There is no finishing line to perfection <33

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

~I love social psych

The Anatomy of Love

By Alex Gunz, on 04-05-2008 22:56
Views : 12358
Favoured : 242
Published in : Articles, Issue 6
"Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism." -Sigmund Freud
"How does it feel when it's love?It's just something you feel together." -Van Halen
I score that: Psychologists 1, rock stars 0.In May of 2000 a virus spread around the world. It infected 1200 computers within three hours, and was rattling around machines at the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon within a day. It shut down servers at The British House of Commons while the American Department of State was forced to temporarily disconnect its computers from the internet (BBC, 2000). Did some malevolent genius unravel the inner secrets of network crypto architecture? Was it a terrorist plot? No, actually, just a small virus tossed off by a Fillipino student disgruntled at having being kicked out of his computer science program. The secret to its success was that upon infecting a machine it emailed itself out using the subject line "ILOVEYOU." This moved people, by the thousand, to open its attachment - even people at the Pentagon 1 - thus apparently confirming The Beatles dictum that "love is all you need." Score one for the rock stars.They would score more, but they were off by a little. According to a very prominent psychology theory, having a sense of relatedness with others is one of the three most fundamental human motivations, along with having a sense of competence and authenticity 2(Deci & Ryan, 2000). Of course, lyrics like "love is maybe 33 percent of all you need" are one reason that psychologists don't pack stadiums. Suffice it to say that love is important. Very important. It's not a coincidence that several major world religions are built around it.Love is one of those things we’ve all had a lot of practice at recognizing - at least, in other people. We all know, for example, that love is the bit in the movie where a sudden outbreak of string music makes two characters stare at each other intently (and you can tell its true love if they’re both pretty). But that’s not all there is to it. The line “I’m marrying my best friend” is to weddings what triple lutzes are to figure skating competitions – pretty much a required element. On top of all that, musicians have been telling us that “love is forever” since the lyre was de rigueur for rocking out. Psychologists have boiled these observations down, and sliced them up a number of ways, but one of the most enduringly popular, at least with the makers of textbooks, has been Robert Sternberg’s “triangle” theory of love (Sternberg, 1986). Think of a special someone for a moment, and play along with this at home: Love, says the triangle theory, is made of some combination of passion, intimacy, and commitment. Passion is the heady feeling that all those parts of the planet not immediately connected to the loved one just aren’t very important. Intimacy is a sense that the other person knows you in a deep way, and likes you3. Commitment is the belief that you want to keep seeing this person past, say, breakfast tomorrow. Those aren’t the word-for-word the official definitions, but close enough. Any given relationship can have any combination of these three components. Passion without the others is infatuation, intimacy on its own is platonic friendship, and commitment on its own is just rather sad. Passion plus commitment is fatuous love (think of sixteen year olds texting “I hart u 4eva” 60 times an hour), while intimacy plus commitment is companionate love (think of your favorite sibling here). Passion plus intimacy is romantic love (like you need any more encouragement to think about that one). Those who find all three in the same person, have consummate love. Lucky lucky them. Now let’s put our lab coats on and take a more intimate4 look at these various bits in the anatomy of love. Commitment
“Ever since that night, we’ve been together. Lovers at first sight, in love forever. It turned out so right, For strangers in the night.” -Frank Sinatra
Commitment comes in levels. Sometimes couples start off with a strong commitment that gets weaker, but usually it increases as people invest more in a relationship (Rusbult & Buunk, 1993). You won’t be surprised to learn, then, that people who are engaged or married report more commitment than do people who are only dating (Stanley & Markman, 1992). But in today’s topsy-turvy world of chaos and upset does commitment really mean so very much? Actually it does; couples who report more commitment have relationships that last longer, on average (Cate & Lloyd, 1992), and are also more willing to forgive the other person, leading to healthier and happier lives (Karremans, Van Lange, Ouwerkerk & Kluwer, 2003). Not bad, eh? One of the secrets to building commitment in relationships is to convince your partner that you really like them. A lot. People who are confident that their partner likes them seem pretty unshakeable about their relationships, to the point that they will engage in what John Holmes terms “knights move thinking”. If you tell them that their partner is angry at them, that their partner has some horrendous fault, or thinks that THEY have a horrendous fault, they report liking their partner, if anything, more than they did before. Told, for instance, that their partner is painfully quiet ("two hours, three syllables. Honest to heck"), they might make a knights move, acknowledging the fault, but connect it to a greater virtue: “Ah yes, he’s the strong silent type.” People who aren’t so sure about their partner (which, in practical terms, is often people with lower self esteem) behave quite differently. Faced with a challenge, they will often start backing out and proactively distancing themselves, seemingly preparing to reject their partner before they themselves can be humiliatingly rejected (Murray, Holmes & Griffin, 1996). On the darker side, Caryl Rusbult and John Martz (1995) interviewed battered women at a shelter, and found that feelings of commitment predicted who would return to their partner immediately on leaving the shelter. Where did this misplaced commitment come from you ask? It was higher in women who had few financial alternatives to their partner, were more heavily invested in their relationship (i.e., they were married), and who reported less severe abuse. Forgiveness is a good thing, but when we are financially or emotionally trapped into giving them, good things often do not stay so.Intimacy
“Seems like you're the only one who knows what it's like to be me. …Someone I'll always laugh with, even at my worst, I'm best with you.” -The RembrandtsIntimacy, more so than the other parts of love, is hard to put your finger on. One can have an intimate relationship with one’s spouse, one’s friend, one’s sibling, or one’s hair dresser (you’d be amazed). It doesn’t involve the violent pyrotechnics of passionate love, but is rather a more stable and warm sense of emotional closeness. The key active ingredient, as it turns out, seems to be self revelation. As you get to know somebody you tend to start by revealing fairly trivial things about yourself (“I’m Canadian”), and then as the relationship develops you reveal yourself more broadly (“I also like skiing”), and also more deeply, unveiling things you normally hide about yourself (“I’m afraid of my boss”). Eventually, at the higher peaks of intimacy, one shares one’s deepest hopes and fears (“I’m also afraid of maple syrup”). Indeed, you can run an experiment like so: Take two strangers, place in lab, and start them interviewing each other. Start with mundane topics (“where are you from?”) before gradually blending in more intimate questions. Keep stirring for half an hour or so, and a loose friendship should start to form (Collins & Milller, 1994). Real relationships tend to follow just such a pattern early on, with tit for tat exchanges of information that “broaden and deepen” over time (Altman & Taylor, 1973). Most people don’t feel comfortable spilling their guts to a person who hasn’t even given their name yet. If you reveal something to a stranger (“I wish I wasn’t reading this stupid article”) and they give nothing back, then perhaps you will infer that they don’t want to be any closer than they already are. From then on you’ll either shut down and stick to the weather, or possibly just feel shameless about pressing on. On the other hand, they might realize that you will interpret their silence as indifference, and try to avoid this by coming up with some tidbit in return (“you should have seen his last one. It was worse”). This may all seem a bit convoluted, but it can be unnerving when people get it wrong. The comedian Chris Rock, asked what it was like to be famous, once replied that it can give the impression of being on a second date the first time you met people. You don’t know them, but they feel like they know you, and so are immediately comfortable making deeper revelations than you normally expect from strangers.Fortunately as intimacy builds, so does confidence, and one can start relaxing about trying to decode all these signals. When your friend of five years tells you that they’ve just stolen the CEO’s toupee, you probably don’t have to worry about revealing anything right back (though you might have other problems at this point). And this seems to be what researchers actually find; people in intimate relationships that are more established seem to make their revelations randomly as they come up, rather than exchanging them tit for tat (Altman, 1973). All this sharing may seem like a lot of work, but partners who disclose more tend to wind up more satisfied with their marriages (Hansen & Schuldt, 1984). Intimacy can develop some strange dynamics as it deepens. For example, long-standing couples