How To Be Alluring: This Posture Increases Women’s Attractivity

Only a small change in posture is enough to increase attractiveness and be more alluring.

Only a small change in posture is enough to increase attractiveness and be more alluring.

A slight arching of a woman’s back — extending her buttocks outward — makes her more alluring, research finds.

It might help to explain the mystery of why high-heeled shoes are so popular.

They cause women to arch their backs slightly to help them balance.

The study found that only relatively small changes in how much a woman’s back was arched made her look more appealing.

Mr Farid Pazhoohi, who led the study, said:

“Increased curvature increases the perception of attractiveness.”

How to be alluring study

Both men and women looking at the 3D models used in the study were found to focus their attention on the rear of the models, eye-tracking revealed.

Below, the image on the right shows an arched back.

When men and women looked at the back and side views the effect of increased attractiveness was particularly pronounced.

Mr Pazhoohi said:

“The latter highlights the unique influence of an arched back on the perception of attractiveness.

The perception of attractiveness and visual attention to the hip region suggests that lordosis or the arching of the back might signal human females’ proceptivity or willingness to be courted.

This also might explain why women wear high heel shoes and why wearing high heel shoes increases womens’ attractiveness.”

Animals such as sheep, cats, ferrets and primates adopt this curved posture, presenting the rear, to signal that they are ready to mate.

It seems that it is also an unconscious signal in humans.

The study was published in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science (Pazhoohi et al., 2017).

Small Facial Scars Are Attractive On Men’s Faces — Sometimes

Facial scars on men are seen as attractive to women but only under certain circumstances — they are signs of bravery and health.

Facial scars on men are seen as attractive to women but only under certain circumstances — they are signs of bravery and health.

Women find small facial scars attractive when looking for a short-term relationship, research finds.

Previously it was thought facial scars made men look less attractive in this context.

However, it seems women may link facial scars to bravery and health.

For long-term relationships, male facial scarring made no difference to women’s perceptions of attractiveness.

When men looked at pictures of women with small scars and without, it made no difference, whatever type of relationship they were considering.

Dr Rob Burriss, the study’s first author, said:

“Male and female participants were shown images of faces that displayed scarring from injury or illness, and were asked to rate how attractive they found the person for long-term and short-term relationships.

Women may have rated scarring as an attractive quality for short-term relationships because they found it be a symbol of masculinity, a feature that is linked to high testosterone levels and an indicator of good genetic qualities that can be passed on to offspring.

Men without scars, however, could be seen as more caring and therefore more suitable for long-term relationships.

Study tests if facial scars are attractive

The results come from a study of 223 people who were asked to look at pictures of opposite-sex faces.

Some people had small facial scars, while others did not.

The facial scars made men 6 percent more attractive, on average.

Dr Burriss said:

“The results demonstrate that we may have more in common with non-Western cultures than previously thought.

The perception that scarring is a sign of strength is a view shared by the Yanomamö tribe of Venezuela for example, who use face-paint to accentuate scars that result from ritualised club fights designed to test a man’s endurance against repeated strikes to the head.

The assumption that scarring is a sign of bravery is also consistent with the historical tradition of academic fencing in Western culture, whereby scarring on a man was often evidence of his courage and ability to withstand an opponent’s blow.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Burriss et al., 2009).

How To Make Your Face Look Younger Revealed By Research

How to make your face look younger using the facial contrast effect.

How to make your face look younger using the facial contrast effect.

When women’s facial features stand out more, they look younger, research finds.

What the researchers call ‘facial contrast’, was linked to an appearance of youth, regardless of ethnic group.

Naturally, people’s facial features merge into each other with age.

Ms Aurélie Porcheron, the study’s first author, said:

“Facial contrast refers to how much the eyes, lips and eyebrows stand out in the face in terms of how light or dark they are or how colorful they are.”

Higher facial contrast has also been previously linked to looking more healthy and more feminine.

How to make your face look younger

This is the first study to test the effect on Caucasian women as well as those from other ethnic groups.

The researchers included Chinese Asian women, Latin American women, South African women and French Caucasian women.

Women were aged between 20 and 80 years old.

The researchers showed digitally manipulated photos to people and asked them to judge who was younger.

The photo with the higher facial contrast was picked as the younger face 80% of the time.

Ms Porcheron said:

“People of different cultures use facial contrast as a cue for perceiving age from the face, even though they are not consciously aware of it.

