The November issue of Pediatrics is reporting on some studies done by researchers at the University of Pittsburg on teen girls’ body weights, perceived body weights and sexual habits. This is what they found: Caucasian girls who thought they were underweight — whether they actually were or not — were more likely to have had…continue reading.
Research
Everything has a reason, they say. Yesterday Maggie Koerth-Baker at BoingBoing reported on a team of researchers trying to figure out how head plays into the scheme of things by studying the oral habits of fruit bats. In their paper, published on October 28th in the journal PLoS ONE, researchers Min Tan, Gareth Jones, Guangjian…continue reading.
Dopamine, the decade’s “it” neurotransmitter, has taken a Pluto-style demotion. Once regarded as the brain chemical that made us feel good and got us addicted to that feeling, is now believed to be more centered on motivation, says The New York Times: People talk of getting their “dopamine rush†from chocolate, music, the stock market,…continue reading.
Back in high school, my friends and I had a special code phrase for getting it on: doing laundry. It possibly originated in the belief that having sex on a washing machine while it was in the spin cycle led to a more intense orgasm, but I can’t be sure. The funny thing is, a…continue reading.
The female Australian redback spider is known for eating its suitors as a post-coital snack. What we didn’t know until recently is why the spider behaved in this way. Apparently, it has to do with foreplay. According to research by Jeffrey Stoltz and Maydianne Andrade at the University of Toronto, a male redback has to…continue reading.
A study by researchers Andrew Elliot and Daniela Niesta in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that the color red increases desire in men for women astronomically–completely unrelated to a female’s appearance. How? Participants in the study were asked to rate black-and-white pictures of women–some of these were shown on a red background…continue reading.
Back in the day, when we still lived in caves, we were pretty good at getting an idea of what an approaching human was all about just by looking at them. The process of inferring things about others from a small number of cues is still with us today. Psychology Today‘s Andrew Galperin wrote this…continue reading.
Biologically speaking, music has no value. And yet. And yet listening to it is still one of the most rewarding activities in which we can engage. Why A study by Valorie N. Salimpoor, Mitchel Benovoy, Gregory Longo, et al, used methods of high temporal sensitivity to see if there’s a relationship between increases in pleasure…continue reading.
Prairie voles. Those little rodents that look a lot like fat mice, inhabit the tall grasses of the Midwest and whose infamous bent for monogamy could help us figure out why humans pair up. Or so we’ve been told for years. Must have been a slow newsday on Monday when Bloomberg ran the story about…continue reading.
