Category: Togetherness

The Journal of ECT has a case report of patient who endured the terrifying delusion that her body was rotting away and being replaced by parts of a pig.

The lady concerned was admitted to hospital for surgery but later developed psychosis:

Approximately 4 weeks after the surgery, she started expressing somatic delusions that her entire body was slowly rotting away. She claimed that the bones in her body were replaced by those of a pig and her own body parts were decomposing. She expressed that she deserved the ‘punishment’ by God in this way (decomposing her body) because she did not perform certain religious rituals and did not take a promised pilgrimage. Over the next few days, she also voiced delusions referring to her children‚Äôs body parts being replaced by those with pig‚Äôs body parts.

The disturbing false belief is described as a simultaneous case of both Cotard delusion, where someone believes they are dead or their body is decomposing, and lycanthropy, where someone believes they are transforming or have transformed into an animal.

The patient was apparently successfully treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) although the authors, who like their patient, are based in India, give an interesting cultural interpretation of the delusion:

Interestingly, no reports of metamorphosis into pig/swine have been reported earlier. The metamorphosis into pig in our case can be understood from the Indian culture and mythological importance of the same. According to the Bhagavad Gita, Indra, king of the Hindu gods, was once transformed into a pig for lack of respect to guru Brihaspati. The index case also had strong guilt of not being able to perform certain religious rituals and a promised pilgrimage, which is similar to lack of respect to god and being punished for the same.

However, this is not the first case of a patient with simultaneous Cotard and lycanthropy delusions in the medical literature. In 2005, two Iranian psychiatrists reported on a patient who believed he had died and had also been transformed into a dog.

Link to latest combined Cotard and lycanthropy case report.

If you’ve ever wondered whether romantic music will enhance your chances of getting a date with the girl you fancy, wonder no more – science has the answer (and it turns out to be yes).

‘Love is in the air’: Effects of songs with romantic lyrics on compliance with a courtship request

Psychology of Music, Vol. 38, No. 3, 303-307 (2010)

Nicolas Guéguen, Céline Jacob, Lubomir Lamy

Previous research has shown that exposure to various media is correlated to variations in human behaviour. Exposure to aggressive song lyrics increases aggressive action whereas exposure to songs with prosocial lyrics is associated with prosocial behaviour. An experiment was carried out where 18—20-year-old single female participants were exposed to romantic lyrics or to neutral ones while waiting for the experiment to start. Five minutes later, the participant interacted with a young male confederate in a marketing survey. During a break, the male confederate asked the participant for her phone number. It was found that women previously exposed to romantic lyrics complied with the request more readily than women exposed to the neutral ones. The theoretical implication of our results for the General Learning Model is discussed.

There’s a great write-up of the study on Nou Stuff if you want more details.

Link to study abstract and DOI entry (via @danlevitin).
Link to write-up on Nou Stuff.

A completely fascinating study published on the Social Science Research Network looked at how likely a marriage was to survive depending on who else in the social network was getting divorced.

The study used data from the famous Framington Heart Study and found that while we tend to think of marriage as a ‘couple thing’ is turns out that even our most intimate bonds are deeply embedded into the social webs we weave.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years

Rose McDermott, Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler

Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.

Link to full text of study (via The Situationist).

Over-the-counter headache pill paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen, reduces the pain of social rejection according to a new study just published in Psychological Science.

Based on past findings of an overlap between the brain circuits involved in physical pain and those involved in feeling rejected, the researchers wondered whether painkillers would also ease emotional distress stemming from exclusion.

Not all painkillers work the same though: some work by numbing the local nerves – like benzocaine-based sort throat lozenges that make your mouth go numb, while others affect the brain systems that process pain no matter where it originates from in the body.

Paracetamol is largely of the second type meaning if social rejection and physical pain really do share some of the same brain circuits, the drug should dull the hurt from both.

To test this out, the researchers recruited a group of healthy students and asked them to take a pill every day for three weeks: half got placebo while the other half were given paracetamol, although they didn’t know which they were taking.

Each evening the participants were asked to complete a standard questionnaire that asked about if they’d experienced hurt feelings or social exclusion during the day. While both groups started out reporting the same levels of hurt feelings, by the end of the three weeks, those taking paracetamol reported significantly less.

