Why do men prefer nice women? Responsiveness and desire

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People’s emotional reactions and desires in initial romantic encounters determine the fate of a potential relationship. Responsiveness may be one of those initial “sparks” necessary to fuel sexual desire and land a second date. However, it may not be a desirable trait for both men and women on a first date. Does responsiveness increase sexual desire in the other person? Do men perceive responsive women as more attractive, and does the same hold true for women’s perceptions of men? A study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin seeks to answer those questions.Femininity and AttractivenessResearchers from the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, the University of Rochester, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, collaborated on three studies to observe people’s perceptions of responsiveness. People often say that they seek a partner that is “responsive to their needs,” and that such a partner would arouse their sexual interest. A responsive person is one that is supportive of another’s needs and goals. “Sexual desire thrives on rising intimacy and being responsive is one of the best ways to instill this elusive sensation over time,” lead researcher Gurit Birnbaum explains. “Our findings show that this does not necessarily hold true in an initial encounter, because a responsive potential partner may convey opposite meanings to different people.”In the first study, the researchers examined whether responsiveness is perceived as feminine or masculine, and whether men or women perceived a responsive person of the opposite sex as sexually desirable. …


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#Alternative-Medicine, #Alzheimer, #King, #People, #Person, #Psychology, #Responsiveness, #Science, #Sexual, #University, #Virtual, #Women

LGBT youth face greater cancer risks, study shows

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A new study led by City College of New York psychologist Margaret Rosario found that youths of same-sex orientation are more likely to engage in behaviors associated with cancer risk than heterosexuals. The peer-reviewed findings appear in the February 2014 issue of the American Journal of Public Health.Titled “Sexual Orientation Disparities in Cancer-Related Risk Behaviors of Tobacco, Alcohol, Sexual Behaviors, and Diet and Physical Activity: Pooled Youth Risk Behavior Surveys,” the study pooled YRBS (Youth Risk Behavior Survey) data from 2005 and 2007. The YRBS is a national survey of high school students conducted biennially.Dr. Rosario, professor of psychology in CCNY’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership and The Graduate Center, CUNY, and her research team then studied 12 cancer-risk behaviors in sexual minorities (youth with same-sex orientation) and heterosexuals in grades 9 through 12. Of an available sample of 65,871 youth, 7.6 percent were found to be a sexual minority.The 12 cancer-risk behaviors included tobacco use, drinking alcohol, early sex, multiple sexual partners, higher body mass index (BMI) and lack of exercise. The report found that for all 12, sexual minorities were more likely than heterosexuals to engage in the risky behavior.”Sexual minorities are at risk for cancer later in life, I suggest, from a host of behaviors that begin relatively early in life,” said Professor Rosario. “No sex or ethnic racial group is at greater risk or protected for these behaviors. Overall, the study underscores the need for early interventions.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by City College of New York. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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Asian elephants reassure others in distress: First empirical evidence of consolation in elephants

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Asian elephants console others who are in distress, using physical touches and vocalizations, finds a study to be published in the open access journal PeerJ. The findings are the first empirical evidence of consolation in elephants, says lead author Joshua Plotnik, who began the research as a graduate student of psychology at Emory University.”For centuries, people have observed that elephants seem to be highly intelligent and empathic animals, but as scientists we need to actually test it,” he says.Consolation behavior is rare in the animal kingdom, with empirical evidence previously provided only for the great apes, canines and certain corvids.”With their strong social bonds, it’s not surprising that elephants show concern for others,” says co-author Frans de Waal, an Emory professor of psychology and director of Living Links at Emory’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center. “This study demonstrates that elephants get distressed when they see others in distress, reaching out to calm them down, not unlike the way chimpanzees or humans embrace someone who is upset.”Plotnik received his Ph.D. from Emory in 2010 and is currently a lecturer in conservation biology at Mahidol University in Thailand and CEO of Think Elephants International, a non-profit focused on education and conservation. His main research interest is convergent cognitive evolution: The independent evolution of similar features of intelligence in species of different lineages.While Plotnik was still at Emory, he and de Waal provided evidence that elephants can both recognize themselves in a mirror — a test of self-awareness passed only by some apes, dolphins and magpies — and problem-solve cooperatively.”Humans are unique in many ways, but not in as many ways as we once thought,” Plotnik says.The current study focused on a group of 26 captive Asian elephants spread over about 30 acres at an elephant camp in northern Thailand. For nearly a year, the researchers observed and recorded incidents when an elephant displayed a stress reaction, and the responses from other nearby elephants.The initial stress responses came from either unobservable, or obvious, stimuli: Events such as a dog walking past, a snake or other potentially dangerous animal rustling the grass, or the presence of another, unfriendly elephant. “When an elephant gets spooked, its ears go out, its tail stands erect or curls out, and it may emit a low-frequency rumble, trumpet and roar to signal its distress,” Plotnik says.The study found that nearby elephants affiliated significantly more with a distressed individual through directed, physical contact following a stress event than during control periods. As a typical example, a nearby elephant would go to the side of the distressed animal and use its trunk to gently touch its face, or put its trunk in the other animal’s mouth.The gesture of putting their trunks in each other’s mouths is almost like an elephant handshake or hug, Plotnik says. “It’s a very vulnerable position to put yourself in, because you could get bitten. It may be sending a signal of, ‘I’m here to help you, not hurt you.’”The responding elephants also showed a tendency to vocalize. …