tend to start creating a collective memory bank between them. Without ever actually saying so, it becomes each of their ‘jobs’ to remember certain things. One partner may be in charge of remembering where they went on holiday each year, while the other specializes in remembering what day the trash goes out. The resulting “transactive” memory is often more sophisticated and effective than either partner could have managed alone (Wegner, Giuliano, & Hertel, 1985). When a spouse dies, people can find that they have lost more than a partner, but that they have literally lost a big chunk of their memory too. Perhaps stranger still is that partners can start to feel their senses of self merging. Think of a person you love closely. Look at the following pairs of circles, and pick the pair that represents the overlap between who you are, and who that person is.Psychologists have shown that the longer a couple have been together, and the closer they are, the more overlapping the circles they tend to pick (Aron, Aron & Smollan, 1992). They refer to this as “inclusion of self in the other.” As people grow together, the other becomes a part of who we are, like a tree growing to partly swallow a bolt that has been placed through it. This is part of why breakups of long relationships hurt so much - even if all parties agrees that splitting is for the best and that they are better off apart, each is losing a piece of them selves. That’s not something one can cure with a few happy thoughts. It usually takes time to restore oneself back to being completely whole, and there aren’t a whole lot of shortcuts around this. Such is the price that must sometimes be paid. Few great things are completely free. Passion
Bob: What think you, my lord, of... love? Edmund: You mean rumpy pumpy? - Blackadder IICast your mind back, oh, 300,000 years to a village of early hominids living on the Steppes of Africa. Zoom in on one roaming band, and still further to one man, Ug. He’s a nice guy, good looking, but just never really hit it off with any of the women he knew. Og is dull, Ig is paranoid, Ag is great as a friend, and he just never really understood Francis5. In short, nobody inspires him in any of the directions that lead to babies being born. Ug is not, by definition, your ancestor.This sort of thing happens all the time, but if it happened to a whole village at once then the local cave-estate would start getting a lot cheaper, if you follow my meaning. This is the type of situation up with which nature does not put. If people don’t produce kids fast enough, then nature will do as it always does in these situations: It cheats. Outrageously. Either it gives families the itch to start arranging marriages (which is common in much of the world), or, if there is just no sane reason to marry any of the local bachelor(ette)s, it goes the direct route and simply suspends our sanity for a while. We are so used to this happening that we don’t even think it’s weird. In fact, we came up with a name for it: “falling in love.” This is the passion part of Sternberg’s triarchy. If you think I’m exaggerating, then consider this: evidence indicates that passion (unlike intimacy and commitment) tends to fade after two to five years, at least in non-arranged western love marriages (Gupta & Singh, 1982). Guess what you can do in two to five years? Still not convinced? How about this: new brain research shows that love deactivates the brain regions associated with negative emotions, with social judgment and with judging other people's intentions and emotions (Bartels & Zeki, 2004). In other words, when nature decides it’s time for you to get with someone, it shuts down the punishment areas of your brain, turns a dimmer switch on the parts responsible for making critical judgments, and gives you a strong sense of longing. Of the various aspects of love’s anatomy, passion is the part most bound up with… well let’s face it, anatomy. Sexual attraction is one of its hallmark features. Just four words in, we already have a pretty shrewd idea what type of love “I want to hold your hand,” is singing about. It’s not exactly a subtle thing. The good news for couples worried that their passion might fade is that romantic love tends to bounce back after the kids leave home. The bad news is that this can take 20 plus years (Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986). Please realize that I’m not suggesting that passionate love is ONLY about having children, or that not having children in any way invalidates a person’s passionate love. It’s an intense and dramatic state that anyone can experience, and enjoy. Just because something evolved to select for a certain outcome doesn’t mean we have to always use it for that reason. For example, we probably have the large range of arm motion that we do because it helped us throw rocks and spears, but nobody thinks that a non-spear throwing life is any less a meaningful one.
Viola: “Tell me how you love her, Will.” Will: “Like a sickness and its cure together.” -Shakespeare in LoveWhen certain types of virus (‘retroviruses’ if you must know) get into our body, they wrangle themselves into our cells, split our DNA open, and write copies of themselves into the blueprint of our being, so that our own cells will later make copies of them. The parallel to passionate love is shocking enough that had Shakespeare known some molecular biology you can bet he would have spent many a dreary London evening dreaming up rhymes for “irus.” Though possibly the world is better off that he didn’t – as analogies go it lacks a certain amount of… romance. If Shakespeare can’t borrow from science, maybe science can borrow from the bard, if only for the odd snappy name. In what is sometimes termed the ‘Romeo & Juliet effect,’ opposition from parents can sometimes increase feelings of passionate love. In fact, pretty much anything that boosts physical arousal can cause people to temporarily think that they’re more in love (Hatfield, 1988), up to, and including, walking across a scary wobbling suspension bridge (Dutton & Aron, 1974), and running in place (White, 1981). Passionate love is a heart pounding rush of emotion, so anything that gets the heart pounding tends to help people feel that emotion more strongly. While this sort of boost doesn’t make relationships actually LAST any longer, it does give them a wonderfully tumultuous quality for a while. If you are writing a play and want maximum drama out of the passion between your characters, it might be best to end it before they have a chance to calm down (for a good example see Shakespeare, 1597). Conclusion
“Love is a many splendored thing.” -John Lennon.And so we can take off our white lab coats as our inspection draws to a close. I hope you loved what you read. Maybe you are worried that your relationship with this article won’t stand the test of time, though? Perhaps this will help: John Gottman has observed many relationships, and has consistently found a single feature which predicts which ones that last; they feature a lot of positive interactions -- smiling, touching, complimenting each other, laughing, and so on. Negative actions happen in them too, of course, but the positive outnumber the negative by a 6 to 1 margin in the couples that stick it out (Gottman, 1994). This ratio seems to be a critical marker. So let me tell you that this article, personally, thinks you are kind, nice, smart, and devastatingly good looking. There. If you can think of two nice things about it then you’ll get along famously. Don’t be shy now; just remember that while “all you need is love” has a nice ring, it becomes even more accurate if you switch the first two words. We all need love.
“Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still.” -Robert Sternberg
“Play the game
Play the game
Play the game
Of love.”
-QueenFinal score: victory psychologists. (really there are some things that should never be given a score, and love is one of them. But psychologists are my guys, I have to show some love).
Dedicated to Karen, the girl I’m lucky enough to love.
Footnotes1The wave of ersatz love wasn’t fatal – the computers were all fixed - but it did leave in its wake (as real love can also do) a messy wash of bellyaching.2Actually they call it “autonomy” rather than “authenticity.” Sadly this often confuses people who think autonomy means “doing any stupid thing I want whenever I want, no matter what anyone says,” while what they ACTUALLY mean is the feeling that you are freely choosing actions that are consistent with your deeper values.3Of course they do, you’re a lovely person. 4In the strictly PG 13 sense of the word. 5Oh but it was fine to call a caveman ‘Ug’?
GlossaryPassion is a wrench dropped into our emotions. If experienced on its own without any other types of love is considered mere infatuation. Intimacy is a sense of friendship, largely powered by self disclosure. If you have this on its own, then you have a platonic friendship. Commitmentis the belief that you wish to make a relationship keep working into the future. If you have this without the other two then you have “empty love”. Fatuous love is passion plus commitment. You’re thinking about the other person all the time, your pulse races when you think about them, and you like to giggle together about the word “forever,” even if you don’t have a deep intimate understanding of each other (well, yet). Companionate love is intimacy plus commitment. You’re great friends, you’re dedicated to being together, you just don’t have the erotic emotionally supercharged insanity of passion (which is good for, say, siblings). Romantic love is passion plus intimacy. Maybe you’re not thinking past the current wonderful moment, but for now you’re buckled into an emotional rollercoaster with a lovely friend. Nice! Consummate love is intimacy plus passion plus commitment. You’ve got it all. They don’t give prizes for this, it IS a prize.