The results also suggest that people could actively modify how old they look, by altering how much their facial features stand out, for example by darkening or coloring their features.”

Cosmetics make your face look younger

Ms Porcheron is currently the head of research at Chanel, the cosmetics manufacturer.

No need to wonder why Chanel might be interested in this psychological finding.

The study’s authors conclude:

“Because cosmetics were shown to enhance facial contrast, this work provides some support for the notion that a universal function of cosmetics is to make female faces look younger.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (Porcheron et al., 2017).

What Does It Mean If Someone Touches Your Arm?

A simple (nonsexual) arm touch can increase compliance, helping behaviour, attraction, and signal power.

A simple (nonsexual) arm touch can increase compliance, helping behaviour, attraction, and signal power.

To get around in the world, we mainly rely on our eyes and ears.

Touch is a sense that’s often forgotten.

But touch is also vital in the way we understand and experience the world.

Even the lightest touch on the upper arm can influence the way we think.

To prove it, here are 10 psychological effects which show just how powerful nonsexual touch can be.

1. Arm touch for money

A well-timed touch can encourage other people to return a lost item.

In one experiment, users of a phone booth who were touched were more likely to return a lost dime to an experimenter (Kleinke, 1977).

The action was no more than a light touch on the arm.

People will do more than that though; people will give a bigger tip to a waitress who has touched them (Crusco & Wetzel, 1984).

(Stop giggling at the back there!)

2. Arm touch for help

People are also more likely to provide help when touched.

In one study, strangers who were touched lightly on the arm were more likely to help an experimenter pick up things they had dropped (Gueguen, 2003).

The percentage of people who helped went up from 63% to 90%.

3. Arm touch for compliance

The power of a light touch on the upper arm often extends more broadly to compliance.

In a study by Willis and Hamm (1980), participants were asked to sign a petition.

While 55% of those not touched agreed to sign it, this went up to 81% of those participants touched once on the upper arm.

A second study asked people to fill in a questionnaire.

The same touch increased compliance from 40% to 70%.

4. Touch twice for more compliance

And you can increase compliance with a second light touch on the arm.

Vaidis and Halimi-Falkowicz (2008) tried this out when asking people in the street to complete a questionnaire.

Those touched twice were more likely to complete the questionnaire than those touched once.

The effects were strongest when men were touched by a female surveyor.

5. Or, touch for a fight!

However, the acceptability of touch, especially between men, depends a lot on culture.

When Dolinski (2010) carried out a compliance experiment in Poland, he got quite different results for men and women.

In Poland men asked to do the experimenter a favour reacted badly to a light touch on the arm.

This seemed to be related to higher levels of homophobia. Women, however, still reacted positively to touch.

6. Arm touch to sell your car

Unlike Poland, France has a contact culture and touching is acceptable between two men.

So French researchers Erceau and Gueguen (2007) approached random men at a second-hand car market.

Half were touched lightly on the arm for 1 second, the other half weren’t.

Afterwards those who had been touched rated the seller as more sincere, friendly, honest, agreeable and kind.

Not bad for a 1-second touch.

We can safely assume the results would have been quite different in Poland!

7. Arm touch for a date

You won’t be surprised to hear that men show more interest in a woman who has lightly touched them.

But here’s the research anyway: Gueguen (2010) found men easily misinterpreted a light nonsexual touch on the arm as a show of sexual interest.

Perhaps more surprisingly women also responded well to a light touch on the arm when being asked for their phone number by a man in the street (Gueguen, 2007).

This may be because women associated a light 1 or 2-second touch with greater dominance.

(Bear in mind, though, that this research was in France again!)

8. Touch for power

Touch communicates something vital about power relationships. Henley (1973) observed people in a major city as they went about their daily business.

The people who tended to touch others (versus those being touched) were usually higher status.

Generally we regard people who touch others as having more power in society (Summerhayes & Suchner, 1978).

9. Forearm touch to communicate

Touch comes in many different forms and can communicate a variety of different emotions.

Just how much can be communicated through touch alone is demonstrated by one remarkable study by Hertenstein et al. (2006).

Using only a touch on the forearm, participants in this study tried to communicate 12 separate emotions to another person.

The receiver, despite not being able to see the toucher, or the touch itself, were pretty accurate for anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude and sympathy.

Accuracy ranged from 48% to 83%.

To put it in context, that is as good as we can do when we can see someone’s face.

10. Massage for maths

So, if you can do all that with a touch, imagine what you could do with a massage!

