Category: Togetherness

Science News has an excellent cover article discussing the psychology of facial attractiveness and rounds-up some of the latest cognitive science research in the area.

It covers research on quite well-worn areas, such as symmetry, masculinity and femininity in faces, but also picks up on some of the new developments that have been tackled only recently.

Other missing elements in evaluating beauty have begun to emerge with the use of new technology. Video techniques have allowed for dynamic rather than static interpretations of beauty.

“Real faces move,” says Edward Morrison of the University of Bristol in England. “If you show someone a moving face, they can recognize it quicker. There is more information.”

And it turns out that how faces move may contribute to how good they look. In a 2007 paper [pdf] in Evolution and Human Behavior, Morrison reported that more of the movements known to be indicators of femininity — blinking, nodding and head tilting — made women’s faces more attractive to male and female volunteers.

“Movement can convey important meanings,” Morrison says. “If that person likes you or doesn’t. If that person is being aggressive. If the person is being flirtatious. The face can start to convey these kinds of things.”

Link to ScienceNews piece ‘It‚Äôs written all over your face’.

I keep running into fascinating articles that The Economist ran over the Christmas period and this one is no exception – it covers research that suggests that men’s deodorants do increase sexual attractiveness, but by increasing confidence and hence the behaviour of the wearer. The smell alone seems to have little impact on women.

Craig Roberts of the University of Liverpool and his colleagues—working with a team from Unilever’s research laboratory at nearby Port Sunlight—have been investigating the problem. They already knew that appropriate scents can improve the mood of those who wear them. What they discovered, though, as they will describe in a forthcoming edition of the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, is that when a man changes his natural body odour it can alter his self-confidence to such an extent that it also changes how attractive women find him.

Half of Dr Roberts’s volunteers were given an aerosol spray containing a commercial formulation of fragrance and antimicrobial agents. The other half were given a spray identical in appearance but lacking active ingredients. The study was arranged so that the researchers did not know who had received the scent and who the dummy. Each participant obviously knew what he was spraying on himself, since he could smell it. But since no one was told the true purpose of the experiment, those who got the dummy did not realise they were being matched against people with a properly smelly aerosol.

Over the course of several days, Dr Roberts’s team conducted a battery of psychological tests on both groups of volunteers. They found that those who had been given the commercial fragrance showed an increase in self-confidence. Not that surprising, perhaps. What was surprising was that their self-confidence improved to such an extent that women who could watch them but not smell them noticed. The women in question were shown short, silent videos of the volunteers. They deemed the men wearing the deodorant more attractive. They were, however, unable to distinguish between the groups when shown only still photographs of the men, suggesting it was the men’s movement and bearing, rather than their physical appearance, that was making the difference.

The abstract of the actual study (I don’t have access to the full-text unfortunately) also reports that non-verbal attractiveness (presumably, sexiness of ‘body language’) was predicted by the men’s liking of the deodorant, independent of their facial attractiveness.

The researchers conclude by highlighting the remarkable influence of personal odour on self-perception, and how this can even influence how others perceive us, even when they can’t actually smell the scent.

The Economist article also discusses the link between natural scent, genetic and pheromones, and sexual allure. An intriguing article and an excellent study.

Link to Economist article ‘The scent of a man’.
Link to DOI entry for deodorant and sexual attractiveness study.

Petra Boyton has a fantastic piece on the experience of orgasm during birth – the focus of an upcoming documentary and a subject likely to cause discomfort in some.

Petra discusses the relationship between sexual stimulation and labour noting that sexual pleasure has been reported during childbirth in the medical literature.

This is from a 1987 review article on sexuality and childbirth:

Newton (1971 , 1973) argued that women’s three reproductive acts: coitus, parturition, and lactation are psychophysiologically interrelated and trigger caretaking behavior, a necessity for species survival. Features that are evident in both coitus (sexual arousal and orgasm) and in undisturbed childbirth include changes in respiration (hyperpnea and tachypnea), vocalization, strained facial expression, rhythmic uterine contractions, loosening of the cervical mucous plug, frequent supine position with thighs adducted, a tendency to become uninhibited, exceptional muscular strength, an altered state of consciousness with rapid return to alert awareness after orgasm or birth, and a profound feeling of joy or ecstasy following orgasm or delivery. In addition, clitoral engorgement usually associated with sexual arousal has been described in labor in a number of parturients, beginning at 8-9cm cervical dilation (clitoral engorgement has also been described on occasion during stressful situations, without sexual stimulation) (Rossi, 1973). Intense orgasmic sensations have also been described during the second stage of labor (Masters and Johnson, 1966; Sarlin, 1963).