The second experiment of the study was similar but instead of filling in questionnaires the participants were asked to take part in a brain scanning experiment at the end of the three weeks.

Inside the scanner, they were asked to take part in a video game that involved tossing a virtual ball between players who they thought were human opponents. In reality, all the other moves were controlled by a computer programme that was preset to start excluding them from the game by not passing the ball to them.

The game was used in previous research and helped establish that brain activity in social rejection and physical pain overlapped.

The same overlap occurred in this new study, but the brain areas most linked to both physical and social pain – the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula – were less active in those who had been taking paracetamol for three weeks.

Those same participants also rated themselves as feeling less rejected on a brief post-game questionnaire than participants who had been taking placebo.

It’s an intriguing finding because it suggests that a common and cheap painkiller might be useful in reducing feelings of social rejection which can feature prominently in conditions like depression and borderline personality disorder.

If this was a brand new drug, you can bet the pharmaceutical industry would be jumping up and down with glee at these findings and would already be planning trials to see if it works as a useful treatment.

But because paracetamol is so old it can’t be patented and so there is virtually no profit to be made from it. Unfortunately, paracetemol can be toxic if taken too often, but it would be interesting to see if anyone does take up the baton to see if it might be a useful psychiatric treatment in appropriate doses.

Link to summary of study in PubMed.

The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom has just released a new document entitled ‘What Psychology Professionals Should Know About Polyamory’ which aims to educate therapists about people in consenting non-monogamous relationships.

The document reviews research on the well-being of people in open relationships and the emotional challenges that they can face, although, I’m afraid I don’t have the knowledge to judge how balanced the analysis actually is (where’s Meg Barker when you need her?)

However, I am reminded of a paragraph in the fantastic book Freud: A Very Short Introduction that discusses how the Freudian view of the traditional paired-off relationship runs into the wall of cultural differences:

Freud once thought of the Oedipus complex as universal; but it can be argued that it is very much a Western concept, which particularly applies to the small, ‘nuclear’ family. Do children brought up in extended families, in which polyagmy is the norm, experience the jealousy, possessiveness, and fear which Freud found in his patients? We do now know; but anecdotal evidence suggests the contrary. A Nigerian analyst told me that, during his training analysis, it took him over a year to make his analyst understand the entirely different emotional climate which obtains in a family in which the father has several wives.

Link to ‘What Psychology Professionals Should Know About Polyamory’.

The ‘Duchenne smile’ is thought to be a largely unfakeable expression of pleasure that involves a signature ‘crinkling around the eyes’ caused by automatic muscles. A new study covered by PsyBlog pours cold water on this popular idea by reporting that most people can produce undetectable fake smiles that involve these supposedly involuntary movements.

It has been suggested that 80% of us are unable to conjure up a fake smile that will trick others because we don’t have voluntary control over the muscles around our eyes which signal the Duchenne smile…

Writing in a recent issue of the journal Emotion, however, Krumhuber and Manstead (2009) question whether this 80% estimate is anywhere near the mark. In the first of a series of experiments they found that 83% of the people in their study could produce fake smiles that others mistook for the real thing in photographs.

The researchers also explored how people perceived genuine and fake smiles when they saw videos rather than just static pictures. Then it emerged that fake smiles were easier to spot, but the supposedly crucial crinkling around the eyes didn’t help much.

Instead, telling a real from fake smile relied more on dynamic processes such as how long people hold it, the symmetry of the expression and whether conflicting emotions are communicated by other facial areas.

Link to PsyBlog on ‘Duchenne: Key to a Genuine Smile?’

If you were ever wondering about the representation of the penis in prehistoric art and what this reveals about “the meaning of erection in Paleolithic minds”, wonder no more. The study has already been done.

Male genital representation in paleolithic art: erection and circumcision before history.

Urology. 2009 Jul;74(1):10-4.

Angulo JC, García-Díez M.

OBJECTIVES: To report on the likely existing evidence about the practice of circumcision in prehistory, or at least a culture of foreskin retraction, and also the meaning of erection in Paleolithic minds. The origin of the ritual of circumcision has been lost in time. Similarly, the primitive anthropologic meaning of erection is undefined.

METHODS: We studied the archeologic and artistic evidence regarding human representations performed during the Upper Paleolithic period, 38,000 to 11,000 years BCE, in Europe, with a focus on genital male representations in portable and rock art.