Love at First Sight
By Stephen Bertman, on 30-04-2008 16:49
Views : 4717
Favoured : 232
Published in : Articles, Issue 6
The song "Some Enchanted Evening" from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific warns us that, when it comes to explaining love at first sight, "Fools give you reasons. Wise men never try." Notwithstanding this lyrical warning, more and more psychologists are trying to solve this age-old mystery.
According to a recent survey, almost two out of three Americans believe in love at first sight (Naumann, 2001). The survey reported that over half of them have actually experienced it, and over half of those went on to marry the person they had instantly fallen in love with.
The concept of love at first sight goes all the way back to the days of the ancient Greeks, who worshiped a goddess they called Aphrodite. (The Romans would later call her Venus.) Aphrodite could overwhelm mere mortals with her immense power and take control of their lives by overriding both common sense and conscience. In one legendary case, a handsome Trojan prince named Paris fell in love with a beautiful Spartan queen named Helen, and she with him, the very first time they saw each other. The only problem was that Helen was already married. When the two lovers sailed away together to Troy, Helen’s husband assembled an armada to bring his wife back home – leading the Elizabethan poet Christopher Marlowe (1604) later to remark that Helen’s was "the face that launch’d a thousand ships." A war ensued that lasted ten years, and the epic poems that war inspired – Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – would endure forever. As Naumann’s (2001) survey reveals, Aphrodite is alive and well today, still wielding her power over our lives.
Greek religion aside, how can we explain Helen and Paris’ attraction for each other? According to legend, Paris was a divinely handsome hero, and Helen the most beautiful woman in all the world, so perhaps it was their extraordinary looks that drew them together. But in saying that, we’d have to admit simultaneously that not every Dick or Jack is as dashing as Paris, nor every Jane or Jill as stunning as Helen. Though beauty may well be in the eye of the beholder, the fact that ordinary Dicks and Janes, or Jacks and Jills, fall hopelessly in love the moment they see each other suggests that something other than simple aesthetics is at work. If so, what could that mysterious "something" be?
That Fabulous Face
If Helen had "the face that launch’d a thousand ships," maybe we should start with the human face in our quest for an answer. After all, when people meet, their faces are what they see first. Because of the multiple components that make up the human face and together give it its distinctiveness, our face is the one part of our body that, more than any other, expresses our personal identity. For that reason, the face is the image pressed with affection into so many leather wallets and echoed with passion in the lyrics of so many love songs.
But what is there about a face that could make it so hypnotically appealing? One nose, two lips, two eyes – are such physical features sufficient in and of themselves to induce us to surrender our will and cosmically link our life with that of another human being? The answer seems to be yes, according to the findings of investigators.
The first striking phenomenon about faces and love is that so many people who are in love look alike, more so than chance would allow, and this has been documented empirically (Chambers, Christiansen, & Kunz, 1983; Griffiths & Kunz, 1973; Hinsz, 1989). Recently, Alvarez and Jaffe (2004) photographed 36 randomly selected couples and divided the photographs into six groups. Then, after cutting the pictures from each group in two, shuffling them, and placing them on a table, they invited a panel of neutral judges to match up the correct sexual partners in each group. The experiment was conducted as a double-blind test with neither the judges nor their supervisors knowing the right answers in advance.
According to chance, the judges should have averaged one correct match for every set of six pictures, about the same as guessing what double number would come up when a pair of dice is rolled. But instead of averaging one right match out of six, the judges got almost two out of six right each time. The close resemblances between sexual partners applied equally to those who were good-looking and to those who were not. In fact, the judges did well even when they were shown only the noses, eyes, or mouths of the test subjects. In short, the study seems to demonstrate that facial resemblances between romantic partners are significantly higher than mere chance would suggest.
In a separate study by psychologist Lisa M. DeBruine, people trusted strangers more when photographs of the strangers’ faces were digitally altered by image manipulation software to more closely resemble their own (DeBruine, 2002, 2005). These results supported the findings of a comparable computer-graphics study in which individual subjects had preferred members of the opposite sex with face-shapes similar to their own (Penton-Voak, Perrett, & Pierce, 1999).
Though research has suggested the faces of older couples grow to look alike because they tend to mimic each other’s expressions (Zajonc, Adelmann, Murphy, & Niedenthal, 1987), other research has shown that striking facial resemblances are evident among couples who are young as well as old, including those who are engaged and haven’t yet married (Hinsz, 1989).
Additional support, albeit unscientific, for "like attracts like" was provided by British portrait painter Suzi Malin in her popular book, Love at First Sight. Intrigued by the facial likenesses between certain celebrity couples (between, for example, Elvis and Priscilla Presley, or Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston), Malin created a series of "split-screen" portraits by photographically pairing the right half of one lover’s face with the left half of the other’s. Malin’s erotic Rorschach blots dramatically convey the astonishing visual correspondences between famous lovers based on the notable similarities between their facial proportions and/or features. However, as the lives of such celebrity couples sadly demonstrate, facial resemblances may be responsible for mutual attraction in the beginning (through a process unromantically called physiognomic homogamy), but in the long run they may not be sufficiently strong to hold a relationship together.
Why Fido Looks Like Fred
Next door to Malin’s portrait gallery hangs a very different set of photographs collected by California-based sociologist Gini Graham Scott: over fifty photos, not of look-alike celebrity couples but of look-alike dogs and their owners. Scott’s pictures appear in her book, Do You Look Like Your Dog?, and can be seen on her amusing website Do You Look Like Your Dog?.
Of course, one swallow (or, in this case, one St. Bernard) does not a summer make. The impressive similarities we see in such pictures, far from being persuasive evidence that people regularly buy pets that resemble them, may simply be anomalies that, in and of themselves, don’t prove a thing, however funny or fascinating the correlations might appear.
However, empirical studies have corroborated Scott’s observations of pet and pet-owner similarity (Coren, 1999; Roy & Christenfeld, 2004, 2005). Their findings were further confirmed by a similar research project conducted by Payne and Jaffe (2005). While attending the National Canine Exposition in Caracas, Venezuela, they took pictures of purebred dogs and their owners. To eliminate any potential clues as to what dogs went with what owners, Payne and Jaffe (2005) used a special photographic process that retained each face but eliminated any tell-tale background.
