Month: July 2010

Someone, somewhere, can look you straight in the eye and say “I’ve got a PhD in booty call research”.

A new study just published online in the Journal of Sex Research investigates where the booty call falls on the spectrum of relationships.

Positioning the Booty-Call Relationship on the Spectrum of Relationships: Sexual but More Emotional Than One-Night Stands

Peter K. Jonason; Norman P. Li; Jessica Richardson

Journal of Sex Research

Most research on human sexuality has focused on long-term pairbonds and one-night stands. However, growing evidence suggests there are relationships that do not fit cleanly into either of those categories. One of these relationships is a “booty-call relationship.”

The purpose of this study was to describe the sexual and emotional nature of booty-call relationships by (a) examining the types of emotional and sexual acts involved in booty-call relationships and (b) comparing the frequency of those acts in booty-call relationships to one-night stands and serious long-term relationships.

In addition, the manner in which sociosexuality is associated with the commission of these acts was also examined. Demonstrative of booty-call relationships’ sexual nature was individuals’ tendency to leave after sex and infrequent handholding.

In contrast, the romantic nature of booty-call relationships was demonstrated through the frequency of acts like kissing. The results suggest the booty-call relationship is a distinct type of relationship situated between one-night stands and serious romantic relationships.

Guys, if you need a post-doc… just call.

Link to booty call study in the Journal of Sex Research (via @NoahWG).

The best ‘poker face’ is probably not a neutral expression, but a happy one, as it led to a greater number of opponent mistakes in a study just published in PLoS One.

The research looked at how poker playing was influenced by the emotional expression of opponents and discovered that blank and threatening expressions had little effect, but a positive expression tends to lull people into a false sense of trust and puts them off their game.

Taken from the study abstract:

This study investigates whether an opponent’s face influences players’ wagering decisions in a zero-sum game with hidden information. Participants made risky choices in a simplified poker task while being presented opponents whose faces differentially correlated with subjective impressions of trust. Surprisingly, we find that threatening face information has little influence on wagering behavior, but faces relaying positive emotional characteristics impact peoples’ decisions.

Thus, people took significantly longer and made more mistakes against emotionally positive opponents. Differences in reaction times and percent correct were greatest around the optimal decision boundary, indicating that face information is predominantly used when making decisions during medium-value gambles. Mistakes against emotionally positive opponents resulted from increased folding rates, suggesting that participants may have believed that these opponents were betting with hands of greater value than other opponents.

According to these results, the best “poker face” for bluffing may not be a neutral face, but rather a face that contains emotional correlates of trustworthiness. Moreover, it suggests that rapid impressions of an opponent play an important role in competitive games, especially when people have little or no experience with an opponent.

Link to Pubmed entry for study.
Link to full-text of study at PLoS One.

An amazing passage about the use of coca among of the indigenous Kogi and Ika people of Colombia, taken from p24 of anthropologist Wade Davis’ magical book on the ethnobotany of ceremonial chemicals, One River.

In a sacred landscape in which every plant is a manifestation of the divine, the chewing of hayo, a variety of coca only found in the mountains of Colombia, represents the most profound expression of culture. Distance in the mountains is not measured in miles but coca chews. When two men meet, they do not shake hands, they exchange leaves. Their societal ideal is to abstain from sex, eating and sleeping while staying up all night, chewing hayo and chanting the names of ancestors. Each week the men chew about a pound of dry leaves, thus absorbing as much as a third of a gram of cocaine each day of their adults lives.

The book traces Davis’ own travels, and those of his mentor Richard Evans Schultes, to understand the culture and chemistry of psychoactive plants among the native peoples of America, both North and South.

It’s an amazingly evocative book and is full of engrossing cultural insights into how plants like coca, the peyote cactus and psilocybin mushrooms have been used traditionally and how they were discovered by Western science.

As we’ve mentioned before, Davis has also given a couple of amazing TED talks that focus on traditional uses of mind altering plants.

Link to more info on One River (Thanks @David_Dobbs!)
Link to previous discussion and links to TED talks.

Murder has become largely confined to the poor and disadvantaged whereas historical records show that in times gone past it was used equally by all levels of society.