RESULTS: Drawings, engravings, and sculptures displaying humans are relatively scarce, and <100 examples of male genitals are specifically represented. Some depict a circumcised penis and other represent urologic disorders such as phimosis, paraphimosis, discharge, priapism, or a scrotal mass. In addition, a small number of phalluses carved in horn, bone, or stone, with varying morphology, has survived to the present and also reveals a sustained cult for male erection and foreskin retraction not limited to a particular topographical territory. The very few noncoital human or humanoid figures with marked erection appear in a context of serious danger or death. Therefore, erection could be understood as a phenomenon related to the shamanic transit between life and death.

CONCLUSIONS: The erection in Paleolithic art is explicitly represented in almost all the figures defined as unequivocally male that have survived to the present and in many objects of portable art. Circumcision and/or foreskin retraction of the penis are present in most of the works.

I suspect that “erection could be understood as a phenomenon related to the shamanic transit between life and death” is a woefully underused chat-up line. Thank you Science!

Link to PubMed entry for prehistoric pecker study.

Stress, anxiety and depression are common terms used in the West to describe ways in which we become mentally distressed. We tend to think these are universal ways of experiencing mental strain but they are not. In fact, the words cannot be directly translated into many of the world’s languages because the concepts do not exist.

The latest issue of the journal Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry is a special collection of articles on ‘cultural idioms of distress’ and tackles ways in which people experience distress after difficult situations from cultures around the world.

One particularly fascinating article discusses a condition from Liberia called ‘Open Mole’ which is widely believed to occur after sudden shocks or after living through tough times.

Across Liberia, a single unified characteristic defines Open Mole. Open Mole is understood to be a soft spot in the center of the skull similar to the soft areas in an infant’s unformed skull, or the sunken fontanel associated with infant dehydration. However, in contrast to the infant skeletal development processes and the dehydration-induced softening with which the Western medical literature is familiar, Open Mole is understood to be an acquired disease state that can occur to adults who experience a sudden fright or shock or who endure chronic adversity and stress. While its defining symptom is the soft spot on top of the skull, Open Mole is commonly associated with many symptoms, including: severe headache, neck pain, back pain, fatigue, weakness, nightmares, troubled sleep, loss of appetite and social withdrawal. Many additional symptoms are believed to accompany Open Mole, but there is little consensus among Liberians about Open Mole’s ethnophysiology [local beliefs about its biological basis].

The etiology of Open Mole is heterogeneous. Although a belief in the existence of Open Mole exists across geographical boundaries and ethnic groupings, it is contested among Liberians on a number of indicators. Some understand Open Mole to be contagious, while others believe that it is not. Some believe that Open Mole is caused by tampering with dangerous spiritual forces, practicing witchcraft or having a dangerous nightmare, while others believe that it can be caused by sharing a hairbrush or a headscarf, getting caught in the rain or sitting in the sun too long. Some believed that Open Mole is caused by committing an act of wrongdoing (like violence, theft or sorcery), while others believed that Open Mole is a victim’s affliction, carried by those who have had wrong done to them.

The issue also has an open-access article on how spirit possession in Nigeria is more likely in people who have lived through traumatic experiences.

It’s a fascinating study, because alongside traditional diagnostic interviews from Western psychiatry the research team create and validate a diagnostic scale for spirit possession symptoms, allowing an empirical look into some of the psychology behind it without ignoring the experience or dismissing it.

Link to special issue (via the excellent Somatosphere)
Link to PubMed entry for Open Mole article.
Link to full text of spirit possession article.

The picture is a wonderful kid’s drawing scribbled on the pages of the sole book on scientific psychology in Medell√≠n’s centre for Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Jacques Lacan was a French psychiatrist who created his own branch of psychoanalysis through an extended post-modernist riff on Freud.

I recently discovered I live in a barrio once famous for being the centre of psychoanlaysis in the city, and after some searching, found one of the parts still going strong is the presence of the centre for Lacanian analysis.

While browsing through the library I discovered a battered photocopy of a book by Hans Eysenck, the late psychologist from the Institute of Psychiatry in London known for his vehement opposition to all things Freudian.

The photocopy is a translation of the 1971 book he wrote called ‘Psychology is About People’ although the title in Spanish is rather more polemic: ‘La Rata o el Div√°n’ – The Rat or the Couch!