However, there is also evidence that sexual stimulation during labour has been shown to help delivery and ease labour-related pain – such as research on the benefits of breast stimulation during birthing.

However, Petra’s write-up makes clear that systematic research is still lacking, so we’re still not sure about how many women experience orgasm during birth, or how effective all types of active sexual stimulation might be to assist birth.

However, this topic is contentious owing to the psychological discomfort it causes. Perhaps the clash between the stereotypes that birth is innocent and pure while sex is dirty and salacious mean that some people will just find the whole subject too much to handle.

There are many of these areas in medicine. For example, sexual relationships between people with learning disabilities.

The thought of two people with Down syndrome having sex causes great discomfort in many people, despite the fact that it is perfectly possible for some people with Down’s understand and consent to the situation.

If we assume that all people who are able to consent and have found a willing consenting partner should be able to freely participate in a sexual relationship, perhaps it would be useful to develop a test to help evaluate people with learning abilities to make sure they are both able to understand and consenting.

These sorts of tests are common for testing the capacity for other sorts of decisions – such as financial responsibility, or decisions to refuse medical care – but discomfort factor tends to mean that these areas are under-researched.

With reference to the upcoming documentary, the website for the film has quite a curious tone, and I have to say, is slightly sensational.

Buy the DVD or CD!

Share Orgasmic Birth with your friends and family this holiday season with our special 5 pack of DVD’s and CD soundtrack and SAVE. Subtitled in French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese.

I can’t say a 5 pack of the Orgasmic Birth (and soundtrack!) would the first thing that comes to mind when buying Christmas presents, but there you go.

Link to Dr Petra on ‘Is there such a thing as an ‚Äòorgasmic birth‚Äô?’

I’ve just come across a bombshell of a paper that looked at numerous headline studies on the cognitive neuroscience of social interaction and found that many contained statistically impossible or spurious correlations between behaviour and brain activity.

The article is currently ‘in press’ for the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science but the preprint is available online as a pdf file.

Social cognitive neuroscience is a hot new area and many of the headline studies use fMRI brain imaging to look at how activity in the brain is correlated with social decision-making or perception.

This new analysis, led by neuroscientist Edward Vul, was inspired by the fact that some of these correlations seem to good to be true, and so the research team investigated. The abstract of their study is below, and it’s powerful stuff – indicating that many of the results are due to flawed analyses.

If you’re not familiar with neuroimaging research it might be useful to know that what a ‘voxel‘ is before reading the abstract.

Essentially, brain scanners digitally divide the scanned area into a block of tiny boxes and each one of these is called a voxel (think 3D pixel).

This allows the scans to be analysed by comparing the activity or tissue density in each voxel to another measure – which could be the same voxel during another scan, or it could be something entirely different, such as a measure of emotion or social decision-making.

The newly emerging field of Social Neuroscience has drawn much attention in recent years, with high-profile studies frequently reporting extremely high (e.g., >.8) correlations between behavioral and self-report measures of personality or emotion and measures of brain activation obtained using fMRI. We show that these correlations often exceed what is statistically possible assuming the (evidently rather limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality/emotion measures. The implausibly high correlations are all the more puzzling because social-neuroscience method sections rarely contain sufficient detail to ascertain how these correlations were obtained.

We surveyed authors of 54 articles that reported findings of this kind to determine the details of their analyses. More than half acknowledged using a strategy that computes separate correlations for individual voxels, and reports means of just the subset of voxels exceeding chosen thresholds. We show how this non-independent analysis grossly inflates correlations, while yielding reassuring-looking scattergrams. This analysis technique was used to obtain the vast majority of the implausibly high correlations in our survey sample. In addition, we argue that other analysis problems likely created entirely spurious correlations in some cases.

We outline how the data from these studies could be reanalyzed with unbiased methods to provide the field with accurate estimates of the correlations in question. We urge authors to perform such reanalyses and to correct the scientific record.

The paper notes that some of the most widely-reported studies in recent years contain this flaw and this new paper has the potential to really shake up the world of social cognitive neuroscience.

pdf of preprint of ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’.