Well, one study has found that it can boost your maths skills (Field, 1996).

Compared with a control group, participants who received massages twice a week for 5 weeks were not only more relaxed but also did better on a maths test.

Once again, witness the incredible power of touch.

Boring disclaimer

All of these studies rely on the touch being appropriate.

Being touched can have quite different meanings depending on situation, culture and gender.

Generally the touch referred to is a light touch on the upper arm—the safest place to touch someone you don’t know.

Also, research has identified a small proportion of people—both men and women—who don’t like to be touched at all during everyday social interactions.

These people are not likely to respond positively in any of these situations.

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What Percentage Of Communication Is Nonverbal? 93% Is A Myth

The idea that 93 percent of communication is nonverbal is a myth deriving from studies by Albert Mehrabian and others.

The idea that 93 percent of communication is nonverbal is a myth deriving from studies by Albert Mehrabian and others.

The idea that the vast majority of communication occurs nonverbally is quoted everywhere from advertising to popular psychology articles.

In fact the original experiments from which these findings derive only applied to communicating attitudes and feelings.

That hasn’t stopped them being applied universally.

Even just considering attitudes and feelings though, these studies on what percentage of communication is nonverbal have been questioned.

What percentage of communication is nonverbal?

Some of the most influential studies to claim high importance for the nonverbal component of communication were carried out by Albert Mehrabian (Mehrabian, 1972).

In one study, participants had to judge the positive, negative or neutral content of various words.

Three were chosen to be positive – ‘dear’, ‘thanks’ and ‘honey’ – three neutral – ‘oh’, ‘maybe’ and ‘really’ – and three negative – ‘brute’, ‘don’t’ and ‘terrible’.

Each was then read in either a positive, neutral or negative tone of voice.

In a second study, participants had to judge if the word ‘maybe’ was positive, negative or neutral from looking at a photograph of a person with a positive, negative or neutral face.

From these, and similar experiments, Mehrabian claimed the face conveyed 55 percent of the information, the voice 38 percent and the words just 7 percent.

Criticism of nonverbal communication study

The criticism of these experiments is pretty obvious.

Although they are interesting, they don’t provide an effective analogue for real social situations.

This is what psychologists call a lack of ecological validity.

It’s not often we use just one word on its own (unless you count swearing).

12.5 times more powerful?

A social psychologist, Michael Argyle, tried to address the problems with Mehrabian’s work.

In his studies whole passages of text were acted out in positive, negative and neutral tones.

The actual methodology was more complicated than Mehrabian’s work but also led to the conclusion that nonverbal channels are 12.5 times more powerful in communicating interpersonal attitudes and feelings than the verbal channel.

The same criticism comes to mind again.

Why should the reading of a paragraph be considered an analogue for spontaneous forms of speech?

Demand characteristics

Perhaps an even stronger criticism of these studies relates to their ‘demand characteristics’.

Demand characteristics is a term psychologists use when they are referring to participants in an experiment acting in ways they think the experimenter wants them to act.

People generally want to please, they want to go with the flow.

So, if they can work out what the experimenter is after, they’ll often try and give it to them.

So, when watching videos in these experiments it will be obvious to participants the speeches are acted, not spontaneous.

Participants pick up on what the experimenter wants from the social cues provided.

Indeed, one study has found that when the purpose of the experiment is actually well-camouflaged from the participants, the dominance of nonverbal communication disappears (Trimboli & Walker, 1987).

So, maybe most of the meaning from communication actually does come from the words that people use.

Boring, but probably true.

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How To Make Yourself Look Unrecognizable

It is remarkably easy to disguise yourself — indeed, to make yourself look unrecognizable, research finds.

It is remarkably easy to disguise yourself — indeed, to make yourself look unrecognizable, research finds.

Simple disguises, like a new hairstyle and makeup, are surprisingly effective at making people unrecognizable, research finds.

Makeup, hair style and colour and even facial hair growth or removal can make someone difficult to recognise.

For the study, models were recruited and told to try and change their appearance — to look unrecognizable.

Hats and dark glasses were not allowed as these are prohibited in real-life security settings.

Here are some examples:

The results showed that disguises reduced people’s ability to spot the same person by 30 percent.

This was despite the fact that they were warned the target’s appearance may have changed.

Participants were only able to see through disguises when they knew the person well.

Dr Rob Jenkins, study’s co-author, said:

“We shouldn’t be complacent about deliberate disguise in criminal and security settings. When someone puts their mind to concealing their identity, it can be very effective.

