Category: Relationships

It is well-known that women prefer taller men — but does this translate into more happiness?

Around 50% of US women will not accept a romantic partner who is shorter than them (Yancey & Emerson, 2014).

Even worse news for the shorter man is an earlier study finding that only 4% of women would accept a shorter man.

Is the preference justified?

If happiness is the aim, the answer could be yes.

The bigger the height difference between husband and wife, the happier the wife, new research finds.

But this effect faded over the years.

After around 18 years of marriage the height difference was no longer linked to a wife’s increased happiness.

That the benefit of happiness lasted so long is surprising.

Usually people get used to things that make them happier relatively quickly.

This suggests height difference could be a special factor, or is a proxy for some special factor.

For example, it could be that taller men are happier men — and this happiness is infectious.

Dr Kitae Sohn, the study’s author, said:

“Although it has been known that women prefer tall men in mating for evolutionary reasons, no study (before this one) has investigated whether a taller husband makes his wife happier.”

The conclusions come from an analysis of thousands of Indonesian women, some of who were followed up over 14 years.

Dr Sohn writes in the article that the relative tallness of her husband has various advantages for the wife:

“One is the intrinsic value of height; that is, women simply like tall men, while unable to say why.

This is similar to people favouring fatty, salty, and sugary foods without knowing exactly why: such foods are essential to survival but were scarce as humans evolved – hence craving such foods increased reproductive fitness in the past.

Similarly, the female preference for male height increased women’s reproductive fitness.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Sohn, 2016).

The very nature of the app could be depersonalising and make people feel disposable.

People using Tinder have more negative body perceptions, new research finds.

On top of worse perceptions of their body, men using Tinder also have lower self-esteem.

Tinder is a dating app with 50 million users where you swipe left or right to like or reject matches.

The very nature of Tinder — which focuses on looks and quantity of people — could be depersonalising and make people feel disposable.

Dr Jessica Strübel, one of the study’s author, said:

“Tinder users reported having lower levels of satisfaction with their faces and bodies and having lower levels of self-worth than the men and women who did not use Tinder.”

For the research 1,317 people were asked about their satisfaction with their bodies along with Tinder use and other psychological constructs.

Dr Strübel said:

“We found that being actively involved with Tinder, regardless of the user’s gender, was associated with body dissatisfaction, body shame, body monitoring, internalization of societal expectations of beauty, comparing oneself physically to others, and reliance on media for information on appearance and attractiveness.”

The nature of the study means we can’t say that Tinder is causing lower self-esteem in men and body dissatisfaction in both sexes.

It could be that people with lower self-esteem feel more drawn to these apps.

Still, the study does highlight potential problems in the way men see their bodies.

Dr Strübel said:

“Although current body image interventions primarily have been directed toward women, our findings suggest that men are equally and negatively affected by their involvement in social media.”

The study was presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in Denver, Colorado.

Psychologist challenges the orthodox view with evidence from studies conducted over 30 years.

Single people are more likely to experience psychological growth and development than those who are married, a psychologist claims.

This is just one perk of being single which is often ignored.

Others include greater sociability and resilience.

The conclusions come from surveying 814 studies conducted over 30 years.

Dr Bella DePaulo, addressing the American Psychological Association’s 124th Annual Convention, said:

“The preoccupation with the perils of loneliness can obscure the profound benefits of solitude.

It is time for a more accurate portrayal of single people and single life — one that recognizes the real strengths and resilience of people who are single, and what makes their lives so meaningful.”

While the advantages of being married are well-known, if over-stated, Dr DePaulo wants the perks of singledom to be acknowledged and understood.

Dr DePaulo finds several advantages to being single, after reviewing the research:

• Single people are more connected to their friends, family, neighbours and co-workers.
• Single people derive more meaning from their work than married people.
• Single people have greater self-determination.

It is the greater self-determination, along with other factors, that may contribute towards single people being more likely to experience a feeling of growth and development as a person.

In addition, single people who feel self-sufficient are less likely to experience negative emotions.

These advantages are seen despite the many benefits that society grants to married people, Dr DePaulo pointed out:

“People who marry get access to more than 1,000 federal benefits and protections, many of them financial.

Considering all of the financial and cultural advantages people get just because they are married, it becomes even more striking that single people are doing as well as they are.”

Being married, of course, has its advantages as well and Dr DePaulo does not claim one status is better than the other:

“More than ever before, Americans can pursue the ways of living that work best for them.

There is no one blueprint for the good life.

What matters is not what everyone else is doing or what other people think we should be doing, but whether we can find the places, the spaces and the people that fit who we really are and allow us to live our best lives.”