On the back of virtually every page, it seems a child has decided to add their own artistic contributions, presumably while the analyst who borrowed the book was distracted.

Which, psychoanalytically speaking, is very telling.

Jesse Bering’s brilliant Scientific American column ‘Bering in Mind’ has a fantastic discussion of the cultural concept of the ‘fag hag’ – a woman who supposedly hangs around with gay men due to her own inadequacies.

I always assumed that ‘fag hag’ was nothing more than a particularly snide homophobic insult from the English language but it turns out that the general concept exists across the world – from Mexico to Japan.

Bering covers a recent research study that set out to investigate the concept and test whether women who do have lots of gay friends have poor self-esteem, worse body image or less satisfactory relationships.

This turns out not to be the case, and, in fact, the more gay male friends that a woman had, the more sexually attractive she felt, although conversely, longer friendships with the closest gay friend predicted lower self-perceived attractiveness.

Bering does a fantastic job of picking apart possible explanations and caveats from what, after all, is a correlational study, but he also notes a fascinating observation at the end:

It occurred to me while writing this article that the social category of straight men that like to socialize with lesbians is astonishingly vacant in our society. Sure, you may hear about some random “dyke tyke” or “lesbro” (two terms that, unlike fag hag, are hardly part of the popular slang vocabulary and actually required me to do some intensive Googling), but their existence is clearly minimal. Do you have any good guesses on why there’s such a discrepancy in frequency between the two cases?

I wonder whether the disparity between the marking of ‘fag hags’ and the lack of similar names for men who hang out with lesbians at least partly reflects the fact that gay men have traditionally been more stigmatised than gay women, and hence there is a greater drive to stigmatise those who socialise with them.

I also wonder the situation is simply less common although I can’t find any research that has actually looked at the issue.

Link to ‘Studying the elusive fag hag.’

I’ve just noticed a smattering of articles that have tackled the idea of the ‘crack baby’ which became popular during the worrying emergence of crack cocaine during the late 80s. It turns out that babies exposed to crack in the womb weren’t necessarily massively brain damaged tragedies as the stereotype had it, but the concept has remained with us.

This is despite the fact that we have solid research to show that while those exposed to cocaine in utero do show some differences from other kids, the effects are undesirable but actually relatively small.

This is from The New York Times last year:

Cocaine slows fetal growth, and exposed infants tend to be born smaller than unexposed ones, with smaller heads. But as these children grow, brain and body size catch up.

At a scientific conference in November, Dr. Lester presented an analysis of a pool of studies of 14 groups of cocaine-exposed children – 4,419 in all, ranging in age from 4 to 13. The analysis failed to show a statistically significant effect on I.Q. or language development. In the largest of the studies, I.Q. scores of exposed children averaged about 4 points lower at age 7 than those of unexposed children.

In tests that measure specific brain functions, there is evidence that cocaine-exposed children are more likely than others to have difficulty with tasks that require visual attention and “executive function”, the brain’s ability to set priorities and pay selective attention, enabling the child to focus on the task at hand.

Cocaine exposure may also increase the frequency of defiant behavior and poor conduct, according to Dr. Lester’s analysis. There is also some evidence that boys may be more vulnerable than girls to behavior problems.

But experts say these findings are quite subtle and hard to generalize. “Just because it is statistically significant doesn’t mean that it is a huge public health impact,” said Dr. Harolyn M. Belcher, a neurodevelopmental pediatrician who is director of research at the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Family Center in Baltimore.

A piece from City Limits Monthly tracked how the myth arose. It’s probably the best account I’ve read of the cultural currents that promoted the concept to front page news and keep it afloat even today.

And just last month The Washington Post talked to some families of kids labelled as ‘crack babies’ now that they have grown up into adults finding that, well, many have done alright.

 
Link to NYT on ‘The Epidemic That Wasn’t’.
Link to great City Limits analysis (via @maiasz)
Link to Washington Post piece (via @sunshinyday)

I have a bullshit switch. It gets triggered when I hear certain phrases. ‘Neuroplasticity’ is one, ‘hemisphere’ is another and ‘raises dopamine’ is a regular button pusher. That’s not to say people can’t use these phrases while talking perfect sense, but I find it useful that they put me on my guard.