A not very good photo of an enjoyable Christmas afternoon spent watching James Bond movie A Quantum of Solace on the psychiatric ward of Hospital San Vincente de Paúl in Medellín.

In the service of international understanding, I’m being taught about Colombian cuisine and salsa music, and in return I’ve taught the hospital canteen how to make chip buttys and have introduced the tradition of the Bank Holiday Bond Movie.

Peace on Earth and Goodwill to All.

I would just like to take this opportunity to wish Mind Hacks readers a happy seasonal festival and I hope you experience an appropriate positive emotion during your marking of the period.

If you’re interested in a little seasonal psychology, Frontal Cortex has an excellent piece on the psychology of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival that involves 8 days of gift giving.

Curiously, it involves the peak-end rule and research with colonoscopies and I’ll leave you to discover the rest.

I’ll be having a very Paisa Christmas with everything kicking off today so Feliz Navidad y Pr√≥spero A√±o Nuevo from Colombia.

Link to Frontal Cortex on Hanukkah and Colonoscopies.

3QuarksDaily has an interesting piece on the psychology of humour and how it is used to negotiate and establish social hierarchies.

The article looks at two theories of humour that try understand what makes something funny. A common explanation is the ‘incongruity’ idea, that suggests when something is suddenly out of context it is more likely to seem funny.

But as the article notes, these theories “fail to explain why we are amused by certain instances of incongruity ‚Äì a man showing up to his job at a real-estate agency with a ‚Äúkick me‚Äù sign on his back ‚Äì but not others ‚Äì a man showing up to his job at a real-estate agency with a cure for cancer”.

The other approach is the ‘superiority’ theory, that suggests that humour is used to establish social hierarchies – those considered objects of humour are further down the social ranking.

But it’s also the case that we seem to use it as a form of flattery for our superiors – various studies (nicely summarised in this NYT article) find that we are much more likely to laugh at the jokes of people higher up the social hierarchy.

The 3QD piece considers the role, development, and rather intriguingly the morality of humour. It’s a little short on links to actual studies which is a little frustrating but it otherwise an interesting and informative exploration.

Link to 3QuarksDaily article ‘Is Humor Immoral?’.

Neuroanthropology has an excellent piece riffing on my recent article on grief hallucinations where I wondered about cultural differences in re-experiencing the dead.

The post discusses work by the evocatively-named anthropologist Donald Tuzin who studied the Ilahita Arapesh of northeastern Papua New Guinea and how they mesh their beliefs and practices of death and afterlife with everyday experience.

Some of Tuzin’s work in this area is published in a wonderful article entitled ‘The Breath of a Ghost: Dreams and the Fear of the Dead’.

It gets a bit spuriously psychoanalytic in places but has some wonderful descriptions of how funeral practices are linked to beliefs about ghosts and their influences. Crucially he argues that it is the demands of everyday life that shape these beliefs, and not vice versa.

At Neuroanthropology Daniel discusses it in light of more up-to-date work and the wider perspective from Tuzin’s long career.

It’s certainly an interesting area, but although re-experiencing of the dead is so common, I didn’t realise quite what a touchy subject it could be. All hell broke loose (excuse the pun) in the comments to the original article.

This is my favourite:

Mr. Vaughn [sic] Bell might find himself in court for libel after accusing everyone who has seen or felt a presence of being a drug addict, alcoholic or ill in some way. His one-sided argument could be the result of stupidity or perhaps some mental defect that prevents him from being intelligent enough to know the difference between a hallucination and an actual ghost/spirit/spectre/haunt. Next he will tell us that the earth is flat, and anyone who thinks it is round is a heretic, and that big yellow thing we call the sun is just an illusion.

Sir, I grew up in Britain. We know the sun is an illusion.

Link to Neuroanthropology on ‘Donald Tuzin and the Breath of a Ghost’.

A study just published in the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior has reviewed all of the available scientific studies on internet addiction and found them to be mostly crap. And not just slightly lacking, really pretty awful.

To quote from the research summary:

The analysis showed that previous studies have utilized inconsistent criteria to define Internet addicts, applied recruiting methods that may cause serious sampling bias, and examined data using primarily exploratory rather than confirmatory data analysis techniques to investigate the degree of association rather than causal relationships among variables.

Rather disappointingly though, the authors just suggest that better research is needed when it’s quite obvious that the whole concept is fundamentally flawed.