The study was presented at the American Psychological Association’s 124th Annual Convention by Dr Bella DePaulo.

A promising new way to maintain healthy relationships.

Focusing on the future can help couples deal with relationship conflicts, new research finds.

When people imagined how they would feel in one year’s time, they thought and felt better about their relationships.

Mr Alex Huynh, the lead author of the study, said:

“When romantic partners argue over things like finances, jealousy, or other interpersonal issues, they tend to employ their current feelings as fuel for a heated argument.

By envisioning their relationship in the future, people can shift the focus away from their current feelings and mitigate conflicts.”

For the study, people thought back to a recent conflict with a friend or romantic partner.

One group thought about how they felt in the moment.

Another group imagined how they would feel one year in the future.

Both groups then wrote about their relationships.

An analysis of the text showed that thinking about the future had positive effects:

• People wrote more positive about their relationships.
• They used more words related to forgiveness and understanding.

The study shows the importance of how people respond to conflict in a relationship.

Mr Huynh said:

“Our study demonstrates that adopting a future-oriented perspective in the context of a relationship conflict — reflecting on how one might feel a year from now — may be a valuable coping tool for one’s psychological happiness and relationship well-being.”

The trick of giving yourself a little psychological distance has all sorts of other benefits.

It can help you generate self-insight, gain emotional control, improve self-control and even trigger wise thoughts.

For more on this, read: Psychological Distance: 10 Fascinating Effects of a Simple Mind Hack

The study was published in Social Psychological and Personality Science (Huynh et al., 2016).

Couple image from Shutterstock

How to keep the spark alive in long-term relationships.

Responsiveness is the key to keeping the sexual spark alive in long-term relationships, new research finds.

A deep level of understanding and the willingness to invest resources is central to responsiveness.

A responsive partner shows understanding to their other half, rather than dismissing their problems or ignoring them.

It is about being aware and responding to the emotional needs of the other person.

Professor Gurit Birnbaum, the first author of this study, said:

“Our research shows that partners who are responsive to each other outside the bedroom are able to maintain their sexual desire.

Responsiveness — which is a type of intimacy — is so important in a relationship because it signals that one is really concerned with the welfare of the other, but in a way that is truly open and informed about what the other cares about and wants.”

For the research 100 heterosexual couples kept diaries over six weeks.

They reported their own sexual desire and the responsiveness of their partner outside the bedroom.

The results showed that both men and women felt more sexual desire when their partner was more responsive to their nonsexual needs.

Women in particular responded to higher levels of responsiveness in their partner with greater levels of sexual desire.

The study’s authors explain:

“People who perceive that their partners understand and appreciate their needs can view sexual interactions as one way to enhance intimate experiences with responsive partners and, accordingly, may experience greater desire for sex with them.”

Professor Birnbaum said:

“Being nice’ and things like that are not necessarily based on who the partner is and what the partner really wants.

When a mate is truly responsive, the relationship feels special and unique and he or she is perceived as valued and desirable.

Sexual desire thrives on increasing intimacy and being responsive is one of the best ways to instill this elusive sensation over time; better than any pyrotechnic sex.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Birnbaum et al., 2016).

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Certain emotional behaviours are linked to physical health problems, study finds.

How people react to marital disagreements has a strong relationship with their health.

Dealing with relationship conflict by getting angry predicts blood pressure problems, new research finds.

Stonewalling — that is, shutting down emotionally — is linked to stiff muscles and a bad back.

Professor Robert Levenson, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Our findings reveal a new level of precision in how emotions are linked to health, and how our behaviors over time can predict the development of negative health outcomes.”

Dr Claudia Haase, the study’s first author, said:

“We looked at marital-conflict conversations that lasted just 15 minutes and could predict the development of health problems over 20 years for husbands based on the emotional behaviors that they showed during these 15 minutes.”

The results — which come from 20 years of data — might encourage some people to consider anger management, the researchers think.

Dr Claudia Haase said:

“Conflict happens in every marriage, but people deal with it in different ways.

Some of us explode with anger; some of us shut down.

Our study shows that these different emotional behaviors can predict the development of different health problems in the long run.”

The study has followed 156 middle-aged couples since 1989.

The couples, who are all from San Francisco, are heterosexual and have been together for many years.

Every year they undergo a battery of tests, including being videotaped interacting in the lab.

They found that displays of anger and stonewalling were linked to high blood pressure and back problems respectively.

Professor Levenson said:

“For years, we’ve known that negative emotions are associated with negative health outcomes, but this study dug deeper to find that specific emotions are linked to specific health problems.