This is taken from a 1997 study called ‘The Decline of Elite Homocide’, published in the journal Criminology, which attempts to explain how homicide has become less democratic over time.

The criminological literature consistently reports a negative relationship between social status and interpersonal homicide. Regardless of the setting studied, homicide tends, with just a few exceptions, to be concentrated among low-status groups, such as the poor, the unemployed, the young, and cultural minorities. Yet robust as it is, this relationship is confined to modern societies. In the premodern era, homicide was found at all levels of the social hierarchy, including its higher echelons.

What explains these facts? Why is homicide largely confined to low status people today but was not in the societies studied by anthropologists and historians? Why has elite homicide declined? The answer developed here builds on a theory advanced by Donald Black (1983), which argues that violent conflict is a function of the unavailability of law. In modern societies, low social status and law are antagonistic, and the result is that legal means of resolving conflict are effectively unavailable to those at the bottom of the social pyramid. In earlier societies, law tended to be unavailable to everybody, irrespective of their social standing.

Link to DOI entry and summary for study.

The ‘incest taboo‘ is the aversion to being sexually attracted to our own family and evolutionary psychology has suggested it is an inherited adaptation to promote genetic diversity. A brilliant study just published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin provides evidence that this is actually a cultural phenomenon, received wisdom if you like, because when awareness of the relationship is hidden, people find individuals who resemble their family more sexually attractive.

The debate about whether the incest taboo is an evolutionary adaptation or a cultural practice has quite a vintage as it became a point of contention between the followers of Edvard Westermarck, the Finnish anthropologist, and Sigmund Freud, the Austrian sex obsessive.

Westermarck believed the practice was an adaptation, based on the fact that it seems to occur universally, whereas Freud believed it was a cultural practice and that, actually, we all have incestuous desires that we typically repress – something now famous as the Oedipus complex.

More modern theories of incest avoidance have suggested that they rely on cognitive processes that judge how related someone might be based on our knowledge and our perception of similarity that may signify a genetic relationship.

However, the picture is a little muddied by the fact that recent psychology studies have shown that we are more likely to be attracted to people we are familiar with and that, to some extent, we are more attracted to people who are physically similar to us.

This new study, by psychologists Chris Fraley and Michael Marks, set out to tackle the issue by seeing how subliminal exposure to closely related people would affect sexual attraction.

In an initial experiment, participants were asked to provide a photo of their parent to the researchers. During the study, they were asked to simply rate the attractiveness of strangers’ faces presented to them on a computer.

What they didn’t know was that just before they saw each face, half of the participants had the photo of their opposite-sex parent quickly flashed up on-screen – so quickly, in fact, that it was too fast to take in consciously. The other half, were given a subliminal image of someone else’s parent.

Those who were subliminally shown their opposite-sex parent rated the subsequent face as significantly more attractive, suggesting that their sexual interest had been slightly raised by subliminal exposure to their mother or father.

The researchers decided to go further by seeing how attraction would be affected if the person was exposed to images of themselves – after all, someone who shares 100% of their genetic material.

For this study this they used a technique called morphing to make images that had been digitally manipulated to be composites of two distinct faces – the person’s own and a stranger’s – to varying amounts. The participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of the faces, each of which ranged from being 0% their own face to a blend of 45% their face and 55% stranger.

The mix was never enough so the participants could tell that the faces were blended with their own, but they consistently rated faces that had more of themselves as more attractive.

A final experiment did exactly the same, but with an additional group who were told their own faces had been blended into the photos and that the study was investigating incest and attraction to faces that are designed to resemble genetic relatives.

The group who were aware what was happening showed exactly the opposite behaviour, they were less sexually attracted to faces that they more closely resembled.

In other words, the aversion to people we have a relation to may be based in conscious awareness, not an unconscious evolutionary adaptation.

This suggests is that Freud may have been right when he suggested that there may be an element of attraction to people in our own family.

The researchers doubt that we need to accept the full ‘Oedipus complex’ theory to make sense of this, but simply that the psychology of familiarity, bonding and attraction begins to develop in the family environment and so we retain an element of attraction to people we learnt about love with.

However, for sensible reasons, as a society we need to make sure we form new romantic relationships with people outside our immediate families, and so have instilled this knowledge in our culture.

Link to PubMed entry for study.