So badly flawed that it’s a logical fallacy, a category error, in fact. To revisit the point, the internet is a medium of communication and it is not possible to be addicted to a medium of communication because the medium does not specify an activity.

It’s like saying someone is a ‘language addict’ or is ‘addicted’ to transport. It just makes no sense.

Unfortunately, none of the so-called diagnostic scales or indeed, researchers, actually get this point, so it’s perfectly possible to be diagnosed with internet addiction if you’re putting in a lot of long-stressful hours running a business. If you use the internet to communicate with your employees that is.

If, on the other hand, you’re putting in a lot of long-stressful hours running a business and you use an alternative medium of communication, then you’re not an internet addict. Same motivations, same emotional impact, same psychological effect. But if you use the internet you have a mental illness, and if you don’t, well, you don’t.

You can switch ‘running a business’ for anything that is stressful, preoccupying and intrusive (following a sports team perhaps) and if you use the internet as a tool, you’re diagnosable.

At least with the current methods – which, it turns out, are not even based on even a semblance of scientific reliability.

This is not to say that there aren’t people who use the internet excessively to the detriment of themselves and their families. But there are people who follow football in a similarly problematic way, and people who spend too much time going to folk concerts, and people who can’t tear themselves away from the stock market.

This doesn’t make them addicts and the sooner we stop trying to apply addiction to people as a clumsy way to trying to avoid the language of blame the quicker we can tackle their social and emotional difficulties in a more relevant and appropriate way.

There’s a good write-up from Dr Shock and another on PsychCentral both of which I recommend as antidotes to the internet addiction foolishness.

Link to study.
Link to DOI entry for same.

As the annual Muslim Hajj pilgrimage comes to an end, I’m reminded of this interesting Slate article from earlier this year which reported on research that looked at whether going to Mecca makes Muslims more moderate.

Although Islam has been associated with extremism in recent years, one of the key parts of the Hajj is the wearing of Ihram clothing to emphasise the fact that all people are created equal.

The article discusses a recent study that used a quirk of the distribution of Saudi Arabian visas to Pakistani Muslims. Only some of those who apply will be randomly allocated a visa to attend the Mecca pilgrimage, meaning the researchers could compare the views of those who went with those who didn’t.

Six months after the Hajjis of ’06 returned home to Pakistan, Clingingsmith, Khwaja, and Kremer had a survey team track down 1,600 Hajj applicants, half of whom had been selected to go to Mecca and half who hadn’t. The Hajjis were asked questions on topics ranging from religious practices (frequency of prayer and mosque attendance, for example) to women’s issues. Perhaps not surprisingly, the study found that after a monthlong immersion in communal prayer, the pilgrims were 15 percent more likely to report following mainstream Muslim practices, such as praying five times a day and reciting the Quran. This came at the expense of local Pakistani religious traditions‚ÄîHajjis were 10 percent less likely to follow local rituals like using amulets or visiting the tombs of local saints…

Even more surprising, Hajjis were 25 percent less likely to believe that it was impossible for Muslims of different ethnicities or sects to live together in harmony—a finding that would seem to be of particular interest for those trying to bring peace to the streets of Baghdad. This greater sense of goodwill among peoples even extended to non-Muslims (who were obviously not represented in Mecca). Hajjis were more likely than non-Hajjis to hold the opinion that people of all religions can live in harmony. Hajjis were also less likely to feel that extreme methods—such as suicide bombings or attacks on civilians—could be justified in dealing with disagreements between Muslims and non-Muslims.

The article discusses some of the other findings from the study, including more tolerant views on the place of women in society, which suggests that the Hajj has an effect of increasing pilgrims’ goodwill towards both fellow Muslims and other people in the world.

Link to Slate article ‘The Pilgrim’s Progressiveness’.
Link to study.

The New York Times has an interesting article arguing that the recent public trend for outlawing ‘teasing’ as a form of bullying is a step too far, owing to psychological research showing that it’s part of normal social interaction and can actually enhance relationships.

The piece is by psychologist Dacher Keltner, and looks at teasing among children, as well as in adults and romantic partners.

He argues that teasing is not only wrongly outlawed, but is a form of social play that is essential for learning to manage complex social interactions.

