nor could they tell whether they were smelling stress sweat and sport sweat. But it turns out that an area of their brains detected the difference. Only stress sweat — and not sport sweat — triggered brain activity in areas involved in the processing of social emotional stimuli (fusiform gyrus), and empathetic feelings (insula), attention (thalamus).
The implications are fascinating. Is stress contagious? In an emergency situation, it makes sense that we’re “wired” to perceive and respond to the stress of others. An odor that induces attention and anxiety may help a group to focus together or synchronize a fight-or-flight response.
It’s particularly interesting that neural circuits associated with empathy — not just attention — were activated. Are we naturally empathetic creatures? Then again, there’s no proof that the volunteers actually felt more understanding and compassionate when smelling stress sweat even if their brains go through some of the motions. I suspect empathy is context-dependent. Further experiments should look into whether volunteers really are more empathetic (more willing to help a person in distress, for instance) after smelling stress sweat compared to sport sweat. If so, this would be further proof that stress sweat is an alarm pheromone, which, by definition, changes the way we behave after we inhale it.
A thought: Could stress sweat induce compassion in autistic people?
And another thought: If feelings have smells, is happiness also inhalable, communicable?
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