Additionally, the researchers adjusted the images of pets and owners so all faces would be comparably sized. Having done that, they then picked 36 canine faces and 36 human faces and arranged the photos into six groups, each group containing six dogs and six owners. Finally, judges were asked to pair up the right dogs with the right owners in each set. As in the other studies, the judges paired up owners and dogs more successfully than mere chance would allow (Payne & Jaffe, 2005; Roy & Christenfeld, 2004). While mere chance would have resulted in about one right pick out of six, the judges averaged two, three, or even four correct picks out of six each time.
Thanks to these careful experiments with pets we now know that Scott’s perception that dogs and owners tend to look alike is supported by rigorous scientific research. But why do people buy dogs that resemble them? And why do human couples tend to resemble each other as well?
In Plato’s Symposium, the Greek playwright Aristophanes recounted a fascinating legend. According to the tale, when human beings were first created, they were comical roly-poly creatures with two faces, four arms, and four legs. The gods then split them in two. Therefore, claimed the playwright, we spend our lives desperately searching for the matching half that we need to complete us.
Are we then somehow cosmically programmed to seek our "other half", a half that is our mirror image? Are we somehow, despite the dictum that "opposites attract", subconsciously drawn to people who resemble us?
The Face in the Water
The ancient Greeks provided an answer of sorts in the myth of Narcissus. According to the Roman poet Ovid, Narcissus was an extraordinarily handsome but self-centered young man who spurned all his lovers. Finally, one of them cursed him by praying that someday Narcissus should himself feel the pain of unrequited love. One day while walking through the woods, Narcissus came upon a pond and gazed into its waters. As he did so, he saw the face of a handsome young man looking up at him. Desiring to embrace the beautiful youth, Narcissus dipped his hands into the water but, as he did, the image broke up. Each time he drew closer to the surface of the water, the object of his love seemed to draw closer to him but, each time he reached into its waters, the image again disappeared. Frustrated in his self-love, a despondent Narcissus continued to sit by the edge of the pond until he finally withered away and died. Even in death, Ovid tells us, Narcissus continued to gaze at his own image in the waters of the river Styx.
The myth of Narcissus is the origin of the term narcissism, and teaches us the mesmerizing power of self-love, a power that can – if we are not vigilant – consume and destroy us. To be mindlessly attracted to a replica of the familiar face in our mirror may, in fact, be a prescription for a broken heart.
The Birds and the Bees
In fact, it may not be the face we see in our mirror, our own face, that guides us in the choice of a mate. The face that functions as our erotic template may in fact be one we saw long before we ever knew what a mirror was.
The observations of British naturalist Spalding (1873) and German zoologist Heinroth (1910) paved the way for research on imprinting in chicks and goslings. When goslings were hatched in an incubator (and were thereby prevented from seeing their actual mothers), they instead became attached to the first human beings they saw, and responded to them as though the people were their parents. Heinroth concluded that the first image the goslings saw somehow became stamped or "imprinted" on their impressionable young brains.
This theory of imprinting was later elaborated by the Austrian zoologist Lorenz (1937) and in decades of subsequent research (Lorenz, 1937, (1988; (Todd & Miller, 1993). As a result of his close observation of ground-nesting birds like ducks and greylag geese, Lorenz concluded that imprinting occurs quickly, takes place only during a critically brief period of time (usually by the first morning after hatching), and is irreversible. Deprived of the sight or sound of its mother, a little duckling or gosling will "adopt" as its parent the first thing it sees and/or hears: a human being (especially if he or she quacks in response to a hatchling’s plaintive peep), or, strangely in the absence of a voice, even a silent inanimate object like a cardboard box, a red balloon, or a white ball. If young ducks or geese imprint on a human, they will affectionately follow in a gaggle wherever their "parent" leads, a phenomenon that was strikingly illustrated in 1993 when Canadian artist and inventor Bill Lishman helped forgetful geese migrate 400 miles from Ontario to Virginia by training them to follow his ultralight airplane, and again the next year when he led another flock of avian amnesiacs by air all the way to South Carolina. By using imprinting to induce the geese to follow his airplane, Lishman became "Father Goose". His aerial exploits are described in his autobiography and were imaginatively and poignantly reenacted in the 1996 family film "Fly Away Home", starring Jeff Daniels. Lorenz’ basic theory of filial imprinting is now well documented and accepted by the scientific community. Investigators have even identified the part of a bird’s brain that enables a chick to imprint (Horn, 1998; McCabe & Nicol, 1999).
In addition to advancing the theory of filial imprinting, Lorenz also proposed a theory of sexual imprinting. According to this theory, the image imprinted on the brain of the young animal (originally designed by nature to make it easier for an offspring to identify and find its nurturing parent) also has the effect of defining and determining its mating preferences in the future. Thus, upon becoming sexually mature, the young animal seeks out a mate that closely resembles the parental imprint implanted in its brain.
A Lasting Impression
What, you may justifiably ask, does all this have to do with my love-life? If I fall in love at first sight, will I be acting like a "bird-brain"?? Well, perhaps. Birds and human beings are, after all, both links in evolution’s chain, though there is a huge biological gap between them.
Recent research, however, suggests that imprinting does indeed influence our choice of mates. People’s faces have been shown to resemble not only their sexual partners’ faces but also the faces of their own parents of the opposite sex, especially when it comes to hair color and eye color (Bereczkei, Gyuris, Koves, & Bernath, 2002; Little, Penton-Voak, Burt, & Perrett, 2003). The age of our parents also seems to influence our choice of mate, with females born to older parents being attracted to the faces of older men, and males born to older parents being drawn to the faces of older women (Perrett, Penton-Voak, Little, Tiddeman, Burt, Schmidt et al., 2002). Furthermore, daughters who were adopted between two and eight years old, or who rated their childhood relationships with their fathers highly, chose husbands whose faces looked like those of the fathers who raised them (Bereczkei, Gyuris, & Weisfeld, 2004; Wiszewska, Pawlowski, & Boothroyd, 2007).
Thus, it’s entirely possible that the person who made the most lasting visual impression on you when you were a young child or infant – a parent, a sibling, or even a nanny – unknowingly drew the mental roadmap to your romantic future. Your search for Mr. or Ms. Right might simply be an exercise, albeit a risky one, in post-hypnotic suggestion.

