Deodorant Changes Attractiveness Of Men And Women In Different Ways

How men who appear low in masculinity can be more attractive to women.

How men who appear low in masculinity can be more attractive to women.

Wearing deodorant makes men who are seen as low in masculinity more attractive to women, new research finds.

The boost to attractiveness was not seen for men whose faces are already perceived as being high in masculinity.

The research underlines the fact that women are more sensitive to odours than men.

Dr Caroline Allen, who led the study, said:

“We’re all aware that fragrances are often marketed as being feminine or masculine – take Old Spice for instance, who have recently parodied this with their hyper-masculine adverts, claiming that their product will allow you to smell like a super masculine guy.”

The conclusions come from a study of hundreds of women and men who rated pictures and odour samples.

Dr Allen explained the results:

“Our study found that when women apply a deodorant it does increase their rated body odour femininity, as would be expected.

Though it seems as though something else is at play when it comes to male body odour and male deodorants.

Only those men who were rated low in masculinity to start with showed a significant increase after applying their deodorants, and the men who were highly masculine initially showed no increase after deodorant application.

This means that men are able to use deodorant to artificially raise their game so to speak, levelling the playing field by making themselves comparable, at least as far as odour is concerned, to more masculine men.

Our evolutionary preferences have likely shaped this difference in fragrance design: research findings show that we actually don’t like high levels of masculinity which are often associated with aggressiveness and hostility, but we show no upper limit on our femininity preferences.”

The study was published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior (Allen et al., 2016).

Smell image from Shutterstock

Your Popularity Revealed By Answer To A Classic Moral Dilemma

Whether you sacrifice one innocent person to save the lives of others?

Whether you sacrifice one innocent person to save the lives of others?

Would you kill one innocent person to save five others?

That is the impossible moral question that may help others judge how much to trust you.

Most people choose to save one innocent life rather than a group of others, new research finds.

Choosing to save one innocent life generally makes people appear more trustworthy.

Here is a typical moral dilemma that psychologists call the ‘trolley problem’:

“An out of control trolley (tram) is speeding towards a group of five people.

You are standing on a footbridge next to a large man.

If you push him off the bridge onto the track below, this will stop the trolley.

He will die, but the five others will be saved.

What do you do?”

The results showed that choosing not to push the large man off the bridge created the most trusting impression on others.

Those who did choose to push the man off the bridge, but only after finding the decision difficult, were trusted more than those who found the decision easy.

Mr Jim A.C. Everett, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Psychologists have argued deontological intuitions arise from ‘irrational’ emotional responses, but our work suggests another explanation: popularity.

If people who stick to moral absolutes are preferred as social partners, expressing this view will reap benefits for oneself.

Over time, this could favor one type of moral thinking over another in the overall population.

And this makes sense — we shudder at the thought of a friend or partner doing a cost/benefit analysis of whether you should be sacrificed for the greater good.

Rather than reflecting erroneous emotional thinking, making moral judgments based on rules may be an adaptive feature of our minds.”

Dr Molly Crockett, one of the study’s co-authors, explained the study’s premise:

“…we used several variations of moral dilemmas where a person must decide whether or not to sacrifice an innocent person in order to save the lives of many others.

We then asked whether people who made either rule-based or cost/benefit moral judgments were preferred as social partners.

Across 9 experiments, with more than 2,400 participants, we found that people who took an absolute approach to the dilemmas (refusing to kill an innocent person, even when this maximized the greater good) were seen as more trustworthy than those who advocated a more flexible, consequentialist approach.

When asked to entrust another person with a sum of money, participants handed over more money, and were more confident of getting it back, when dealing with someone who refused to sacrifice one to save many, versus with someone who chose to maximize the overall number of lives saved.”

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Everett et al., 2016).

The Facial Expressions That Appear Most Attractive To Others

People rated someone’s attractiveness after they demonstrated emotions including happiness and fear.

People rated someone’s attractiveness after they demonstrated emotions including happiness and fear.

Almost everyone has experienced a near instant attraction to another person, whether just social or something more.

According to new research, neuroscientists now think this could be down to an instant ability to read facial emotions.

People who find each other’s emotions easy to read are naturally drawn to each other.

Reading emotions successfully gives people the feeling of understanding and connectedness.