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#African, #Agriculture, #Asian, #Emory, #Humans, #Pregnancy, #Psychology, #Study

Dreams, déjà vu and delusions caused by faulty "reality testing"

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New research from the University of Adelaide has delved into the reasons why some people are unable to break free of their delusions, despite overwhelming evidence explaining the delusion isn’t real.In a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, University of Adelaide philosopher Professor Philip Gerrans says dreams and delusions have a common link — they are associated with faulty “reality testing” in the brain’s higher order cognitive systems.”Normally this ‘reality testing’ in the brain monitors a ‘story telling’ system which generates a narrative of people’s experience,” Professor Gerrans says.”A simple example of normal reality testing is the person who gets a headache, immediately thinks they might have a brain tumor, then dismisses that thought and moves on. Their story episode ‘I might have brain cancer’ gets tested and quickly rejected.”In someone who has problems with reality testing, that story might persist and may even be elaborated and translated into action. Such people can experience immense mental health difficulties, even to the point of becoming a threat to themselves or to others,” he says.In his paper, Professor Gerrans discusses delusions triggered by feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity, such as the “Capgras delusion” — the delusion of “doubles.” One example is of a man who, after serious head injury following a motor vehicle accident, returned home from the hospital after a year only to state repeatedly that his family had been replaced by impostors.”His family looked familiar but didn’t feel familiar, and the story in his head made sense of that feeling. It didn’t matter how much people tried to point out that his family was the same, in his mind they had been completely replaced by impostors,” Professor Gerrans says.He says in the “Fregoli delusion,” people think they’re being followed by a familiar person in disguise as a way of coping with a feeling of familiarity evoked by seeing a stranger.”People also experience feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity in dj vu — a sense that a new place is strangely familiar, and the reverse, jamais vu — a sense of extreme unfamiliarity evoked by a familiar place. However, such feelings do not lead to delusion in people whose reality testing is intact.”Professor Gerrans says better understanding this reality testing system could help to improve outcomes for people living with such difficulties.”Trying to treat someone experiencing these delusions by telling them the truth is not necessarily going to help, so new strategies need to be developed to assist them. Ultimately, that’s the aim of this work — to help explain the nature of reality testing in order to help people find a way of working through or around their delusions so that the delusions no longer adversely affect their lives.”Professor Gerrans’s new book, The Measure of Madness. Philosophy and Cognitive Neuropsychiatry (MIT Press), will be published this year.What’s the difference between a dream, a delusion and an hallucination? Professor Gerrans explains:Dream: The images, sensations and thoughts we experience during sleep. In dreams we simply have experiences, we don’t have beliefs about experience because “reality testing” systems are not active.Delusion: An irrational belief at odds with reality maintained in the face of obvious contrary evidence and logical argument.Hallucination: The apparent perception of an object not actually present.Dj vu: The feeling that you have previously experienced a situation which is in fact unfamiliar. Caused by an erroneous “sense of familiarity.”Jamais vu: The feeling that a familiar situation has not been experienced before. …


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#Agriculture, #Alzheimer, #Delusion, #Evidence, #Familiarity, #Journal, #Person, #Pregnancy, #Professorgerrans, #Psychology, #Story, #Year

