What's in a kiss? Science Offers a Clue...

 

 

Kissing Helps Us Find the Right Partner

 – And Keep Them

What's in a kiss? A study by Oxford University researchers suggests kissing helps us size up potential partners and, once in a relationship, may be a way of getting a partner to stick around.

"Kissing in human sexual relationships is incredibly prevalent in various forms across just about every society and culture," says Rafael Wlodarski, the DPhil student who carried out the research in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. "Kissing is seen in our closest primate relatives, chimps and bonobos, but it is much less intense and less commonly used.

"So here's a human courtship behavior which is incredibly widespread and common and, in extent, is quite unique. And we are still not exactly sure why it is so widespread or what purpose it serves."

To understand more, Rafael Wlodarski and Professor Robin Dunbar set up an online questionnaire in which over 900 adults answered questions about the importance of kissing in both short-term and long-term relationships.

Rafael Wlodarski explains: "There are three main theories about the role that kissing plays in sexual relationships:

1. that it somehow helps assess the genetic quality of potential mates;
2. that it is used to increase arousal (to initiate sex for example);
3. and that it is useful in keeping relationships together.

We wanted to see which of these theories held up under closer scrutiny."

The researchers report their findings in two papers, one in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior and the second in the journal Human Nature, both published by Springer. They were funded by the European Research Council.

The survey responses showed that women rated kissing as generally more important in relationships than men. Furthermore, men and women who rated themselves as being attractive, or who tended to have more short-term relationships and casual encounters, also rated kissing as being more important.

In humans, as in all mammals, females must invest more time than men in having offspring -- pregnancy takes nine months and breast-feeding may take up to several years. Previous studies have shown women tend to be more selective when initially choosing a partner. Men and women who are more attractive, or have more casual sex partners, have also been found to be more selective in choosing potential mates. As it is these groups which tended to value kissing more in their survey responses, it suggests that kissing helps in assessing potential mates.

It has been suggested previously that kissing may allow people to subconsciously assess a potential partner through taste or smell, picking up on biological cues for compatibility, genetic fitness or general health.

"Mate choice and courtship in humans is complex," says Professor Robin Dunbar. "It involves a series of periods of assessments where people ask themselves 'shall I carry on deeper into this relationship?' Initial attraction may include facial, body and social cues. Then assessments become more and more intimate as we go deeper into the courtship stages, and this is where kissing comes in."

The Jane Austen Problem
He adds: "In choosing partners, we have to deal with the 'Jane Austen problem': How long do you wait for Mr Darcy to come along when you can't wait forever and there may be lots of women waiting just for him? At what point do you have to compromise for the curate?

"What Jane Austen realized is that people are extremely good at assessing where they are in the 'mating market' and pitch their demands accordingly. It depends what kind of poker hand you've been dealt. If you have a strong bidding hand, you can afford to be much more demanding and choosy when it comes to prospective mates.

"We see some of that coming out in the results of our survey, suggesting that kissing plays a role in assessing a potential partner," Professor Dunbar explains.

Past research has also found that women place greater value on activities that strengthen long-term relationships (since raising offspring is made easier with two parents present). In the current study, the team found that kissing's importance changed for people according to whether it was being done in long-term or short-term relationships. Particularly, it was rated by women as more important in long-term relationships, suggesting that kissing also plays an important role in mediating affection and attachment among established couples.

While high levels of arousal might be a consequence of kissing (particularly as a prelude to sex), the researchers say it does not appear to be a driving factor that explains why we kiss in romantic relationships.

Other findings included:

• In short relationships, survey participants said kissing was most important before sex, less so during sex, was less important again after sex and was least important at other times. In committed relationships, where forming and maintain a lasting bond is an important goal, kissing was equally important before sex and at times not-related to sex.
• More frequent kissing in a relationship was linked to the quality of a relationship, while this wasn't the case for having more sex. However, people's satisfaction with the amount of both kissing and sex did tally with the quality of that relationship.

The Menstrual Cycle and Kissing
In a companion paper in the journal Human Nature, the researchers report that women's attitudes to romantic kissing also depend on where in their menstrual cycle and their relationship they are. Women valued kissing most at initial stages of a relationship when they were in the part of their cycle when they are most likely to conceive.