This is one of the many ways that our emotions provide a window for glimpsing important qualities of our future lives.”

The study was published in the journal Emotion (Haase et al., 2016).

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How feeling wealthy affects men and women’s satisfaction with their relationships.

When men feel wealthy, they are less satisfied with their partner’s appearance, new research finds.

Essentially, when men are wealthier, they feel their value is higher.

For women, though, how much money they have doesn’t seem to matter to how satisfied they are with their relationship.

Similarly, women do not feel that being richer increases how attractive they are.

Money, however, makes both sexes more bold.

When they feel richer, people are more likely to approach others that they find attractive.

Professor Darius Chan, one of the study’s authors, said:

“…wealthy men attach more importance to a mate’s physical attractiveness setting higher standards and preferring to engage in short-term mating than those who have less money.

However, for committed women, money may lead to less variation in their mating strategies because losing a long-term relationship generally has a higher reproductive cost.”

The results come from a Chinese study of heterosexuals involved in long-term relationships.

Here is how the study’s authors explain the results:

“…individuals’ mate preferences could be conditional on their self-perceived mate value…

Men’s mate value is based more on resources than women’s mate value, while women’s mate value depends more on physical attractiveness than men’s mate value.”

Professor Chan explained the motivation for the study:

“We wanted a better understanding of the psychological importance of money in the development of romantic relationships because very little is known about this subject.

That way people would have a better perspective of the relationships they are in.”

Would the same results be seen outside China?

Professor Chan thinks they would:

“Whereas it remains as an empirical question to be answered, we expect that our findings are likely to be found in other cultures as well because the basic mechanisms of mate selection have been found to be rather similar across culture.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (Li et al., 2016).

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The ‘corticolimbic system’ plays an important role in mood disorders, such as depression.

The brain system governing the emotional response is most heritable from mother to daughter, but less so from mother to son, a new study finds.

Fathers, though, are less likely to pass on their emotional brain circuitry to either boys or girls.

The ‘corticolimbic system’ plays an important role in mood disorders, such as depression.

The corticolimbic system is made up of the amydala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

The research could explain why depression is strongly heritable from mother to daughter.

Not that this means mothers are solely responsible for any depression which daughters develop, Dr Fumiko Hoeft explained:

“Many factors play a role in depression — genes that are not inherited from the mother, social environment, and life experiences, to name only three.

Mother-daughter transmission is just one piece of it.

But this is the first study to bridge animal and human clinical research and show a possible matrilineal transmission of human corticolimbic circuitry, which has been implicated in depression, by scanning both parents and offspring.

It opens the door to a whole new avenue of research looking at intergenerational transmission patterns in the human brain.”

The conclusions come from a series of brain scans conducted on 35 families.

The researchers found that the volume of grey matter was more similar in certain areas related to the emotions in mothers and daughters.

Other family relationships did not show the same strong connection.

Dr Hoeft continued:

“This gives us a potential new tool to better understand depression and other neuropsychiatric conditions, as most conditions seem to show intergenerational transmission patterns.

Anxiety, autism, addition, schizophrenia, dyslexia, you name it — brain patterns inherited from both mothers and fathers have an impact on just about all of them.”

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience (Yamagata et al., 2016).

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Study found reduced risk of cancer, stroke and heart disease.

More social ties at a younger age are linked to better physical well-being latter on, a new study finds.

The physical benefits include a lower risk of many long-term health problems including stroke, heart disease and cancer.

The study comes on top of earlier findings that older adults also live longer if they have more social connections.

Professor Kathleen Mullan Harris, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Based on these findings, it should be as important to encourage adolescents and young adults to build broad social relationships and social skills for interacting with others as it is to eat healthy and be physically active.”

For adolescents, the researchers found, larger social networks protected against inflammation and obesity.

For older adults, being socially isolated was worse for health than either hypertension or diabetes.

Professor Harris said:

“The relationship between health and the degree to which people are integrated in large social networks is strongest at the beginning and at the end of life, and not so important in middle adulthood, when the quality, not the quantity, of social relationships matters.”

The study drew from four nationally representative surveys in the US.

Social relationships were taken into account along with key markers of physical health like waist circumference, body mass index and blood pressure.

Professor Yang Claire Yang, the study’s first author, said:

“We studied the interplay between social relationships, behavioral factors and physiological dysregulation that, over time, lead to chronic diseases of aging — cancer being a prominent example.

Our analysis makes it clear that doctors, clinicians, and other health workers should redouble their efforts to help the public understand how important strong social bonds are throughout the course of all of our lives.”

The study was published in the journal PNAS (Yang et al., 2015).

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