The study’s author write:

“Humans interacting with other humans must be able to understand their interaction partner’s affect and motivations, often without words.

We asked participants to watch different persons experiencing different emotions.

We found the better a participant thought they could understand another person’s emotion the more they felt attracted toward that person.”

For the research, people were shown pictures of six women whose attractiveness they rated.

They then watched videos of the women demonstrating different facial emotions such as happiness and fear.

Participants then rated the women’s attractiveness again.

Brain scans showed that interpersonal attraction was linked to a kind of neural synchrony.

The study’s authors explain:

“Individual changes in interpersonal attraction were predicted by activity in the participant’s reward circuit, which in turn signaled how well the participant’s ‘neural vocabulary’ was suited to decode the other’s behavior.”

In other words, being able to read someone’s emotions successfully is a rough guide that they are similar to you.

Similarity and connectedness are two of the most important factors for interpersonal attraction.

As the study’s authors write:

“Being able to comprehend another person’s intentions and emotions is essential for successful social interaction.

To accomplish a common goal, partners must understand and continuously update information about their partner’s current intentions and motivation, anticipate the other’s behavior, and adapt their own behavior accordingly.”

Or, as the slightly cynical headline writers at GQ would have it: “Crying On A First Date Could Get You Laid”

https://www.spring.org.uk/2016/02/why-couples-differ-physical-attractiveness.php

The study was published in the journal PNAS (Anders et al., 2016).

Crying image from Shutterstock

The Female Body Shape Men Find Most Attractive

From Texas to Tehran and from Dakar to Beijing, the results were the same.

From Texas to Tehran and from Dakar to Beijing, the results were the same.

Women who are almost underweight are most attractive to men, a recent study finds.

Dr Lobke Vaanholt, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Although most people will not be surprised that extreme thinness was perceived as the most attractive body type, since this prevails so heavily in media, culture and fashion, the important advance is that now we have an evolutionary understanding of why this is the case.”

For the research, people in 10 different countries were rated a deck of cards which showed various body shapes.

They were asked to put these in order from most to least attractive.

Women with a BMI of 19, which is on the borderline with being underweight, were preferred across the board.

From Texas to Tehran and from Dakar to Beijing, the results were the same.

As a woman’s BMI increased, they become progressively less attractive.

The simple reason men find a low BMI attractive is that it signals youth.

The typical BMI of an 18 to 20-year-old is between 17 and 20.

Professor John Speakman, who led the research, explained the evolutionary aspect of the findings:

“Fitness in evolutionary terms comprises two things: survival and the ability to reproduce.

What we wanted to investigate was the idea that when we look at someone and think they are physically attractive, are we actually making that assessment based on a hard-wired evolutionary understanding of their potential for future survival and reproductive ability?”

The study was published in the journal PeerJ (Wang et al., 2015).

The Fascinating Reason Plain Faces Are Seen As More Attractive

Some types of faces are easier on the eye and the brain.

Some types of faces are easier on the eye and the brain.

Simple faces are easier for the brain to process and store so we find them more attractive, new research suggests.

The study had men looking at pictures of women and ranking them.

Those ranked higher tended to have faces without distinguishing features.

The reason could be that the brain has a preference for looking at things which are easier to encode.

As the authors write:

“Sparseness was found [to be] positively correlated with attractiveness as rated by men and explained up to 17% of variance in attractiveness.

[…]

Our results show that female faces which are rated the most attractive by men should be the most sparsely coded by the primary visual cortex of these men.”

They continue:

“A century of research in empirical aesthetics has revealed preferences for certain forms and patterns that appear universal, being shared between societies in humans and between species.

[…]

The best documented of these preferences are for symmetrical, averaged and prototypical forms, curved contours and scale-invariant patterns.

[…] these preferred stimuli have in common to be efficiently coded by the perceptual system…”

In other words simple faces are literally easy on the eye and easy on the brain.

The study was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science (Renoult et al., 2016).

Pretty face image from Shutterstock

The Intriguing Reason Pretty Faces Can Transfix Us

The research gave people small dose of morphine, which stimulates the reward system.

The research gave people small dose of morphine, which stimulates the reward system.

Pretty faces activate the brain’s reward system, which is why they are so pleasant to look at, a new study finds.

Ms Olga Chelnokova, who led the study, explained:

“The reward system is involved in generating the experience of pleasure when, for instance, we enjoy tasty food or happen to win a lottery.