Most recently, I’ve found the phrase ‘raises cortisol’ to be a useful way of alerting me to the fact that the subsequent words may be a few data points short of a bar graph – potentially some poorly understood drivel.

This has been recently by demonstrated by scaremongering advice handed out to parents based on the claim that some vaguely specified study has ‘shown’ that something or other ‘raises cortisol levels’ in children.

The experts then go on to explain that cortisol is ‘bad’ for the developing brain because, as we all know, at least according to the scientific stereotype, cortisol is the ‘stress hormone’.

A few weeks ago psychologist Penelope Leach claimed that leaving babies to cry means “huge quantities of the stress hormone cortisol are being released in that baby’s brain, flooding his brain and his central nervous system, and one of the things we’ve learnt is that lots of cortisol washing about is really not good for the developing brain”.

This claim is apparently also in her new book and it made headlines around the world: ‘Crying babies at risk of brain damage’, ‘Leaving your baby to cry could damage its brain new book claims’, ‘Letting newborns cry is bad for them: study’ and so on.

The excellent Neuroskeptic blog noticed that ubiquitous psychologist Oliver James was recently advising people that leaving children in childcare could raise the risk of behaviour problems later in life because a study found that cortisol “levels had doubled within an hour of the mother leaving them in daycare”.

These claims both reflect one-dimensional thinking about how the brain works. Yes, stress tends to raise cortisol levels and there is good evidence to suggest that chronically high levels of stress and cortisol may be detrimental to brain, but this conclusion is typically drawn from people who have been through some fairly serious shit, wars, deprivation, trauma, or have specific hormone problems.

There is remarkably little research on cortisol, everyday stresses in young children and none to suggest normal variation damages the brain in any way. In fact, a couple of studies suggest that higher cortisol levels in young children are related to better mental performance but you probably won’t hear about these. You’ll also not hear about the recent study in the Journal of Pediatrics that found that breast-fed infants had higher cortisol levels.

That’s not to say that all of the studies have found a positive effect (there’s a fair research base on how higher cortisol levels during pregnancy can, in some situations, lead to later problems) but just that its common that ‘experts’ in vaguely related field will cherry pick brain studies to support what they already say.

This is particularly effective when it chimes with our folk neuroscience: dopamine equals addiction, cortisol equals stress, serotonin equals enjoyment, the right-hemisphere equals creativity and so on. None of which makes sense its own. They’re all useless when used as stereotypes.

As Neuroskeptic notes, virtually every form of physical activity raises cortisol levels, so you can’t just blithely apply the over-generalisation without making a nonsense of the world.

Or indeed, of childcare.

Link to Neuroskeptic on cortisol and pop childcare advice.

One of the most delightful ways of testing social opinion has got to be the ‘lost letter’ technique, where researchers ‘lose’ paid up letters addressed to various controversial organisations to see how many get dropped back in the post box.

A new study, led by psychologist Tracey Witte, used exactly this technique and suggests that stigma concerning suicide may be improving as they found no difference in the amount of ‘lost letters’ that reached their final destination between those addressed to the fictional organisations the ‘American Heart Disease Research Foundation’, the ‘American Diabetes Research Foundation’ and the ‘American Suicide Research Foundation’.

In case you’re wondering, the addresses are otherwise identical (the same PO Box number) to reduce any other forms of bias. Only the names differ.

There have been some inventive ‘lost letter’ studies in the past, including the original 1965 one which found that three quarters of the letters to the ‘Medical Research Associates’ or a ‘Mr. Walter Carnap’ arrived at their destination but only one quarter of those addressed to either ‘Friends of the Communist Party’ or ‘Friends of the Nazi Party’ arrived.

Perhaps more relevant to today’s climate was a study completed in California in the year 2000 which found that letters addressed to the ‘Gay Marriage Foundation’ were significantly less likely to be returned than letters addressed to the ‘Blue Sky Foundation’.

As the researchers of the new study on suicide stigma note, one of the advantages of the technique is that it’s unobtrusive and “exceedingly unlikely that participants in these studies even know that their behavior is being measured by researchers.”

Link to PubMed entry for suicide ‘lost letter’ study.

NPR has an interesting interview on the phenomenon of compulsive hoarding where people will be almost unable to throw out used items and will collect mountains of clutter in their houses to the point where they can no longer see the walls.