Previous studies have shown that hormonal changes associated with the menstrual cycle can change a woman's preferences for a potential mate. When chances of conceiving are highest, women seem to prefer men who display supposed signals of underlying genetic fitness, such as masculinized faces, facial symmetry, social dominance, and genetic compatibility. It appears that kissing a romantic potential partner at this time helps women assess the genetic quality of a potential mate, the researchers say.

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Vivid & Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction
by John McNally

Writing Romance
by Vanessa Grant

Story Source:

1. Wlodarski, R. & Dunbar, R.I.M. Examining the Possible Functions of Kissing in Romantic Relationships. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2013
2. Rafael Wlodarski, Robin I. M. Dunbar. Menstrual Cycle Effects on Attitudes toward Romantic Kissing. Human Nature, 2013

 

Weighed Down by Guilt: Research Shows It's More Than a Metaphor

"Guilt-inducing memories lead to increased reports of weight."

Lots of people say they do. They're "carrying guilt" or "weighed down by guilt." Are these just expressions, or is there something more to these metaphors?

Princeton researcher Martin Day and Ramona Bobocel, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo, recently published the results of a series of studies that begin to offer answers to that question.

In an article titled "The Weight of a Guilty Conscience: Subjective Body Weight as an Embodiment of Guilt" in the journal PLOS ONE, Day and Bobocel find evidence that the emotional experience of guilt can be grounded in subjective bodily sensation.

Day, a postdoctoral research associate at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Bobocel discuss their findings and how they can contribute to the broader understanding of how humans perceive guilt:

"Embodied cognition is an emerging field in psychology that examines how our thoughts and emotions interact with our bodies to guide behavior. Guilt is important because it plays a role in regulating our moral behavior. It can help us correct our mistakes and prevent future wrongdoing. Of course, people know that guilt feels unpleasant and is sometimes associated with feelings of tension and regret. However, we know less about the broad nature of guilt -- such as how it interacts with the body and our beliefs about the body.

"People often say guilt is like a 'weight on one's conscience,' and we examined whether guilt is actually embodied as a sensation of weight.

In a series of studies we asked students and members of the public to recall a time that they did something unethical. People recalled a variety of wrongdoings, such as lying, stealing or cheating. Afterward, in a separate task, we asked them to rate their subjective feeling of their own body weight as compared to their average. That is, did they feel less weight than usual, about the same weight, or more weight? We compared these responses to participants in control conditions who recalled an ethical memory, a memory of someone else's unethical actions or who were not asked to recall a memory.

"We found that recalling personal unethical acts led participants to report increased subjective body weight as compared to recalling ethical acts, unethical acts of others or no recall. We also found that this increased sense of weight was related to participants' heightened feelings of guilt, and not other negative emotions, such as sadness or disgust.  Ethical deeds were rated just as important as unethical actions, but only unethical, guilt-inducing memories led to increased reports of weight.

"In a final study we also explored a perceptual consequence of the weight of guilt. Using the same materials, we tested whether recall of unethical memories would affect perceived effort to complete a variety of helping behaviors as compared to a control condition. Importantly, some of these behaviors involved physical effort, such as carrying groceries upstairs for someone, whereas other behaviors did not, such as giving someone spare change. We found no differences between conditions for the perceived effort of the nonphysical actions.

However, those who recalled unethical memories, which can be accompanied by sensations of weight, perceived the physical behaviors to involve even greater effort to complete compared to ratings provided by those in a control condition.

"Overall, it was exciting to find these patterns of results, which are consistent with an embodied theory of emotion. However, this is still relatively new research, and we are still exploring how to more fully characterize the experience of guilt. There are also very recent and complementary findings on this topic from independent research labs. For example, simulating the experience of the weight of guilt, such as with a heavy backpack, seems to be tied to regulating moral behavior. Such results are encouraging, and hopefully this emerging line of research will lead us to a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of guilt."

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For more on character development, click on the image below:

A Writer's Guide to Characterization: Archetypes, Heroic Journeys, and Other Elements of Dynamic Character Development
by Victoria Lynn Schmidt

Story Source: Martin V. Day, D. Ramona Bobocel. The Weight of a Guilty Conscience: Subjective Body Weight as an Embodiment of Guilt. PLoS ONE, 2013