Familiarity with the people who are disguising themselves improves accuracy.

When you are unfamiliar with a face you are easily fooled by superficial changes in hairstyle or colouration.

However, when you ‘know’ a face you tend to rely more on internal facial features — the eyes, nose and mouth — which are much harder to alter.”

Evasion is the best way to make yourself look unrecognizable

The most effective form of disguise, to make people look unrecognizable, was trying not to look like yourself.

This is known as an evasion disguise.

In comparison, impersonating someone else was not as effective.

Dr Eilidh Noyes, the study’s first author, said:

“With evasion disguise, you can change your appearance in any way you like.

With impersonation, you can only change your appearance in ways that resemble your target, so your options are much more constrained.

Deliberate disguise poses a real challenge to human face recognition.

The next step is to test automatic face recognition on the same tasks.”

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (Noyes & Jenkins, 2019).

Beard Psychology: 4 Facts About Effects Of Male Facial Hair

Beard psychology: what psychological effects does a beard have? Heavy vs light stubble vs clean shaven. All important questions answered!

Beard psychology: what psychological effects does a beard have? Heavy vs light stubble vs clean shaven. All important questions answered!

If you’re having trouble telling men from women, here’s a clue.

Men are the ones with hair sprouting from their faces (alright more hair sprouting from their faces).

Some men attempt to cover up the effect of all those androgens by shaving off their beards.

Others prefer to send out manly signals in all directions (well, either that or they can’t be bothered to shave).

Who is right? What are the facts about beards everyone should know?

Here are four very important facts about beards.

1. Beards are attractive…or are they?

Whether or not beards are attractive to women is a big area of controversy in beard-related psychological research.

Some studies find that bearded men are more attractive to women than the clean-shaven, others not (e.g. Reed & Blunk, 1990; Muscarella & Cunningham, 1996).

The most recent research goes against both beards and being clean-shaven and is starting to show the benefits of stubble.

But do women prefer light stubble or heavy stubble?

The jury is still out, with one study suggesting light stubble (Neave & Shields, 2008) and another heavy stubble (Dixson & Brooks, 2013).

Just a matter of fashion?

Well, probably best for men to cover all bases by letting it grow through light to heavy stubble and into a full beard.

See what effect it has on the women in your life and adjust to taste.

It’s a social psychological experiment that’s easy to do and saves precious moments in the morning.

2. Fact about beards: increase age, social status and aggressiveness

Dixson and Vasey (2012) found that (European) women from New Zealand and Samoan Polynesians both thought that men with beards looked older and that they looked of higher social status.

On top of this, when men look angry and have a beard, they look even more angry than clean-shaven men.

Why not test this out by poking a bearded man with a stick.

How angry does he look?

Make sure to note down your results before being knocked unconscious.

Science is important.

3. Fact about beards and babies

Men with beards are good with babies, or at least that’s women’s perception according to Dixson and Vasey (2012).

This is a little mysterious given that beards are associated with masculinity and very masculine men are, on average, less likely to be good long-term bets.

But perhaps the beard as ‘good-daddy-signal’ operates through other variables.

Because men with beards look older and of higher social status, they are more likely to be able to provide for their offspring.

Or it could be, as Dixson and Vasey (2012) say, that it’s because they used pictures of bearded men who were smiling and this is a strangely potent combination.

Like a cage fighter baking a cake.

Or a fireman writing a poem.

You get the picture.

4. Fact about beards and fighting

Finally, let’s take an evolutionary perspective on the beard. What signal does it send?

Is it costly to produce in some way and therefore an ancient signal of good genes?

Perhaps.

Like a lion’s mane, beards may be a way of showing off.

Since one man can easily grab another’s beard in a fight, they could be a disadvantage.

So, any man with a long beard is saying: “I’m so good in a fight that even grabbing on to this beard won’t help you!”

(I’m not totally convinced by this argument, although the thought of men fighting by grabbing each other’s beards is inherently funny. You really don’t see enough beard-fights in movies nowadays do you?).

→ Read on: What A Hairy Chest Says About A Man’s Intelligence

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Teamwork: 10 Ways To Build Great Skills

Teamwork skills online or face-to-face involve spreading the team’s story, prioritising social skills, mixing genders, building trust and more…

Teamwork skills online or face-to-face involve spreading the team’s story, prioritising social skills, mixing genders, building trust and more…

Teamwork is more important than ever — especially now that some of it has moved online.