The discussion is with psychologists and hoarding researchers Randy Frost and Gail Steketee and has lots of novel insights on a recognised but not well-understood behaviour.

I was struck by the bit where the interviewer highlights that lots of hoarders collect newspapers and Frost replies that “we think it’s related to a sense of wanting to acquire and preserve opportunities”. They also discuss the interesting concept of ‘clutter blindness’.

There are lots of similar parts that made me questions the traditional one-size-fits-all explanation that its just variant of obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD.

Apparently the two psychologists have written a book on the topic called Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things and you can read an excerpt on the NPR website.

By the way, if you’re interested in learning more, don’t miss the short documentary Possessed that we’ve recommend previously and you can watch online.

Link to NPR on ‘Hoarding: When Too Much ‘Stuff’ Causes Grief’.

National Geographic Magazine has a nuanced, tragic and colourful article about the growing numbers of unofficial saints in Mexico that are called on to protect against death in the increasingly turbulent cities, or have been created as revered patrons of the criminal underworld by gangs and drug traffickers.

“The emotional pressures, the tensions of living in a time of crisis lead people to look for symbolic figures that can help them face danger,” says Jos√© Luis Gonz√°lez, a professor at Mexico’s National School of Anthropology and History who specializes in popular religions. Among the helper figures are Afro-Cuban deities that have recently found their way to new shores and outlaws that have been transformed into miracle workers, like a mythical bandit from northern Mexico called Jes√∫s Malverde. There are even saints from the New Testament repurposed for achieving not salvation but success. In this expanding spiritual universe, the worship of a skeleton dressed in long robes and carrying a scythe‚ÄîLa Santa Muerte‚Äîis possibly the fastest growing and, at first glance at least, the most extravagant of the new cults. “If you look at it from the point of view of a country that over the last ten years has become dangerously familiar with death,” Gonz√°lez says, “you can see that this skeleton is a very concrete and clear symbolic reference to the current situation.”

There is an excellent Wikipedia page on La Santa Muerte if you want more background on the deathly figure.

The NeoGeo article also discusses Jes√∫s Malverde, the ‘narcosaint’ that we mentioned in a previous post, who has a remarkable following on YouTube with numerous digital tributes appearing on the site.

Also, don’t miss National Geographic’s striking photo gallery that accompanies the piece.

Link to National Geographic article ‘Troubled Spirits’ (via 3QD).
Link to National Geographic photo gallery for the article.

Women who have a smaller waist in relation to their hips tend to be perceived as more attractive. Some argue this is an evolutionary tendency, a desire for women who are perceived to be more fertile, while others suggest it is just a product of the media who, from porn to Prada, laud the image of small waisted women.

The New York Times covers a fascinating study which tested these ideas in an innovative way – by seeing whether blind men, who have avoided the body-shape bias of visual media, would also find women with a lower waist-to-hip ratio more attractive.

The study, currently in press for the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, was devised by researcher led by psychologist Johan Karremans who tested the idea by using adjustable mannequins.

The blind stood before them; they were told to touch the women, to focus their hands on the waists and hips. The breasts on both figures were the same, in case the men reached too high. The men extended their arms; they ran their hands over the region. Then they scored the attractiveness of the bodies. Karremans had a hunch, he told me, that their ratings wouldn’t match those of the sighted men he used as controls, half of them blindfolded so that they, too, would be judging by feel. It seemed likely, he said, that visual culture would play an overwhelming part in creating the outlines of lust. And though the blind had almost surely grown up hearing attractiveness described, perhaps even in terms of hourglass shapes, it was improbable, he writes in his forthcoming journal paper, that they had heard descriptions amounting to, “The more hourglass shaped, the more attractive,” which would be necessary to favor the curvier mannequin over the figure that was only somewhat less so.

But, with some statistically insignificant variation, the scores of the blind matched those of the sighted. Both groups preferred the more pronounced sweep from waist to hip.

How this preference comes about is another matter of course, and the scientific article apparently suggests that as body scent is also a guide to attractiveness and is partly genetically determined it’s possible that blind men have come to associate body shape with attractiveness via smell.

The explanation sounds a little speculative to me, but the core finding of the study is fascinating.

The NYT article is also a great brief guide to attractiveness and waist-to-hip ratio argument.

Link to NYT on ‘The Anatomy of Desire’.