It turns out that the same system is also engaged in creating the feelings of pleasure when we look at a pretty face.”

In the study people were given a small dose of morphine, which stimulates the reward system.

They then looked at a series of faces which varied in attractivity.

Ms Chelnokova explained the results:

“Participants rated the most attractive faces as even more attractive, and were willing to do more presses on button that let them look at the picture for a longer time.

They also spent more time looking at the eyes of the people in the pictures.

Importantly, we observed the opposite behaviors when we blocked the reward system with another drug, such that, for instance, our participants gave lower ratings to the most attractive faces.”

In a further study, Ms Chelnokova tracked people’s eye movements while they looked at 3D faces.

Here is an image showing the typical pattern of which areas our eyes routinely scan.

Red areas are looked at the most, followed by yellow, green and blue.

151110102344_1_540x360

Ms Chelnokova explained the results:

“The importance of the eyes in our evaluation of others has been well documented.

For instance, it is hard to recognize someone if their eyes are hidden, while if someone is lying to us, we can often see it in their eyes.

In general, if we are to understand how another person feels, the eyes can give us most of the required information.”

Along with the nose and cheeks, the eyes are especially important for us.

The studies were part of Ms Chelnokova’s PhD.

Pretty face image from Shutterstock

8 Psych Studies On How Women Can Get Hit On More…Which is Most Obvious?

Could these be 8 of the most obvious findings about attraction ever?

Could these be 8 of the most obvious findings about attraction ever?

Women wearing high-heels are more attractive to men than those wearing flats, a recent study has found.

Also, the higher the heels, the greater men’s helping behaviour and the more women are hit on.

The French research is the first ever to look at the vexed question of how a woman’s high-heels affect the behaviour of men (Guéguen, 2014).

The research had a woman wearing either flat shoes, 5cm heels or 9cm heels while asking both men and women to fill in a questionnaire or just hanging around in a bar.

The study is the latest in a long-running line of research into important questions we all know the answer to but scientists have gone ahead and confirmed anyway.

Here are the other seven:

  • Curvy: men rate women with a lower waist-to-hip ratio as more attractive.
  • Larger breasts: men were more likely to pick up a female hitchhiker when her breast size was artificially increased (by padding that is, not surgery!)
  • Blonde hair: men are more likely to approach women with blonde hair for a date than either brunettes or redheads. Blonde waitresses also make better tips.
  • Tattoos: women with tattoos are twice as likely to be approached for a date by men.
  • Make-up: women wearing make-up attract 33% more advances from men.
  • Revealing dress: women wearing revealing clothes are rated more sexually receptive than those dressed conservatively.
  • Wear red: men speaking with a woman in a red shirt ask more intimate questions. Female hitchhikers wearing red are more likely to be picked up.

If it’s troubling you that all of these points are related to the body rather than the mind, then Professor Guéguen has the following reminder:

“Research has found that across all cultures men care more about physical features in potential opposite-sex mates while women care more about resource features.

In sex differences in human mate preferences conducted in 37 cultures, Buss (1989) reported that males value physical attractiveness in potential mates more than females do in 34 cultures.”

And you thought we lived in enlightened times?

Incidentally, for men who are looking to be more attractive to women, I only have one piece of advice to add to the usual (get rich and famous) and that’s to always carry a guitar case around with you.

High heels image from Shutterstock

Four Ways This Familiar Flirty Behaviour is Attractive

Why strangers who do this together are more likely to date.

Why strangers who do this together are more likely to date.

There’s little doubt that humour is romantically attractive — but the question is why?

Could it be about displaying your intelligence to a prospective partner?

Actually it’s about much more than that according to Dr Jeffrey Hall, the author of a new study on the subject:

“The idea that humor is a signal of intelligence doesn’t give humor its due credit.

If you meet someone who you can laugh with, it might mean your future relationship is going to be fun and filled with good cheer.”

In fact, Dr Hall suggests there are four reasons humour is romantically attractive:

  1. Displaying an agreeable and social personality. Dr Hall said: “Part of what it means to be social is the ability to joke along with people.”
  2. Gauging interest. Dr Hall said: “Men are trying to get women to show their cards. For some men it is a conscious strategy.”
  3. Following the unwritten script that men are jokers and women are laughers. Dr Hall said: “The script is powerful and it is enduring, and it dictates everything from asking someone out to picking up the tab.”
  4. Humour is valuable for its own sake. Dr Hall said: “Shared laughter might be a pathway toward developing a more long-lasting relationship.”