Engagement: A Source of Value, Quality of Life, or Both?

By Janina Marguc, on 08-12-2006 16:08
Views : 14549
Favoured : 368
Published in : Articles, Issue 1
Science and Practice at a CrossroadsWhen Romy was a child, her daily schedule was almost as busy as that of many adults. Just like all the other children, she woke up early to go to school, came home for lunch, and took a little break before doing her homework. Afterwards, however, she would not go and play with her friends or watch TV: Romy usually had plans for the rest of the day, ranging from weekly ballet classes and music lessons to tennis. Later, in high school, she worked in a bookshop one afternoon per week and on Saturdays. During the winter, Sundays were reserved for the ski club, which meant getting up at five a.m. to catch the coach that took the whole group to a ski resort nearby. Oftentimes, dance performances or tennis games were scheduled for the weekend, too, and still Romy found time for her friends, for school, and other activities like reading. How is that possible? And moreover, isn't it irresponsible of parents to overwhelm their children with scheduled activities while they are young, given that adulthood will come sooner than one will realize anyway? Looking back now, fifteen years later, Romy explains: "The happiest times in my life were those when I was actually most busy, but with different things that fulfilled me in a complementary way. There were also times when I was not engaged in so many things, basically just went to school, hung out with friends, and did some kind of sports once or twice a week. I got quite bored and grumpy, and ended up spending way too much time watching TV…" Romy seems like a fairly engaged person, but does that mean that the mere number of different tasks one engages in at a given stage of life can predict how happy one is?
Let me describe another example of an engaged person, the enthusiastic workaholic. The person might love her job even though it takes up most of her time, diminishing opportunities for socializing, being with her partner or family, for holidays, or merely reading a book. There is not much diversity involved in the kinds of tasks this person engages in, at least not beyond what the job itself can afford, but the person might still be very happy. This might be due to a mechanism involving strength of engagement: The more absorbed, involved, occupied and interested the workaholic is in her job, the more valuable it will be for her, even if he encounters obstacles that sometimes make everyday business a real pain (see Higgins, 2006). Yet, there is another kind of workaholic, the so-called non-enthusiastic type. This person also feels heavily compelled to work at his or her job, but does not necessarily like it (Bonebright, Clay, & Ankenmann, 2000). By the same principle that makes the enthusiastic workaholic adore her job, the non-enthusiastic workaholic may become increasingly repelled by it the more absorbed and occupied she becomes. This is because strength of engagement does not simply add to the positive value of things, but intensifies our subjective evaluation of any target object, be it positive or negative. Hence, if a person evaluates her job rather negatively in the first place, she will hate it even more the more she engages in it.The difference between the two examples is the level at which engagement is defined: While the latter perspective defines engagement as a state that people are in while they are doing something (e.g., pursuing a goal, reading a book, solving a problem, or playing a tennis match), the former example describes what one may call an engaged life, which is quite a different thing, at least at the first glance. What exactly is an engaged life then? Isn’t it just a busy, hectic way of spending one’s time? Or does the diversity of activities one pursues on a regular basis also play a role? Again, there is no single answer, but as you will later see, all answers have something in common. For example, if one were to ask people on the street what engagement or being engaged means, one would be likely to find answers ranging from being involved, committed, willing to expend time and energy on things one values, a sense of caring, and taking responsibility for something. If one were to ask researchers in the domain of positive psychology, on the other hand, they would explain that an engaged life refers to making use of one’s positive traits, including strengths of character (e.g., originality, integrity, or courage) and talents, which in turn leads to higher engagement, absorption, and flow in life, and thus adds to subjective well-being (Duckworth, Steen, & Seligman, 2005). Similarly, Cantor and Anderson (1999) believe that vigorous participation in personally involving daily life activities increases effective funtioning and subjective wellbeing. Speaking to the diversity aspect of engagement, the expression “engaged lifestyle” has also been used to describe an active involvement in various domains of life, including mental, social, and physical activities, which acts as a buffer against cognitive decline as people are getting older (Bosma, van Boxtel, Ponds, Jelicic, Houx, Metsemakers, & Jolles, 2002). So engagement not only makes you like your job more (provided you consider it to be at least a little bit positive), but also makes people happier and smarter in old age? This is a compelling conjecture supported by preliminary evidence, but it requires some further thought and empirical testing. Remember, all the findings are based on a slightly different definition of engagement! However, what all of them have in common is a sense of involvement in current activities or in what life has to provide.How can the average person make use of such findings in everyday life? Not everyone will be thrilled about reading dense scientific articles with lengthy passages on statistical methods and procedures. No, the “modern person” uses Google and searches online bookstores to find the information he or she needs. In fact, this is what I did as well in order to find out whether engagement as a term also exists in popular science and what context it is used in there. To my surprise, my search yielded an almost perfect hit, namely a book called “The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal” (Loehr & Schwartz, 2003) Wow. It sounds like a bestseller, doesn’t it? The title reminds you of those thousands of books out there that tell you how to live. One that both top-managers, commuting to their fancy office in lower Manhattan, and people who are fed up with checking off their to-do-lists merely to realize at the end of the day that they again did not manage to do everything they had planned would litteraly absorb. But the very title, proclaiming the power of engagement, also compelled me to take a closer look - I just couldn’t resist. And I became even more curious to learn more about the specific approach after I read the inside cover, which explains that the authors had originally designed their program to enhance the performance of athletes like Monica Seles and Jim Courier, but then adapted and applied it to other settings, mostly in the corporate world, where it has been greeted with great interest. Loehr and Schwarz promise their clients no less than to become “more fully engaged on and off the job, meaning physically energized, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned” through following their program. Indeed, the book is full of sample cases that are used to illustrate the core principles and practical aspects of a typical training. So, how does it work? I will not go too much into detail here due to a lack of space and because it would become pointless to read the book. Moreover, it is certainly not the one and only way to lead an engaged life and it is written from a very Western perspective. Nonetheless, the authors make some intriguing points and suggestions that are easy to implement and apparently are capable of turning the workaholic who usually eats his or her sandwich in front of the computer screen rather than taking a proper break and feels the job leaves no time for family, friends, or other valued activities, into a more effective, socially apt, and generally more balanced person. So, the first core principle established by the authors is that managing energy rather than time is the key to high performance. For instance, rather than cramming as much as possible into our daily schedule, we should pay attention to the quality of the time we spend on things. Trivial as it sounds, people often ignore this principle, putting efficiency at risk. The second principle contests that full engagement requires drawing energy from four dimensions of resources: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Thus, one should take care of building up strong capacities on each of those dimensions to become fully engaged instead of tripping over the slightest obstacle, becoming sick, depressed, stressed out, or left without a sense of why one is doing what one does. Third, energy capacity is assumed to decrease with overuse and under-use, so it’s not only those who never rest will trade off abilities to focus and invest effort in their personal goals or relationships, but also those who rest too much. They will become inactive and lose drive. The fourth principle is that capacities can be built up by pushing beyond one’s limits in a systematic way, similar to a muscle that can be trained by straining it systematically. And last but not least, the key to full engagement and sustained performance is the use of so called “positive energy rituals”, which are very specific routines implemented in daily life, helping to renew one’s energy periodically and then being able to expend it again. For instance, going for a five to ten-minute walk after an exhausting meeting helps to refresh one’s mind before going back to one’s desk and work more efficiently on the next task. Without such a break, it is difficult to switch to the next task and sustain concentration, because of depletion (see also Baumeister, Muraven, & Tice, 2000). Easy and simple as this seems, many people don’t actually make use of such rituals, because they think they have too little time to lose or don’t know what they could do during breaks. Even calling a close friend or your grandma for a few minutes takes your mind off work and at the same time shows the person that you care for him or her. In fact, implementing positive rituals is an intriguingly useful thing to do, because after a while they become habits one does not have to think about anymore and that therefore do not require conscious effort anymore. Moreover, the idea of building up capacities by positive rituals goes in line with the assumption from positive psychology that a sound and solid basis of positive feelings, habits, and ways of thinking buffers against negative events and adds to the perceived quality of life. In practice, the training usually starts by assessing a person’s current behavioral patterns, physical health, personal strengths, deepest values and goals, as well as asking him or her about their most disturbing performance barriers at work, like lack of focus, negative thinking, little passion, or dissatisfying personal relationships. Then, the person together with the trainer comes up with a few positive rituals targeted to remove these barriers and build up the appropriate “muscle” to deal with them in a more effective way, as well as a concrete timeframe for when to implement each ritual. Again, making intentions specific or even framing them in an “if…then…” sentence increases the likelihood of actually performing a behavior (Gollwitzer, 1999). Overall, for people who are thinking about changing something in their daily lives because they don’t feel energized or dull, or those who want to make better use of their time, this book might be a fun and motivating companion with plenty of suggestions that are easy to try out. However, it should be noted that the authors use a rather Western approach that might make little sense to people from other cultures, and their claims are based on a mixture of years of practical experience and some scientific findings. For those with a preference for scientifically established “facts”, findings seem to suggest that in terms of improving the quality of life through engagement, the following things are important: First, you need to find things you value, let yourself become immersed in them, and you will value them even more. Second, make sure that you don’t completely neglect aspects of life that are highly important to you, like social relationships or activities you enjoy for intrinsic reasons. And third, allow yourself to renew energy capacities, for example with physical activity or rest. Ultimately, a lot of empirical work is still necessary not only to reconcile the applied perspective with scientific views, but also to find out what engagement really is, what exactly it does to us, when engagement is useful and when it is necessary to disengage. How people are able to do that is yet another question to address, for if positive things become more valuable to us the more we engage in them, how would we ever try out something new? One thing is for sure: No matter how people arrive at feeling engaged and absorbed – either in their lives or in a specific activity – it is certainly not a bad thing at all.
GlossaryPositive psychology is a field within psychology which refers to the scientific study of positive experiences and positive individual traits, and the institutions that facilitate their development; it is concerened with well-being and optimal functioning and assumes that these are not equal to the absence of sadness, surrefing, and worry, but also include contentment, joy, and satisfaction, which in turn depend on building up and cultivating positive emotions and strengths.Cognitive decline refers to a decreasing ability to perform well on tasks that require speedy, analytical, or creative thinking due to aging