Failures in teamwork have caused accidents in nuclear power stations, planes to crash and businesses to fail.

Many organisations are trying to do more with less by relying on the efficiency of teamwork.

However, a collection of individuals doesn’t become a team just because it’s a called ‘a team’.

There are a whole range of psychological processes that need to be nurtured in order for ‘teamwork to make the dream work’, as the saying goes.

While all teams are different, there are some universals that all teamwork need, or at least can benefit from.

Here is what psychologists have discovered over the decades:

1. Prioritise social skills for great teamwork

Surely if you want to build a fantastic group whether online or offline, you put the smartest people together?

Not necessarily.

According to research conducted by Woolley et al. (2010), highly performing groups need social sensitivity.

In their study, 699 people were observed working in groups of two to five.

They found that the intelligence of the group is…

“…not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members…”

And this finding is not an isolated one.

The importance of social skills emerges in the research again and again.

So, it’s not about putting all the biggest brains together, it’s thinking about the social dynamic:

  • Who will listen to others?
  • Who will share criticism constructively?
  • Who will have an open mind?
  • Whose will back other people up?

Great teamwork requires great social skills.

Teamwork quote:

“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” – Henry Ford

2. Mix genders in teams

Since women’s social skills tend, on average, to be a little stronger than men’s, including women is one way of prioritising social skills for better teamwork.

Woolley et al.’s study reached the same conclusion: teams which included women did better than men-only teams.

But, that doesn’t mean you should take it to the logical extreme and build women-only teams: it’s all about the mix.

For example, Hoogendoorn et al. (2011) found that teams with equal gender mixes outperformed male-only and female-only groups in a business exercise.

Similarly, this Credit Suisse Research Institute report found that companies with at least some female board members have better share price performance than those that are men-only.

So, it makes sense to mix up the genders for effective teamwork.

Teamwork quote:

“A diverse mix of voices leads to better discussions, decisions, and outcomes for everyone.” — Sundar Pichai

3. Build trust for better teamwork

It’s very hard for people to work together effectively if they don’t trust each other — and this can be even harder online.

They also have to appear trustworthy to others or it may be difficult for them to do their job.

Teams that appear more trustworthy (hopefully because they are!) have been shown to perform better when negotiating with other groups (Naquin & Kurtzberg, 2009).

After all, would you do business with a team you don’t trust?

Not if you can avoid it.

The problem is that in groups people perceive the trustworthiness of the group by assessing the least trustworthy member.

So, in terms of trustworthiness, one bad apple really can spoil the bunch.

Teamwork quote:

“Teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.” – Patrick Lencioni

4. Build teamwork with humour

If group members don’t seem to trust each other, then perhaps it’s humour that’s missing.

One study by Professor William Hampes has found that people whose sense of humour is stronger are rated more trustworthy by others (Hampes, 1999).

Similarly, when teamwork is strong, people start joking around together and will tend to talk to each other outside work.

Humour can be a signal that groups are getting along and can even help create that buzz that makes some group’s teamwork so effective.

Humour has all sorts of benefits including reducing stress, boosting creativity, communication and team cohesiveness (Romero & Pescosolido, 2008).

Some studies have even found that humour can increase teamwork performance and the effectiveness of leadership.

It has to be the right type of humour though—not (all) put-downs.

Teamwork quote:

“If you can laugh together, you can work together.” – Robert Orben

5. Mix introverts and extroverts

We tend to think of the extroverts as superior at teamwork: they mix better, pipe up more in meetings and generally seem to be getting on with others more smoothly.

But introverts have their place in effective teamwork as well.

Introverts certainly don’t blow their own trumpets and aren’t often noticed at the outset, perhaps even more so online, yet eventually the group comes to value them.

That’s what Bendersky and Shah (2012) found in their study of introverts and extroverts working together.

In general, as the team evolves, extroverts do worse than people expect and introverts do better.

The quiet ones can come through in the end to boost teamwork.

Teamwork quote:

“Great things in business are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people.” – Steve Jobs

6. Define goals for effective teamwork

One of the greatest barriers to effective teamwork is pretty simple: they don’t know what the goal is.

This problem can be even worse when teamwork is carried out online.

A study of 500 managers and professionals in 30 different companies found that it was an unclear vision of the goal that was stopping them performing effectively.