Wealthy neighborhoods fuel materialistic desires, study says

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Where you live could affect whether or not you spend compulsively, according to new research from San Francisco State University published today in the Journal of Consumer Culture.Individuals who live in wealthy neighborhoods are more likely to have materialistic values and poor spending habits, the study says, particularly if they are young, living in urban areas and relatively poor compared with their surroundings. The study is the first to show a connection between neighborhood socioeconomic status and materialism.The reason for the link, said co-author and SF State Associate Professor of Psychology Ryan Howell, may have to do with “relative deprivation,” or the feeling someone gets when they believe they are less well-off than those around them. If someone is bombarded with images or reminders of wealth, such as an abundance of investment banks nearby or neighbors driving luxury cars, they are likelier to feel a need to spend money they may not have to project an image of wealth they don’t actually possess.”People who live in more affluent areas are vulnerable to this implicit social comparison, where you start to see other people spending a lot of money,” Howell said. “Because you feel the need to live up to that standard, you end up impulsively buying material items, even though they don’t actually make you happier.”To conduct the study, researchers determined a neighborhood’s socioeconomic status by looking at its per-capita income and poverty rate as well as the number of financial institutions present. That information was compared with survey data measuring participants’ materialistic values, views about money and spending, and savings habits. After controlling for age, gender and individual socioeconomic status, researchers found residents of wealthier neighborhoods were likelier to be materialistic, spend compulsively and manage their money poorly than those living in less well-off areas.The effect was seen especially in younger people, who Howell said tend to be more materialistic in general, those who live in urban areas, where residents are exposed to a larger socioeconomic spectrum, and those whose individual socioeconomic status is lower than their neighborhood’s. Conversely, someone with a high individual socioeconomic status was less susceptible to such behavior.”We did find that individual socioeconomic status is negatively correlated with materialism, so the more money you have for yourself, the less materialistic you are,” said Jia Wei Zhang, lead author of the study and current University of California, Berkeley graduate student who conducted the research with Howell while an undergraduate at SF State. “But it doesn’t fully negate the effect of a wealthy neighborhood. Regardless of how much someone is worth in general, the richer their neighborhood, the more likely they are to be materialistic, independent of their own socioeconomic status.”The next step in the research, Howell said, is to explore whether there are ways to counter a neighborhood’s effect on an individual’s materialistic values. This could be done simply by making more people aware of the correlation, or through interventions developed to make people feel more grateful for their status. …


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#Agriculture, #Consumer, #Financial, #Franciscostate, #Health, #Howell, #Investment, #Professor, #Psychology

Loneliness is a major health risk for older adults

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Feeling extreme loneliness can increase an older person’s chances of premature death by 14 percent, according to research by John Cacioppo, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago.Cacioppo and his colleagues’ work shows that the impact of loneliness on premature death is nearly as strong as the impact of disadvantaged socioeconomic status, which they found increases the chances of dying early by 19 percent. A 2010 meta-analysis showed that loneliness has twice the impact on early death as does obesity, he said.Cacioppo, the Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at the University, joined other scholars at a seminar on “The Science of Resilient Aging” Feb. 16 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual meeting in Chicago.The researchers looked at dramatic differences in the rate of decline in physical and mental health as people age. Cacioppo and colleagues have examined the role of satisfying relationships on older people to develop their resilience, the ability to bounce back after adversity and grow from stresses in life.The consequences to health are dramatic, as feeling isolated from others can disrupt sleep, elevate blood pressure, increase morning rises in the stress hormone cortisol, alter gene expression in immune cells, and increase depression and lower overall subjective well-being, Cacioppo pointed out in a talk, “Rewarding Social Connections Promote Successful Aging.”Cacioppo, one of the nation’s leading experts on loneliness, said older people can avoid the consequences of loneliness by staying in touch with former co-workers, taking part in family traditions, and sharing good times with family and friends — all of which gives older adults a chance to connect others about whom they care and who care about them.”Retiring to Florida to live in a warmer climate among strangers isn’t necessarily a good idea if it means you are disconnected from the people who mean the most to you,” said Cacioppo. Population changes make understanding the role of loneliness and health all the more important, he explained.”We are experiencing a silver tsunami demographically. The baby boomers are reaching retirement age. Each day between 2011 and 2030, an average of 10,000 people will turn 65,” he said. “People have to think about how to protect themselves from depression, low subjective well-being and early mortality.”Although some people are happy to be alone, most people thrive from social situations in which they provide mutual support and develop strong rapport. Evolution encouraged people to work together to survive and accordingly most people enjoy companionship over being alone.Research by Cacioppo and his colleagues has identified three core dimensions to healthy relationships — intimate connectedness, which comes from having someone in your life you feel affirms who you are; relational connectedness, which comes from having face-to-face contacts that are mutually rewarding; and collective connectedness, which comes from feeling that you’re part of a group or collective beyond individual existence.It is not solitude or physical isolation itself, but rather the subjective sense of isolation that Cacioppo’s work shows to be so profoundly disruptive. Older people living alone are not necessary lonely if they remain socially engaged and enjoy the company of those around them. …