Attitudes Towards Sexual Relationships Can Be Judged From Photos Of Your Face
ScienceDaily (Apr. 9, 2008) — Suitors can tell a young person's attitude to sexual relationships by the look on their face, according to new research which gives deeper insight into mate attractiveness.

The Durham University-led study of 700 heterosexual participants also found that young men and women look for complete opposites when it comes to relationships with the other sex.
Men generally prefer women who they perceive are open to short-term sexual relationships whilst women are usually interested in men who appear to have potential to be long-term relationship material.
The scientists say the research shows people can use their perceptions to make more informed partner selection depending on the type of relationship they are pursuing. The study is a significant step in further understanding the evolution of partner choice, according to the research team from Durham, St Andrews and Aberdeen Universities.
Participants were asked to judge the attractiveness and attitudes to sex of the opposite sex from their facial photographs. These perceptual judgements were then compared with the actual attitudes and behaviours of the individuals in the photographs, which had been determined through a detailed questionnaire. The people in the photographs were all in their early 20s.
The experiments found that the men and women taking part could generally judge from photographs who would be more interested in a short-term sexual relationship. In the first study sample of 153 participants, 72 per cent of people correctly identified the attitudes from photographs more than half of the time. However, further questioning showed that the participants were not always confident in their judgements.
The research, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, also found that women who were open to short-term sexual relationships were usually seen by others as more attractive -- although researchers can not determine precisely why without further investigation. The men who were most open to casual sex were generally perceived as being more masculine-looking, with facial features including squarer jaws, larger nose and smaller eyes. These findings support previous research carried out by the Durham team which found that women see masculine men as more likely to be unfaithful and as worse parents.
Lead author Dr Lynda Boothroyd from Durham University's Psychology Department said: "Our results suggest that although some people can judge the sexual strategy of others simply from looking at their face, people are not always sure about their judgements possibly because the cues are very subtle. Yet preferences for different types of face were actually quite strong.
"This shows that these initial impressions may be part of how we assess potential mates -- or potential rivals -- when we first meet them. These will then give way over time to more in depth knowledge of that person, as you get to know them better, and may change with age".
Dr Ben Jones, from the University of Aberdeen's Face Research Lab, said "Lots of previous studies have shown that people can judge a lot about a person from their face, including things like health and even some personality traits like introversion, but this really is the first study to show that people are also sensitive to subtle facial signals about the type of romantic relationships that others might enjoy."
Professor David Perrett from the University of St Andrews cautioned: "While faces do hold cues to sexual attitudes, men should not presume any kind of relationship is wanted from appearance alone since women's choice is what matters. Indeed most women found promiscuous-looking guys unattractive for both short and long-term relationships".
In the study, participants were shown pairs of photographs or 'averaged' facial images of men and women in their early 20s with two opposing attitudes to relationships. The participants were asked to choose the face that they felt would be more open to short-term sexual relationships, one-night stands and the idea of sex without love. They were also asked which face they thought was the most attractive for a long- or short-term relationship, who was more masculine or feminine, and who they thought was generally attractive.