But, it is not only goals that must be defined for good teamwork…

Teamwork quote:

“There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals.” – Idowu Koyenikan

7. Define roles

OK, everyone knows the goal, but do they know what they’re supposed to be doing to achieve this goal?

It seems like a pretty basic step, yet it’s frequently unclear to team-members exactly what their role is.

Unclear roles become particularly problematic when the situation changes and teamwork has to adapt.

If the roles aren’t clear then each person doesn’t know what they’re supposed to be doing.

And that’s a recipe for disaster.

Teamwork quote:

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney

8. Teams need a story

For people to work together effectively, in particular online, they need to know what the story is in a more general sense.

Where have we come from and where are we going?

It’s about more than just goals and roles, it’s about the assumptions we are using and the knowledge that we share (or don’t).

Psychologists sometimes refer to these ‘stories’ as mental models.

We construct these mental models of the world outside to help us navigate it and work out what to do next.

When the mental models of groups are better aligned, they perform better.

For example, Westli et al. (2010) found that when medical staff at a trauma centre shared mental models their performance was better, over and above specific teamwork skills.

People who share the same story are more likely to know what to do automatically, almost without thinking about it.

Psychologists call this implicit coordination and it is the key to great teamwork.

Teamwork quote:

“It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” – Charles Darwin

9. Teamwork requires concise communication

When teams make mistakes, one of the most common reasons is that they failed to communicate effectively.

In complex environments, information will often be coming from many different sources online and off — this makes teamwork harder.

We’re all awash in information nowadays, or maybe drowning is a better word; emails get cc’d to everyone, and who knows what’s important?

Teams that perform best clearly communicate the most important information before they’ve even been asked for it and filter out the junk.

Teamwork quote:

“The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.” — Malcolm Gladwell

10. Leadership enhances teamwork

Teamwork invariably benefits from good leadership.

Naturally it’s about motivation, structuring tasks, analysing what needs to be done, allocating goals and so on, but it’s more than that.

The best leaders are also trying to nurture their teams by addressing some of the soft skills above.

They are getting the mix of personnel right, encouraging concise communication, spreading the group’s story, using humour and building trust.

How do you do that? Well, leaders aren’t all born, some are made.

So you can learn the right way (How To Be a Great Leader) and the wrong way (7 Reasons Leaders Fail).

Teamwork quote:

“Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” — Sheryl Sandberg

→ This post draws on work published by Salas et al. (2000)

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Signs Of Lust In The Eyes: These Quick Movements Reveal All

How to spot the signs of lust in the eyes.

How to spot the signs of lust in the eyes.

When a stranger looks into your eyes, it could signal romantic love, but if their eyes then slide down your body, they’re probably feeling sexual desire, a study finds.

This automatic judgement can happen in as little as half a second and likely recruits different networks of activity in the brain.

Stephanie Cacioppo, who led the study, which is published in the journal Psychological Science, said:

“Although little is currently known about the science of love at first sight or how people fall in love, these patterns of response provide the first clues regarding how automatic attentional processes, such as eye gaze, may differentiate feelings of love from feelings of desire toward strangers.”

In the study, men and women looked at photographs of strangers and indicated as quickly as possible whether they were feeling romantic love or sexual desire (Bolmont et al., 2014).

Some were pictures of couples, others of a single person of the opposite sex.

At the same time, eye-tracking equipment followed where they looked in the photographs.

By putting these two pieces of information together, the researchers found that people tended to be looking at the face first, and that’s where the eyes rested when thinking about romantic love.

But, when participants felt sexual desire, their gaze quickly shifted down the body.

Here are the ‘heat maps’ which show where people were looking:

When people felt sexual desire, their gaze mainly focused on the faces at first, but the green area below shows their gaze moving southwards.

Love and sexual desire are surprisingly separate processes in both the brain and in people’s lived experience:

“Love is not a prerequisite for sexual desire, and sexual desire does not necessarily lead to love. Love and lust can exist by themselves or in combination, and to any degree.

In one study of 500 individuals conducted in the mid-1960s by Tennov (1999), 61% of the women and 35% of the men agreed with the statement, “I have been in love without feeling any need for sex,” and 53% of the women and 79% of the men agreed with the statement, “I have been sexually attracted without feeling the slightest trace of love.””

Image credits: Stephanie Cacioppo & Bolmont et al.

Why Acts Of Kindness Are Highly Contagious (M)

The wonderful human behaviour that elevates all our morals.

The wonderful human behaviour that elevates all our morals.

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