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Even fact will not change first impressions

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Knowledge is power, yet new research suggests that a person’s appearance alone can trump knowledge. First impressions are so powerful that they can override what we are told about people. A new study found that even when told whether a person was gay or straight, participants generally identified the person’s sexual orientation based on how they looked — even if it contradicted the facts presented to them.”We judge books by their covers, and we can’t help but do it,” says Nicholas Rule of the University of Toronto. “With effort, we can overcome this to some extent, but we are continually tasked with needing to correct ourselves.” The less time we have to make our judgments, the more likely we are to go with our gut, even over fact, he says.A series of recent studies, presented today at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) annual conference in Austin, shows that appearance shapes everything from whether we ultimately end up liking someone to our assessment of their sexual orientation or trustworthiness. And researchers say that whether a first impression occurs online versus in person is important. While we may be able to size up someone’s personality from a Facebook photo, it will often be more negative impression than one formed face-to-face.Appearance trumps fact”As soon as one sees another person, an impression is formed,” Rule says. “This happens so quickly — just a small fraction of a second — that what we see can sometimes dominate what we know.”In the study on first impressions of sexual orientation, Rule and colleagues showed 100 participants photos of 20 men, identifying them either as gay or straight. The photos had been previously coded based on a consensus opinion on whether the men “looked” gay or straight, which accurately matched to their real-life sexual orientations. The researchers then tested participants’ recall of the men’s sexual orientations several times to ensure perfect memorization.After this learning phase, the researchers then showed participants the faces again, varying the amount of time they had to categorize the men’s sexual orientations. The less time they had to categorize the faces, the more likely the participants were to categorize the men according to whether they looked gay or straight rather than what they had been told about their sexuality. …


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#Cancer, #Ecology, #Facebook, #Health, #Personality, #Psychology, #Science, #Sexuality, #Society, #Texas, #Toronto

What do women want? It depends on time of month

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If she loves you and then she loves you not, don’t blame the petals of that daisy. Blame evolution.UCLA researchers analyzed dozens of published and unpublished studies on how women’s preferences for mates change throughout the menstrual cycle. Their findings suggest that ovulating women have evolved to prefer mates who display sexy traits — such as a masculine body type and facial features, dominant behavior and certain scents — but not traits typically desired in long-term mates.So, desires for those masculine characteristics, which are thought to have been markers of high genetic quality in our male ancestors, don’t last all month — just the few days in a woman’s cycle when she is most likely to pass on genes that, eons ago, might have increased the odds of her offspring surviving and reproducing.”Women sometimes get a bad rap for being fickle, but the changes they experience are not arbitrary,” said Martie Haselton, a professor of psychology and communication studies at UCLA and the paper’s senior author. “Women experience intricately patterned preference shifts even though they might not serve any function in the present.”The findings will appear online this month in Psychological Bulletin, which is published by the American Psychological Association.Whether women’s mate preferences shift at high fertility has been a source of debate since the late 1990s, when the first scholarly studies to hint at such a change appeared. Since then, several papers have failed to replicate the early studies’ results, casting doubt on the hypothesis.Haselton and Kelly Gildersleeve, a UCLA doctoral candidate in psychology and the study’s lead author, spent three years attempting to resolve the controversy. They solicited raw data from dozens of scholars who have conducted research on the topic and then translated the data from 50 studies into the same mathematical format so that the findings could be statistically analyzed together.The strength of women’s preference shift proved to be statistically significant, although “small” to “medium” in size, relative to most findings in the field. As a point of comparison, the size of the shift was statistically comparable to the difference researchers have found between men’s and women’s self-reported number of heterosexual sex partners (with men reporting more sex partners).The findings are less clear, however, about which male characteristics are most alluring to ovulating women. But women’s responses to male body scents could be capable of producing the strongest effects, Haselton said.In the few scent studies conducted so far, researchers asked women to smell T-shirts that had been worn by men with varying degrees of body and facial symmetry. (Across a large body of research on many different animals, body and facial symmetry are associated with larger body size, more pronounced sexual “ornaments” such as the attractive plumage on male birds, and better health, suggesting that symmetry could be an indicator of genetic quality.) Women preferred the odors of more symmetrical men when in the fertile portions of their cycles. The UCLA meta-analysis likewise showed a large shift in women’s preference for the body odor of symmetrical men, although more studies are needed to determine whether this effect is robust.Haselton, who is based in UCLA’s College of Letters and Science, is one of a handful of pioneers in research on behavioral changes at ovulation. …