Our rush to banish teasing from social life has its origins in legitimate concerns about bullies on the playground and at work. We must remember, though, that teasing, like so many things, gets better with age. Starting at around 11 or 12, children become much more sophisticated in their ability to hold contradictory propositions about the world — they move from Manichaean either-or, black-or-white reasoning to a more ironic, complex understanding. As a result, as any chagrined parent will tell you, they add irony and sarcasm to their social repertory. And it is at this age that you begin to see a precipitous drop in the reported incidences of bullying. As children learn the subtleties of teasing, their teasing is less often experienced as damaging.

In seeking to protect our children from bullying and aggression, we risk depriving them of a most remarkable form of social exchange. In teasing, we learn to use our voices, bodies and faces, and to read those of others — the raw materials of emotional intelligence and the moral imagination. We learn the wisdom of laughing at ourselves, and not taking the self too seriously. We learn boundaries between danger and safety, right and wrong, friend and foe, male and female, what is serious and what is not. We transform the many conflicts of social living into entertaining dramas. No kidding.

It’s quite a comprehensive piece, looking at how we use the subtleties of language to signal the ‘teasing mode’ as well as passing on important social messages without being explicit.

I wonder how this translates across cultures. I’m always struck who the British tendency to ‘take the piss’ out of each other and themselves is not necessarily shared by other cultures, at least to the same degree or in the same situations.

Link to NYT piece ‘In Defense of Teasing’.

This week’s British Medical Journal has a wonderful social network study that examined how happiness moved through social networks. It found that even when friends of friends become happy, the effect can ripple through and boost your own contentment.

It’s a wonderfully conceived study that looks at how people in social networks change over time, both geographically and psychologically. It turns out the effect is stronger if we live near the person, but happiness doesn’t ripple through workplaces, unless we consider the happy person our friend.

While there are many determinants of happiness, whether an individual is happy also depends on whether others in the individual’s social network are happy. Happy people tend to be located in the centre of their local social networks and in large clusters of other happy people.

The happiness of an individual is associated with the happiness of people up to three degrees removed in the social network. Happiness, in other words, is not merely a function of individual experience or individual choice but is also a property of groups of people.

Indeed, changes in individual happiness can ripple through social networks and generate large scale structure in the network, giving rise to clusters of happy and unhappy individuals. These results are even more remarkable considering that happiness requires close physical proximity to spread and that the effect decays over time.

However, the article is also notable for being astoundingly well written. It’s not only a description of a scientific study, it’s a plain language guide to social network analysis.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a scientific paper that’s so clear and informative. If you want to learn about how social network analysis works, this is a great place to start.

Link to text of BMJ study.
Link to write-up from The New York Times.
Link to write-up from Washington Post.

This week’s British Medical Journal has an excellent short article on ‘Diogenes syndrome’, an unofficial name for the situation where an older person is living in squalor without seeming to have mental or neurological impairments that might explain it, but without seeming to mind either.

The syndrome is named after the Ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope who gave up mainstream life to live in poverty and made his home in a barrel.

Older adults found fit the description of the syndrome are often referred to psychiatrists, but the author, psychiatrist Brian Murray, wonders whether we’re missing Diogenes’ point – that happiness has nothing to do with material circumstances.

Alternatively, Diogenes syndrome may simply be a description of a social situation. This would fit with my impression that referrals for Diogenes syndrome have tailed off since reality television programmes started showing celebrity cleaning ladies helping “normal” people living in squalor. Age seems to be a factor: perhaps it is a sign of our paternalistic culture that a person younger than 65 living in squalor is seen by millions on television, whereas those past the age of 65 are seen by a psychiatrist.

Link to thoughtful BMJ piece on Diogenes syndrome.

Scientific American Mind Matter’s blog has just published an article I wrote on grief hallucinations, the remarkably common experience of seeing, hearing, touching or sensing our loved ones after they’ve passed away.

Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to having someone close to you die and are a common part of the mourning process, but it’s remarkable how often people are embarrassed to say they’ve had the experience because they worry what others might think.

I was inspired to write the piece after reading a wonderful paper, published in Transcultural Psychiatry, by psychiatrist Carlos Sluzki on the cultural significance of one Hispanic lady’s post-grief hallucinations.

My reference to the shadow cat draws on the intro to Sluzki’s article which must be one of the most beautiful openings to an academic article I’ve ever read.