The study found that the more a man tries to be funny and the more a woman laughs, the more likely the woman is to be interested in a date.

An even better indicator of romantic interest is when the couple are seen laughing together.

The conclusions come from a study of 51 pairs of single, heterosexual college students.

They met each other for the first time and talked for 10 minutes.

The psychologists found that both men and women tried to be funny an equal amount.

But it was the man’s humour, along with the woman’s response, that was critical to romantic interest.

Unexpectedly, the researchers found no connection between humour and intelligence.

The study was published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology (Hall, 2015).

Romance image from Shutterstock

How To Fall in Love: 36 Questions That Can Make Love Blossom in 45 Minutes

Could these 36 questions help you form the most intimate relationship of your life?

Could these 36 questions help you form the most intimate relationship of your life?

These 36 questions to fall in love could make you closer and more intimate with another person than with anyone else in your life — in just 45 minutes.

When New York psychologist Professor Arthur Aron and colleagues used these questions experimentally, they discovered that 30% of people formed their closest ever human relationship.

And, on average, people had become at least as close as their average established relationship, which had taken years to form.

The questions, published in the journal Interpersonal Closeness, were originally designed to create closeness between two people so that psychologists could study how relationships form (Aron et al., 1997).

Apart from anything else, though, most people found it really fun.

The instructions start with the following:

“We believe that the best way for you to get close to your partner is for you to share with them and for them to share with you.

In order to help you get close we’ve arranged for the two of you to engage in a kind of sharing game.

One of you should read aloud the first [question] and then BOTH do what it asks, starting with the person who read the slip aloud.

When you are both done, go on to the second [question] — one of you reading it aloud and both doing what it asks.

Alternate who reads aloud (and thus goes first) with each new [question].” (Aron et al., 1997).

And here are the questions:

36 Questions To Fall In Love – Set 1

1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?

2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?

3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?

4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?

5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?

7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.

9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?

11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.

12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?

36 Questions To Fall In Love – Set Two

1. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?

2. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?

3. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

4. What do you value most in a friendship?

5. What is your most treasured memory?

6. What is your most terrible memory?

7. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?

8. What does friendship mean to you?

9. What roles do love and affection play in your life?

10. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.

11. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?

12. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

36 Questions To Fall In Love – Set Three

1. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling …”

2. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share …”

3. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.

4. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.

5. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.

6. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?

7. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.

8. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?

9. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?

10. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?

11. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?

12. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

Intimate conversation image from Shutterstock

Brain Map of Love and Desire

Is there any connection between love and sexual desire in the brain?

Is there any connection between love and sexual desire in the brain?

The first study to look at the neural difference between love and sexual desire finds remarkable overlaps and distinct differences.

Researchers from across the world brought together the results from 20 studies which measured neural activity for both love and sexual desire (Cacioppo et al., 2012).

Participants in the studies were often looking either at pictures of their partners or at erotically stimulating images.

The results showed that some strikingly similar brain networks were activated by love and sexual desire.

One of the study’s authors, Professor Jim Pfaus, explained:

“No one has ever put these two together to see the patterns of activation. We didn’t know what to expect — the two could have ended up being completely separate. It turns out that love and desire activate specific but related areas in the brain.”

The regions activated were those involved in emotion, motivation and higher level thoughts.

This finding suggests that sexual desire is more than just a basic emotion, but involves goal-directed motivation and the recruitment of more advanced thoughts.

Love is built on top of these circuits, with one key area of difference being in the striatum. This area of the brain is typically associated with the balance between higher- and lower-level functions.

One part of the striatum is mostly concerned with things that are inherently pleasurable, while another part is mostly concerned with learning the connections between behaviour and rewards.

In other words: this is where you learn what feels good and start to get the taste for it. The striatum, then, is where the love habit is formed.

It’s a similar process as that involved in drug addiction. Pfaus explains:

“Love is actually a habit that is formed from sexual desire as desire is rewarded. It works the same way in the brain as when people become addicted to drugs.”

Image credit: Brandon Warren

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