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#Alternative-Medicine, #Alzheimer, #American, #Cancer, #Pregnancy, #Psychological, #Psychology, #Research, #Science

Another reason to not mix work, family: Money makes parenting less meaningful, study suggests

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Money and parenting don’t mix. That’s according to new research that suggests that merely thinking about money diminishes the meaning people derive from parenting. The study is one among a growing number that identifies when, why, and how parenthood is associated with happiness or misery.”The relationship between parenthood and well-being is not one and the same for all parents,” says Kostadin Kushlev of the University of British Columbia. While this may seems like an obvious claim, social scientists until now have yet to identify the psychological and demographic factors that influence parental happiness.New research being presented today at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference in Austin offers not only insight into the link between money and parental well-being but also a new model for understanding a variety of factors that affect whether parents are happier or less happy than their childless counterparts.Money creates conflicting goalsFascinated by research suggesting that parenting is linked to lower well-being, Kushlev and his adviser Elizabeth Dunn sought to determine which aspects of life might influence how much pleasure and pain people got out of being parents. They specifically looked at the influence of wealth on meaning in parenthood.In one recently published study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, they found that a having a higher socioeconomic status lowers people’s sense of meaning while taking care of their children but not during other daily activities. In a field study in the same paper, they found that showing people images of money while filling out a questionnaire at a festival with their children also reduced their levels of meaning in life.In a new study, the researchers took the research a step further — showing some participants money while testing the influence of parents’ objectives when they were taking care of their children at a festival. The researchers asked one group of parents to read a paragraph about the festival in terms of productivity and achievement, while another group read about the festival in the context of satisfying the needs of their children with no expectation for direct return. They then surveyed both groups about parenting and sense of meaning. “This design allowed us to see whether money compromises meaning because of the conflict between the goals associated with money and the goals and the behaviors that parenting normally demands,” Kushlev says.They found that activating goals for both money-making and satisfying the needs of their children at the same time did indeed form a conflict: It made parents feel that what they were doing was less meaningful.Furthermore, they found this effect most pronounced in women. “Money seems to compromise meaning for mothers but not for fathers when they are spending time with their children,” Kushlev says. …


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#Agriculture, #Alternative-Medicine, #Alzheimer, #Cancer, #Festival, #Journal, #Kushlev, #Personality, #Psychology, #Social, #University

"Smelling" with our eyes: Descriptions affect odor perception

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According to Simona Manescu and Johannes Frasnelli of the University of Montreal’s Department of Psychology, an odour is judged differently depending on whether it is accompanied by a positive or negative description when it is smelled. When associated with a pleasant label, we enjoy the odour more than when it is presented with a negative label. To put it another way, we also smell with our eyes!This was demonstrated by researchers in a study recently published in the journal Chemical Senses.For their study, they recruited 50 participants who were asked to smell the odours of four odorants (essential oil of pine, geraniol, cumin, as well as parmesan cheese). Each odour (administered through a mask) was randomly presented with a positive or negative label displayed on a computer screen. In this way, pine oil was presented either with the label “Pine Needles” or the label “Old Solvent”; geraniol was presented with the label “Fresh Flowers” or “Cheap Perfume”; cumin was presented with the label “Indian Food” or “Dirty Clothes; and finally, parmesan cheese was presented with the label of either the cheese or dried vomit.The result was that all participants rated the four odours more positively when they were presented with positive labels than when presented with negative labels. Specifically, participants described the odours as pleasant and edible (even those associated with non-food items) when associated with positive labels. Conversely, the same odours were considered unpleasant and inedible when associated with negative labels — even the food odours. “It shows that odour perception is not objective: it is affected by the cognitive interpretation that occurs when one looks at a label,” says Manescu. “Moreover, this is the first time we have been able to influence the edibility perception of an odour, even though the positive and negative labels accompanying the odours showed non-food words,” adds Frasnelli.This finding indicates that the perceived edibility of an odour can be manipulated by a description, and that olfactory perception may be driven by a top-down (or directive) cognitive process.Reaction times also affected by odoursVarious studies have shown that odours affect the reaction times of individuals. Thus, unpleasant odours cause rapid reactions (recoil, for example), while pleasant odours cause slower reactions. …


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#Agriculture, #Cancer, #Conversely, #Food, #Indian, #Negative, #Psychology, #Science, #University