I note that there’s not a great deal of research on grief hallucinations, despite how common they are, although I picked up on a study during the last few days which addressed these curious phenomena in a study on psychotic symptoms.

A thorough population survey in France that appeared earlier this year found that grief hallucinations were the most frequent ‘psychotic’ symptom in individuals without mental illness.

It’s also interesting to read the comments that the article has generated. I really seemed to have pushed a few buttons.

I’m quite proud of the piece though, and it’s a vastly under-discussed and under-researched topic that affects huge numbers of people.

Link to SciAm piece ‘Ghost Stories: Visits from the Deceased’.
Link to Carlos Sluzki’s excellent article.
Link to DOI for same.

The Psychologist has a truly fantastic article on astronaut psychology, treating off-world mental health problems, and the interpersonal dynamics of the space mission.

It is thoroughly fascinating, exceptionally well-written and even contains an interview with astronaut Dr Jay Buckley “a crew member with STS-90, Space Shuttle Columbia’s 16-day Neurolab mission in 1998. The seven-member crew conducted life science experiments focusing on the effects of microgravity on the brain and nervous system.”

I think I’ve just wet myself.

One of my favourite bits is where it discusses what measures they take to maintain the astronauts’ mental health.

This is no small problem and the article notes that psychological problems have been the leading medical cause of long-duration mission terminations.

Depression is apparently a key problem. The article ominously notes that no-one has yet had to use the on-board antidepressant medication, but it does describe a computerised psychological treatment for depression as part of the on-board software package the ‘Virtual Space Station’.

The Virtual Space Station’s depression module will follow the problem-solving treatment (PST) approach to therapy. James Cartreine, the principal investigator on the Virtual Space Station project, says his team chose this form of intervention because it is empirically supported and has high face validity – in other words, it’s immediately apparent to users of the Virtual Space Station how the interactive programme is going to help them.

‘The active ingredient of PST is behavioral activation,’ says Cartreine, ‘getting people with depression to do something – and helping them to feel good about their efforts, whether or not their efforts were successful.’

Because of its focus on identifying problems and working out possible solutions, PST can help combat feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, which is particularly appropriate for people isolated in space in a confined environment. The fact that it’s tangible – it’s geared towards solving observable problems as opposed to cognitive problems – also makes it suitable for astronauts, who have proven to be accepting of the intervention. ‘Astronauts are physical scientists, engineers and programmers – they’re not necessarily used to thinking about their thought processes,’ says Cartreine.

If you’re interested in how the same topic looked in 1959, we discussed some unintentionally hilarious articles from a special issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry on a rather Freudian ‘space psychiatry’ from that very same year.

 
Link to Psychologist article ‘New horizons’.

 
Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist and I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut.

New Scientist has an article on the psychology and biology on sleeping around – which has been given the wonderfully gentle and inviting name of ‘sociosexuality’ in the research literature.

Rather predictably, the article contains the rather tired ‘men spread their seed, women look for long term partners’ evolutionary psychology explanation, but also does a good job of countering this with some interesting and sometimes surprising studies from the sex research literature.

One of the most interesting bits is where it notes that foetal testosterone exposure is correlated in men with masculine facial features and number of sexual partners in adulthood, and exactly the the same holds for women:

Another factor with strong links to sociosexuality is masculinity. Boothroyd found men with more masculine-looking faces scored higher on sociosexuality, and it seems to be the same story for women. Sarah Mikach and Michael Bailey of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, examined how women’s sociosexuality related to the degree to which they looked, felt or behaved in a masculine way. They found that heterosexual women who had high numbers of sexual partners were more likely to show higher levels of masculinity.

The researchers argued that these women behave in a way that is more typically male and this could be due to early – probably prenatal – exposure to androgens, such as testosterone, that organise typically “male” brains differently from typically “female” brains (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 20, p 141). Supporting this idea, Andrew Clark of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, found a higher rate of sociosexuality in women with a smaller ratio of index to ring finger length – which some researchers believe corresponds to higher prenatal androgen exposure (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 25, p 113).

If you want to rate your own sociosexuality, they’ve also put the questionnaire online.

Unusually for the normally rather coy New Scientist, the article is open-access. Is this a sign that New Scientist are realising that science is like love – it’s better when it’s free, or are they just using sex as a way of getting short-term affection?

We’ll see how we feel in the morning.

Link to NewSci on ‘The dizzying diversity of human sexual strategies’.