Too Much Commitment May Be Unhealthy For Relationships, Professor Says
ScienceDaily (Dec. 2, 2008) — Romantic relationships establish special bonds between partners. Oftentimes, passionate rapport leads to permanent partnerships, and ultimately, the start of families.

Sometimes, however, one or both partners place too much emotional weight on their relationship. As a result, men or women may tend to evaluate their self-worth solely based on the outcomes of their romantic interactions. This is what psychologists term as relationship-contingent self-esteem (RCSE), and, according to University of Houston researcher Chip Knee, it's an unhealthy factor in romantic relationships.
"Individuals with high levels of RCSE are very committed to their relationships, but they also find themselves at risk to become devastated when something goes wrong -- even a relatively minor event," said Knee, UH assistant professor of psychology and director of the university's Interpersonal Relations and Motivation Research Group. "An overwhelming amount of the wrong kind of commitment can actually undermine a relationship."
Knee added that RCSE can trigger depression and anxieties during even the most minor or common relationship-based incidents, such as miscommunication, short spats over noncritical matters or a critique of one's personality or appearance.
It also factors into one or more partners developing manic, obsessive (or needy) behaviors with regard to love.
RCSE might place one at risk for serious mood changes after break-ups, divorce or threats to one's relationship. Identifying it during the early stages of a relationship can prevent such negative outcomes or help partners recognize that they are incompatible.
Knee and a group of researchers observed the impact of RCSE among heterosexual college students in a series of studies. Their findings were presented in the paper "Relationship-Contingent Self-Esteem - The Ups and Downs of Romantic Relationships," published in the flagship Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Collaborating with Knee were Amber L. Bush of UH, Amy Canevello of the University of Michigan and Astrid Cook of Idiro Technologies.
Included in these studies was a 14-day diary procedure in which 198 participants recorded the most positive and negative events in their romantic relationships.
Also documented in this daily diary were participants' feelings about themselves and their relationships.
"What we found with this particular study was that people with higher levels of RCSE felt worse about themselves during negative moments in their relationships," Knee said. "It's as if it doesn't matter why the negative occurrence happens or who was at fault. The partners with stronger RCSE still feel badly about themselves."
Individuals with RCSE also are prone to react more emotionally to relationship-based situations, Knee added. Instead of taking a step back, analyzing a situation and determining how to best address it, those with RCSE respond immediately and impulsively.
"When something happens in a relationship, these individuals don't separate themselves from it," he said. "They immediately feel personally connected to any negative circumstance in a relationship and become anxious, more depressed and hostile."
RCSE is one of the research areas being explored by Knee and UH's Interpersonal Relations and Motivation Research Group (IRMRG).
The group studies close relationships and health and conducts research via laboratory experiments, surveys and longitudinal diary methods.
Research is focused on how individuals' beliefs about relationships guide their thoughts, emotions and behaviors; the unhealthy ways in which people attach themselves to close relationships; and how to reduce or even eliminate interpersonal defensiveness.

Morningness Is A Predictor Of Better Grades In College
ScienceDaily (June 10, 2008) — Morningness is a predictor of better grades in college, according to a research abstract that will be presented on June 9 at SLEEP 2008, the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).

The study, authored by Kendry Clay, of the University of North Texas, focused on 824 undergraduate students who were enrolled in psychology classes. The subjects completed a health survey which included questions regarding sleep habits and aspects of daytime functioning.
According to the results, college students who are evening types had lower GPAs, while those who are morning types had higher GPAs.
"The finding that college students who are evening types have lower GPAs is a very important finding, sure to make its way into undergraduate psychology texts in the near future, along with the research showing that memory is improved by sleep," said Daniel J. Taylor, PhD, of the University of North Texas, Ms. Clay's faculty mentor, a co-author, and who developed the concept for this study. "Further, these results suggest that it might be possible to improve academic performance by using chronotherapy to help students entrain their biological clock to become more morning types."

Grades In College Directly Linked To Health-related Behaviors
ScienceDaily (Oct. 22, 2008) — Lack of sleep, excessive television/computer screen time, stress, gambling, alcohol and tobacco use and other health-related issues are taking a toll on college students' academic performance, according to a study released by the University of Minnesota Boynton Health Service.

"Our study shows that there is a direct link between college students' health and their academic achievement. This is the first time that anything like this has been published where Grade Point Average is linked to all these behaviors," said Dr. Ed Ehlinger, the director and chief health officer of the University of Minnesota Boynton Health Service.
Today's report, "Health and Academic Performance: Minnesota Undergraduate Students," is part of one of the most comprehensive studies of college students' health in the nation. About 24,000 students from 14 Minnesota colleges and universities were randomly selected to participate in this study and 9,931 completed the 2007 College Student Health Survey Report. The results only include undergraduate students from two-year and four-year institutions. All five University of Minnesota campuses were included in the survey.
In the results, 69.9 percent of college students reported they were stressed and 32.9 percent of those students said that stress was hurting their academic performance. In fact, the mean GPA for students saying stress impacted their academics was 3.12, compared with the 3.23 mean GPA for students who didn't believe it was affecting their academics. "While this may seem like a small difference in GPA, when you are looking at over 9,000 students the impact of this difference is huge," Ehlinger said.
Twenty percent of students reported that sleep difficulties impacted their academics. In fact, those students who reported getting fewer nights of adequate sleep had a mean GPA of 3.08 compared with a 3.27 mean GPA for those who do not report sleep deficiencies.
"The more days students get adequate sleep -- the better GPAs they attain," Ehlinger said. "There is a direct link between the two."
When it comes to excessive television and computer use (not including academic use), 30.4 percent of students surveyed reported excessive screen time. Thirteen percent of those with the issue reported that it impacted their studies; these students had a lower mean GPA of 3.04 compared with a mean GPA of 3.27 for those who said the problem did not impact them.
"Turning off the computer or TV and going to sleep is one of the best things our students can do to improve their grades," Ehlinger said.
Students who reported that they had smoked during the past 30 days had a 3.12 mean GPA compared with a 3.28 mean GPA for students who reported not smoking. The study revealed surprising information for students who even smoke infrequently.
"Even students who smoked once or twice in a month had lower GPAs than those who didn't smoke," Ehlinger said. "Using tobacco to calm down or 'to be social' is lowering students' grades."
Ehlinger hopes that this study's results will spur college students to change behavior and for colleges to pay more attention to the health of their students.
"We hope this information helps students make wise decisions," Ehlinger said. "If you're investing a lot of time and money in your education, do you really want to waste your investment on behaviors that interfere with your academic success?"
The report also includes information on mental health, health insurance, physical activity levels, financial issues, drug use, injury, sexual assault and alcohol use.
Members of the public, along with students and health officials, should pay attention to the results of this report, because the health of college students is important to society, Ehlinger said.
"College students are so important for our economic development -- the development of our society," Ehlinger said. "One way to protect that investment in our future is to help them stay healthy."
Along with the University of Minnesota's campuses, the survey included Alexandria Technical College; Anoka-Ramsey Community College; Lake Superior College; Minnesota State Community and Technical College; North Hennepin Community College; Northwest Technical College; Bemidji State University; Concordia College and Minnesota State University, Moorhead

Mom Was Right -- If You Don't Have Anything Nice To Say About Someone, Don't Say Anything At All: The Boomerang Effect Of Gossip Is Discovered
ScienceDaily (Mar. 19, 1998) — WASHINGTON -- It appears to go against common sense -- not to mention classic psychological theory -- but researchers writing in the April edition of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology say they have identified a common, but apparently mindless, psychological phenomenon that plays a previously unrecognized role in the way people form impressions of other people. Specifically, they've found that when someone attributes positive or negative traits to someone else, the listener will often attribute those same traits to the speaker. "In other words," the authors write, "politicians who allege corruption by their opponents may themselves be perceived as dishonest, critics who praise artists may themselves be perceived as talented, and gossips who describe others' infidelities may themselves be viewed as immoral."

In a recent communication, the authors suggest that this phenomenon could play a role in the public's reaction reaction to participants in the recent White House scandal. "For example," they note, "when Kenneth Starr accuses Bill Clinton of perjury, Starr himself may be seen as more deceitful. Similarly, when Linda Tripp claims that Monica Lewinsky had sex with the President, Tripp herself may be seen as more promiscuous. The gist of our research is that when you gossip, you become associated with the characteristics you describe, ultimately leading those characteristics to be 'transferred' to you."
The researchers conducted a series of four studies on the phenomenon they call spontaneous trait transference. Three of the four studies involved participants looking at photographs accompanied by brief statements. In the first study, the statements were ostensibly about someone the person in the photograph knew. In the second, the statements were either about the person in the photograph or about someone else. In the third study, participants were clearly told that the photographs and the statements had nothing to do with each other; they had been paired at random. In the final study, participants watched videotapes of actors answering off-screen questions about themselves or about someone they knew.
Some of the statements accompanying the photographs (or made on the videotape) were designed to elicit a positive or negative trait. For example "cruel" was implied by the statement "He hates animals. Today he was walking to the store and he saw this puppy. So he kicked it out of his way." But consistently through the studies, participants attributed the elicited trait to the speakers, even though these speakers described someone other than themselves. This occurred even when participants were specifically told that there was no connection between the speakers and the statements, suggesting, the authors say, that this phenomenon is irrational and largely outside of conscious awareness.

Sexual Intimacy: Why College Men May Hear 'Yes' When Women Mean 'No'
ScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2008) — Faulty male introspection may explain why men so often misinterpret women's indirect messages to stop or slow down the escalation of sexual intimacy, according to new research by UC Davis communication professor Michael Motley.

"When she says 'It's getting late,' he may hear 'So let's skip the preliminaries,'" Motley says. "The problem is that he is interpreting what she said by trying to imagine what he would mean -- and the only reason he can imagine saying 'It's getting late' while making out is to mean 'Let's speed things up.'"
Motley calls it the "introspection" explanation: "Males' inferred meanings for women's indirect sexual resistance messages are more similar to the meanings males would have intended by those same messages than to the meanings women intend."
Previous research has found that up to 85 percent of college women have had at least one experience in which a man attempts to escalate physical intimacy beyond the point that she has said "stop," experiences they usually regard as unpleasant.
Motley's research during the past decade suggests miscommunication is a significant reason for the problem in many cases. (The research does not address rape or other situations in which a man indeed understands "no" but ignores it.)
In one study, Motley gave 30 female and 60 male UC Davis undergraduates a multiple-choice questionnaire that asked about 16 common "female resistance messages." The messages ranged from very direct -- "Let's stop this" -- to very indirect -- "I'm seeing someone else." Four potential interpretations were listed for each message; only one was "stop."
For "I'm seeing someone else," for example, the following four interpretations were listed:
a) You want to go further but you want him to know that it doesn't mean that you're committed to him;
b) You want to go further but you want him to be discreet, so that the other guy doesn't find out;
c) You want to go further but you want him to realize, in case you end up "going together," that you may do this with someone else while you're seeing him;
d) You don't want to go further.
The women in the study were asked to recall a time when they used one of the messages, and to choose the answer that best matched what they meant when they said it. Half of the men were asked to recall a time when they were with a woman who communicated each message, and to choose the interpretation that best matched what they thought the woman meant when she said it. The other 30 men were instructed to choose the interpretation that best matched what they would mean if they were to communicate the messages.
The questionnaire study showed that men were accurate at interpreting direct resistance messages like "Let's stop this." But they were as apt to interpret "Let's be friends" to mean "keep going" as to mean "stop." And few of them would mean "stop" if they were to deliver any of the indirect messages themselves.
In related studies, Motley has also shown that most women use indirect messages out of concern that men will be offended or angered by direct messages -- but that most men actually accept direct resistance messages easily and without negative reactions.
"Studies in Applied Interpersonal Communication" also reports Motley's research into the behaviors and conditions that determine the fate of platonic friendships when one party develops unrequited romantic feelings for the other. Chapters by other researchers explore such topics as interpersonal guilt, how to give advice so people will listen to it, and what constitutes effective emotional support.
While intended as an academic text, the book contains practical conclusions and recommendations. For example, Motley's chapters lay out these lessons from his research into unwanted escalation of sexual intimacy:
Men need to be aware of the many ways that women may say "stop" without using the word "stop."
When a man asks himself during intimacy, "Why did she say that?" he should not try to answer the question by imagining what he would mean if he said the same thing.
When in doubt, ask. "So it's getting late; does that mean we should stop?"
Women should use direct messages.
A woman who cannot be direct should at least work a direct message into the indirect one: "It's getting late, so I'd like to stop."
The research appears in "Studies in Applied Interpersonal Communication" (Sage Publications, 2008), a new book edited by Motley. The book is due on academic bookshelves soon.

On Pointe @)~~

7:45 AM